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You are here: Home / Politics / Politicans / David Brooks Giving A Seminar At The Aspen Institute / Eminence front

Eminence front

by DougJ|  March 11, 201112:29 pm| 53 Comments

This post is in: David Brooks Giving A Seminar At The Aspen Institute, Going Galt

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The Monkey Cage discusses the data showing that, among Democrats, concern over global warming increases with education while among Republicans, it decreases. Many of our favorite serious conservatives admit that global warming is happening, but feel it’s important that we do nothing about it. This means that, in practice, they are no different from Jim Inhofe. They just have the right kind of breeding to sound more intelligent than he does.

The reason that I am perhaps irrationally hostile to PBS and NPR (and I take back what I said about NPR being better off without federal money, I don’t know if that is true or not) is that they are too often purveyors of right-wing craziness masquerading as thoughtful erudition. Shame on me for regularly watching Charlie Rose for years, I know.

You didn’t think I was going to get through this post without mentioning another Bobo review, did you? This time, it’s Evan Newmark of the Wall Street Journal who says that, regardless of whether or not Bobo is right that all humans care about is “‘waist-to-hip ratios’, ‘clear skin’ and other breeding metrics worthy of farm animals”, talking about humans in this way does not make for compelling literature.

I would also ask people to remember who else believed in breeding metrics and biological pre-determinism. It’s easy to put a high-brow gloss on even the most barbaric philosophies.

To some extent, the Charlie Rose/NPR model for discourse is that if you get a lot of wealthy, ostensibly knowledgeable people together and have them discuss topics without using profanity, the audience will benefit. It’s the free-wheeling marketplace of ideas! It doesn’t matter if some of these people have wrong about everything in the past, what matters is the profound intellectual honesty of their Yglesias-award winning bons mots. If conservatives and liberals get together, they can agree that we are all human beings blah blah blah. Tell that to school teachers in Wisconsin, tell it to the millions of people who are unemployed.

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Reader Interactions

53Comments

  1. 1.

    BGinCHI

    March 11, 2011 at 12:33 pm

    Let me put this as succinctly as possible:

    The language Bobo and the faux-intellects on PBS and elsewhere use is not descriptive but prescriptive.

    In other words, when they think they are making observations, they are actually making interventions, and not just rhetorical ones. These people set standards and create the rules we live by.

    And that’s why we can’t have nice things.

  2. 2.

    David Koch

    March 11, 2011 at 12:34 pm

    Charlie Rose is funded by:

    me.

    and a bunch of my rich friends.

  3. 3.

    BGinCHI

    March 11, 2011 at 12:34 pm

    Ps.

    It’s a put on.

    But it’s a put on that makes a difference.

    Capitalism’s biggest, bestest lie: meritocracy.

  4. 4.

    Comrade Javamanphil

    March 11, 2011 at 12:35 pm

    @BGinCHI: If only I did what he asked me a little faster and better, he would stop hitting me. I’ll keep trying because I know he only wants what is best for me.

  5. 5.

    Hunter Gathers

    March 11, 2011 at 12:38 pm

    You can say any kind of crazy or ignorant thing that you want to these days, as long as you’re not foaming at the mouth when you do it. You could have someone declare that all of the racial minorities in this country should go back to their nations of origin, and be taken seriously, as long as you don’t use racial slurs or raise your voice. Sure, the likes of Bobo, Chunky Bobo and David Frum may support crazy ass policies and insane political movements, but they do it in an even keeled manner, which makes whatever they say palatable to the masses.

  6. 6.

    BGinCHI

    March 11, 2011 at 12:38 pm

    @Comrade Javamanphil: It’s just like your super-ego, but with squeakier loafers and a better haircut.

  7. 7.

    DonkeyKong

    March 11, 2011 at 12:44 pm

    Bobo is just the 5th reincarnation of Herbert Spencer.

    Divine right of kings means the divine right of anyone who can get uppermost.-Herbert Spencer

  8. 8.

    LarsThorwald

    March 11, 2011 at 12:45 pm

    Did anyone else think this post read as kind of intellectual word salad? Doug, you are all over the road here, man.

  9. 9.

    Mike Kay (Ding-Dong-Broder's Dead)

    March 11, 2011 at 12:46 pm

    I would also ask people to remember who else believed in breeding metrics and biological pre-determinism.

    I found it odd that a nerdy, unattractive schlub like Brooks (who top of that is jewish) would go all Aryan racial science.

    The guy is a real self hater.

  10. 10.

    Paul in KY

    March 11, 2011 at 12:50 pm

    @David Koch: Fuck you, and a bunch of your rich friends.

  11. 11.

    trollhattan

    March 11, 2011 at 12:50 pm

    I haz a new congressional hero: Ed Markey.

    http://wonkroom.thinkprogress.org/2011/03/10/markey-flat-earthers/

  12. 12.

    jrg

    March 11, 2011 at 12:53 pm

    The reason that I am perhaps irrationally hostile to PBS and NPR (and I take back what I said about NPR being better off without federal money, I don’t know if that is true or not) is that they are too often purveyors of right-wing craziness masquerading as thoughtful erudition.

    Dougj, I think I’m missing something. The hypothesis that the article presents is:

    The Internet and cable television news make it easier for us not only to process information selectively ourselves, but to selectively acquire information that has been processed already, when we only tune in to ideologically compatible Web sites, cable news shows and so forth ….

    I agree with you that “balance” and “civility” can be detrimental to discourse when one side is flat-out lying, but it seems to me like your criticisms are misplaced when it comes to PBS or NPR, at least in this context.

  13. 13.

    Kryptik

    March 11, 2011 at 12:53 pm

    Yep, anything, as long as it’s said on an even keel, is ok, like calling Rep. Ellison a bigot and a liar for saying a Muslim 9/11 was called a terrorist collaborator before his remains were found on Ground Zero six months after the attack. You know, like National Review, Hannity, and Drudge have done despite archives showing the fucking trolls at New York Post and the like promoting that exact rumor 1 fucking month after 9/11.

  14. 14.

    matt

    March 11, 2011 at 12:55 pm

    why do so many chumps try to piss on Yglesias? Try to match his output of interesting ideas sometime.

  15. 15.

    EvolutionaryDesign

    March 11, 2011 at 12:55 pm

    If they keep attention focused on the niceties of discourse, we never have to bog ourselves down in the unpleasantness of the hard chocies we are facing. Everybody (making over a million dollars) wins! Plus, it doesn’t hurt that national media has internalized that the right’s position is the starting frame for anything ever, and we’re just a bunch of unserious buffoons.

    AMERICA, FUCK YEAH!

  16. 16.

    MikeJ

    March 11, 2011 at 12:55 pm

    @BGinCHI:

    Capitalism’s biggest, bestest lie: meritocracy.

    Meritocracy and aristocracy mean exactly the same thing but with different language roots. Latin and Greek respectively for “best”.

  17. 17.

    a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)

    March 11, 2011 at 12:58 pm

    @Hunter Gathers: Y

    ou can say any kind of crazy or ignorant thing that you want to these days

    As proof of which that vile Erick, son of Erick is employed by a putatively mainstream cable news organization, after calling a Supreme Court Justice a goat fucking child molester. If there were such a thing as actual civility in the US, he would be radioactive.

  18. 18.

    BGinCHI

    March 11, 2011 at 12:58 pm

    @MikeJ: Also the root in Assyrian for “hole in the ass.”

  19. 19.

    wengler

    March 11, 2011 at 1:00 pm

    The best thing about PBS was Bill Moyers and he is no longer on the air.

  20. 20.

    Bob In Pacifica

    March 11, 2011 at 1:00 pm

    To understand the American model of state propaganda everyone should track down a copy of Christopher Simpson’s “Science of Coercion: Communication Research and Psychological Warfare, 1945-1960”. When one propagandizes to an entity as large as a nation you need to tailor your message to the various groups, left, right, center, black, white, brown.

    Propaganda is something that our intelligence services have been working on since at least WWII, generally in lockstep with much of our media.

    Here is a good place to start:

    http://www.namebase.org/steinem.html

    Steinem, from the late fifties into the early sixties ran CIA propaganda mills at international youth festivals. Now that’s down the memory hole. Among those working for her were Cokie Roberts and her husband. Roberts has admitted it.

    Steinem’s work for the CIA at the youth festivals was reported in the NY Times in 1967. Then Steinem became a feminist whose MS Magazine was fronted for by CIA asset Clay Felker. So when Steinem had that divisive op-ed on the eve of the New Hampshire primary early in 2008, if you look at her early career in US intelligence you might ask why she would try to divide white women from African Americans by saying that women have it rougher than blacks.

    Likewise, Cokie Roberts, who probably was placed on NPR when they moved in the original office furniture, continues to drone on what is permissible for non-radicals to think. She is just another set of blinders for Americans.

    That is, NPR functions as government propaganda for the center-to-left subset of Americans. You can go so far but not too far. It’s sort of a modified limited hangout.

  21. 21.

    j low

    March 11, 2011 at 1:03 pm

    they are too often purveyors of right-wing craziness masquerading as thoughtful erudition.

    This!

  22. 22.

    schrodinger's cat

    March 11, 2011 at 1:05 pm

    DougJ@top
    Did you read Bobo’s latest inanity on today’s NYT? What do you make of it?

  23. 23.

    salacious crumb

    March 11, 2011 at 1:05 pm

    As far as global warming and education goes, people use education to confirm their own biases. Its takes a lot of courage and guts to face the truth (where we have to face unpleasant truths) and the education is valuable if we have used it to that end. Republicans just use education to confirm their own biases about global warming and it not being cause of man made activities. I have heard PhD’s in Biology (from good universities) argue passionately about intelligent design.

  24. 24.

    Chris

    March 11, 2011 at 1:06 pm

    If conservatives and liberals get together, they can agree that we are all human beings blah blah blah. Tell that to school teachers in Wisconsin, tell it to the millions of people who are unemployed.

    This.

    The conservative/liberal divide isn’t about ideals, or values, or politics: more than perhaps anything, it’s about the fact that the Republican base really freaking hates the Democratic base on a very personal level, and is willing to vote for politicians based almost solely on whether they stick it to the uppity [insert name of hated group here].

    The notion that we can just sit together and talk about it is ludicrous: if they were willing to do anything that conciliatory, we wouldn’t be having this problem in the first place.

  25. 25.

    FlipYrWhig

    March 11, 2011 at 1:16 pm

    @matt:

    why do so many chumps try to piss on Yglesias? Try to match his output of interesting ideas sometime.

    The ones about licensing barbers, or the ones about “congestion pricing” for highway traffic? Because that’s, like, 77% of what he posts.

  26. 26.

    nestor

    March 11, 2011 at 1:19 pm

    Shame on me for regularly watching Charlie Rose for years, I know

    No shame in that. I regularly watched William F. Buckley, Jr. as a toddler.

    His facial tics were strangely compelling.

  27. 27.

    Brachiator

    March 11, 2011 at 1:22 pm

    Eminence front

    It’s a put on. Which pretty much explains anything coming from Bobo

    I would also ask people to remember who else believed in breeding metrics and biological pre-determinism.

    But the thing is, that none of this leads to biological pre-determinism. It’s only that conservatives huff and puff to try to get the wild, wacky, randomness of natural selection (and sexual selection) to match their philosophical reveries.

    If conservatives and liberals get together, they can agree that we are all human beings blah blah blah.

    But for conservatives and even liberals with totalitarian mindsets, some human beings are more equal than others. Pace, George Orwell.

  28. 28.

    Kryptik

    March 11, 2011 at 1:26 pm

    Ugh…god. I just watched last nights Rachel. Thank god she has an even keel style of reporting, but apparently not enough to be acceptable to the very serious people. Otherwise, maybe we could all take the stories she had about blatant disenfranchisement, both electorally and legally, going on state-level now.

    Fuck it all….

  29. 29.

    AAA Bonds

    March 11, 2011 at 1:27 pm

    To me, there’s two issues.

    1) Educated conservatives are bald-faced liars. They know that scientists are, generally, the people to trust about science. But they also know that they’ll continue to benefit from scientific advances, whether it’s climate science, biology, etc., whether or not they attack science.

    Why? Because educated conservatives, like educated liberals, are wealthier on average.

    This is just like the large amount of conservative Creationist doctors and engineers in America. The non-scientific trades that benefit the most from science aren’t in any way prevented from expressing contempt for the science that made their jobs possible – exactly the opposite.

    2) David Brooks is fifteen. He doesn’t grasp that applying reductionism to literary love is begging the question. Brooks considers explanation to be the same as meaning – and he is incapable of explaining human biology anyway, because he considers trivia to be the same thing as explanation. I’d say to ignore him, were he not the most pernicious example of anti-intellectualism in America.

  30. 30.

    Zifnab

    March 11, 2011 at 1:28 pm

    To some extent, the Charlie Rose/NPR model for discourse is that if you get a lot of wealthy, ostensibly knowledgeable people together and have them discuss topics without using profanity, the audience will benefit. It’s the free-wheeling marketplace of ideas!

    And I think, to a degree, this might work. Except the wealthy, ostensibly knowledgeable people you assemble always seem to be from the same dinner party. And when an outsider walks in and points out the hob-nobbing debutants are factually inaccurate, the person is dismissed or marginalized and never invited back again.

    If you’ve got a bunch of people milling around pondering the answer to 2+2, while some argue 3 and some argue 4 and some argue 5, that’s not terrible. But when you add an actual knowledgeable professional to the mix and he announces, “Yeah we know its 4”, and the social club blows him off to embrace the argument in favor of the facts… It stops being quaint and starts becoming poisonous.

  31. 31.

    Doug Hill

    March 11, 2011 at 1:30 pm

    @matt:

    I was mocking the award Sully gives in his name, not him.

  32. 32.

    AAA Bonds

    March 11, 2011 at 1:31 pm

    @FlipYrWhig:

    The ones about licensing barbers, or the ones about “congestion pricing” for highway traffic? Because that’s, like, 77% of what he posts.

    Yeah, you can tell the guy has a background in philosophy. A hundred ideas for every rational thought.

  33. 33.

    debbie

    March 11, 2011 at 1:33 pm

    (NPR is) too often purveyors of right-wing craziness masquerading as thoughtful erudition.

    Or it’s providing a platform for them to hang themselves with their own words. No different than it being a good thing whenever Iran’s Dinner Jacket Guy speaks at the U.N. to remind everyone just how nuts he is.

    Besides, what’s the alternative? Listening to right-wing programs who will say how great their guys are? I’d rather form my opinions based on what I actually hear, not what someone else tells me to believe. There’s too much of that going on already.

  34. 34.

    Liberty60

    March 11, 2011 at 1:42 pm

    It’s easy to put a high-brow gloss on even the most barbaric philosophies.

    This is what I meant in an earlier thread when I said there is a difference between saying things hatefully versus saying hateful things.

    I’m not a fan of the calls for civility, not because I want inflamed anger and rhetoric, but more that hateful thoughts aren’t improved by saying them in calm measured tones.

    When a thoughtful intellectual muses about IQ and its relationship to poverty in America, then gets a brick thrown through his window, I don’t see that as an unequal dialogue.

  35. 35.

    Judas Escargot (aka ninja fetus with a taste for bruschetta)

    March 11, 2011 at 1:44 pm

    @matt:

    why do so many chumps try to piss on Yglesias? Try to match his output of interesting ideas sometime.

    He pretends to be a liberal, and (for the most part) he isn’t. He’s what we wish our centrists were. Whoever moderates his site is an ahole, also, too.

    That said, IMO he does deserve some credit… a few months back, someone paid for junkets to introduce some of our younger punditry (Ezra, McMegan, Yglesias and a few others) to the wonders of China, presumably for PR purposes. Yglesias seems to be the only one to have moved a little leftward when he came back.

  36. 36.

    SiubhanDuinne

    March 11, 2011 at 1:46 pm

    Laughing here fit to beat the band. The NYT Book Review has reviewed Bobo’s novel, and the reviewer is … um … not kind. A couple of extracts:

    [F]iction is not Brooks’s métier, and he lacks the ability to create characters that compel belief. The story of Harold and Erica, their formative years, eventual meeting, marriage and separate careers, is without interest: one doesn’t care what happens to them because in spite of Brooks’s earnest attempt to describe their psychological depths, they do not come to life; they and their supporting cast are mannequins for the display of psychological and social generalizations.

    (snip)

    Brooks seems willing to take seriously any claim by a cognitive scientist, however idiotic: for example, that since people need only 4,000 words for 98 percent of conversations, the reason they have vocabularies of 60,000 words is to impress and sort out potential mates.

    Okay, one more:

    Brooks is out to expose the superficiality of an overly rational view of human nature, but there is more than one kind of superficiality.

    The review is by Thomas Nagel, an actual philosopher. Ugly link: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/13/books/review/book-review-the-social-animal-by-david-brooks.html?nl=books&emc=booksupdateema3

  37. 37.

    ThatLeftTurnInABQ

    March 11, 2011 at 2:02 pm

    @Chris:

    The conservative/liberal divide isn’t about ideals, or values, or politics: more than perhaps anything, it’s about the fact that the Republican base really freaking hates the Democratic base on a very personal level, and is willing to vote for politicians based almost solely on whether they stick it to the uppity [insert name of hated group here].
     
    The notion that we can just sit together and talk about it is ludicrous: if they were willing to do anything that conciliatory, we wouldn’t be having this problem in the first place.

    Ditto that. US politics is civil war continued by other means. When conservatives say that they hate liberals and want to hurt and kill them, that isn’t over the top rhetoric in the heat of argument over some policy dispute, it is a simple statement of what they want. Ends, not means. They want you dead. Your very existence offends them.

  38. 38.

    geg6

    March 11, 2011 at 2:04 pm

    @matt:

    Oh, please. Matt Yglesius: “I’m a bald white male who knows nothing about chemistry or hygiene and so I am supremely qualified to pronounce about whether or not hair dressers and barbers should be required to have a license.”

    He’s no better than the Fonzie of Reason. In fact, he’s worse because Fonzie dresses better.

  39. 39.

    geg6

    March 11, 2011 at 2:06 pm

    @wengler:

    Well, I do like “Antiques Roadshow.” And the Pittsburgh History Series by Rick Sebak shown here on WQED.

  40. 40.

    Doug Hill

    March 11, 2011 at 2:06 pm

    @SiubhanDuinne:

    Thanks!

  41. 41.

    techno

    March 11, 2011 at 2:08 pm

    I am sorry I am not up to speed about the latest NPR controversies. I decided that PBS was submoronic about 1982 and haven’t watched it since. Trust me on this, there are PLENTY of places to get your news that are FAR more scholarly, reliable, honest, and just plain well-written than the garbage on PBS / NPR.

  42. 42.

    Doug Hill

    March 11, 2011 at 2:09 pm

    @schrodinger’s cat:

    It was stupid.

  43. 43.

    geg6

    March 11, 2011 at 2:11 pm

    @Doug Hill:

    Well, you should be mocking him. He’s an idiot and deserves mocking as much as Bobo and Sully, if not more simply because he seems to think he’s a liberal. Sorry, MattY, you aren’t a liberal. You’re a libertarian. In other words, you’re an idiot.

  44. 44.

    Doug Hill

    March 11, 2011 at 2:28 pm

    @geg6:

    I’m not his biggest fan but the award bothers me more than he does.

  45. 45.

    geg6

    March 11, 2011 at 3:04 pm

    @Doug Hill:

    Sully named the award for him because Sully loves him some idiocy, especially of the libertarian sort. He thinks they are “reasonable” and “smart” like his heroes Paul Ryan and Mitch Daniels. He likes MattY for the same reason. I have neither read nor heard anything from any of them that isn’t completely laughable. Of course, I quit reading Yglesius the first time I read one of his continuing series of jeremiads against the jackboot that is barbering/cosmetology licensing. That’s been years now.

  46. 46.

    Chet

    March 11, 2011 at 3:09 pm

    @Hunter Gathers: This is, of course, made easier by the “populist” Fox News/Tea Party/Palinite base, which does foam at the mouth and thereby does its part to move the Overton window to a place favorable to its ostensible betters.

  47. 47.

    Wolfdaughter

    March 11, 2011 at 3:15 pm

    ThatLeftTurnInABQ:

    US politics is civil war continued by other means. When conservatives say that they hate liberals and want to hurt and kill them, that isn’t over the top rhetoric in the heat of argument over some policy dispute, it is a simple statement of what they want. Ends, not means. They want you dead. Your very existence offends them.

    This. Also, they believe that we wish the same for them, and that therefore they are justified in hating us, and the more wacko ones actually act upon their beliefs (go, 2nd Amendment! USA! USA! USA!)

    I’m more enlightened than they . I’d just like to exile them all, including radicals from every nation, ethnicity and creed, to a handy asteroid, and let them duke it out.

  48. 48.

    BC

    March 11, 2011 at 3:45 pm

    I am beating myself up because, until 2009 inauguration, I really thought the Republican party just had a different view of the best method to bring peace and prosperity to this country. I am now aware that not only is this not true, they don’t even have the wherewithal to understand the problems this country faces. So they have solutions that in no way, shape, or form have any relationship to the country’s problems. And our media don’t understand this simple fact and continue with the preconception I had earlier. Which is why Cokie and her friends are so frustrating.

  49. 49.

    matt

    March 11, 2011 at 4:03 pm

    Oh, some stupid award the odious Andrew Sullivan leaves around with his droppings. Sorry, didn’t know about that since I consider him to be nothing more than a slightly cleaned up version of Jonah Goldberg.

    Anyway, for some ideas on the yglesias site, here are some from today/yesterday:

    http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2011/03/firing-government-workers-leads-to-a-reduction-in-overall-levels-of-employment/

    http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2011/03/layoffs-mysteriously-averted-by-non-budgetary-bill/

    http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2011/03/oil-a-commodity-traded-on-a-global-marketplace/

    http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2011/03/how-public-opinion-does-matter/

    All substantial, and all in nice direct opposition to the waves of obfuscating bullshit that emanate from our political press.

  50. 50.

    Liberty60

    March 11, 2011 at 4:08 pm

    @techno:
    Whats funny is that I hated NPR back when I was a conservative, mostly for the same reasons I hate it now.

    It is the epitome of bourgeois affectation, with its near-constant social status markers and coded reference points to a privileged lifestyle, carefully camouflaged behind social concern trolling.

    Ditto arts funding- Robert Samuelson, who may be wrong about everything except the time of day, got it right when he called it “porkbarrel for the highbrows”.

  51. 51.

    Chris

    March 11, 2011 at 4:17 pm

    @Wolfdaughter:

    I’m more enlightened than they . I’d just like to exile them all, including radicals from every nation, ethnicity and creed, to a handy asteroid, and let them duke it out.

    Personally, I’d actually love to go Galt on them. See how long the country’s scientific advantage (and everything that leans on it) lasts when the only people left are those who believe evolution and global warming are false. See how long their Ubermenschen’s wealth lasts without all the pesky useless workers underneath them to create the wealth. See how long their vaunted free market stays on track with no regulations AT ALL to keep it in line. Etc, etc, etc.

    I know going Galt is an impossible lunatic’s fantasy, no matter who does it. But as long as we’re dreaming, I’d really fucking love to see what their civilization would look like without all the liberalism they despise holding it together.

  52. 52.

    schrodinger's cat

    March 11, 2011 at 7:13 pm

    @BC: That’s what I used to think before Bush II became President the first time.

  53. 53.

    Aloysius

    March 11, 2011 at 7:31 pm

    @matt: Let’s look at those four Yglesias links one by one…

    1. “Firing Government Workers…”: it’s an obvious point that has already been made many times before in more detail, *and* he throws in this little gem of crap: “There’s a case to be made, clearly, that laying off government workers and using the savings to cut taxes on rich people will boost economic growth over the long run.”

    See, this is why some people (like me!) really can’t stand Yglesias: what he just said there is hooey, and by bringing it up he gives rhetorical cover to supply-side cultists and seriously undermines his own intellectual credibility.

    2. “Layoffs Mysteriously Averted…”: Totally without substance. He’s just quoting the Times! He adds no insight of his own whatever.

    3. “Oil…”: His writing style is appalling (gee whiz, gasoline prices and oil prices are connected? Whodathunkit?) and I’m not entirely sure his faith in business reporting is justified, but whatever. More importantly, while he’s saying something true, nowhere in that article does he explicitly explain *why it is* that global, rather than local, supply and demand drive oil prices. It’s obvious to people who follow these things closely, but nobody like that would glean anything new from his post anyways.

    4. “How Public…”: Sigh. Yglesias completely misses Black’s point, which is (and has been for some time now!) that polling shows voters don’t care nearly as much about the deficit as they do about jobs or a number of other issues. Period. Most people outside of editorial boards and Beltway circle jerks do not care about the deficit. The problem isn’t that the public doesn’t understand the deficit. The problem is that our Democratic leaders are feeding into the totally silly deficit hysteria that conservatives push because they are out to drown “big government” in the bathtub.

    So, long story short, Yglesias is some combination of lazy/hackish/conventional/dull/obtuse. I’ve seen Markov chainers produce text with more verve and insight.

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