Every Friday I’m going to be posting a short note like this highlighting something I’ve read in the last week that I’d recommend. You can read the last one here.
Matt Yglesias has a bit of an odd relationship to my articles, in that he keeps mentioning them but I’m honestly not sure if he’s bothered reading one to the end.1
For example, a little over two months after October 7th, he wrote an essay patting himself on the back about his two-state liberal Zionist moderation. As is his wont, he located himself in the golden mean between two extreme positions. One of them was mine.
Saying you support a two-state solution to the Israel/Palestine conflict is the most cringe position imaginable.
If you want to participate in pro-Israel politics you’re supposed to say that Israel has repeatedly offered this only to have it rejected so there’s nothing more to talk about and certainly no case for pressure. Besides, everybody knows that anti-Israel politics is just antisemitism so it doesn’t matter what the Israeli government says or does about anything. And if you want to participate in contemporary pro-Palestinian politics, you’re supposed to agree with Yousef Mounayyer that the two-state solution is dead and agree with Ben Burgis that “from the river to the sea” is nothing more than “a call for democracy and equality.”
That’s all he says about my article. Clearly, he read the headline:
…but if he read any of the actual text, you wouldn’t know it from Yglesias’s use of it. The context was Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib being censured by her House colleagues for, among other transgressions, using that slogan. The primary point I made in the article is about what Tlaib herself means by it.
I wrote:
It’s true that Hamas uses “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” and similar slogans. But the phrase predates Hamas and is also widely used by advocates of a single democratic state with equal rights for Israeli Jews, Palestinian Muslims and Christians, Thai and Indian guest workers, and everyone else who lives there.
Tlaib has made it very clear that she belongs to this camp. You can argue it’s tactically unwise to use a slogan that can be misinterpreted — but you can’t (honestly) deny that this is what she means by it.
Yglesias’s swipe-in-passing suggests that my position is self-evidently absurd, but…what’s the absurd part, exactly? The claim that this is what Tlaib means? To think it’s not, you’d have to maintain that her entire body of public statements on Palestine, which have been extremely consistent over the years, is one long feint designed to cover up her secret support for an Islamist theocracy, or for reversing the current direction of ethnic cleansing, or some other equally dastardly secret position. Alternately, perhaps the self-evident absurdity is supposed to be my claim that the phrase is “widely used” in Tlaib’s way. But if that’s what Yglesias means, he’s committed to saying that the western Left is full of people only pretending to want to apply standard secular democratic principles to Israel/Palestine and secretly holding positions on what the ideal outcome would be in the Middle East that are totally and obviously at odds with the principles that shape their domestic politics.
More likely than either, though, he simply thinks that what I mean is that everyone who uses the slogan means what Tlaib means. Which would mean he didn’t read the article.
Similarly, in an essay the next year, he used me as part of a round-up of AOC haters.
Long before this Drafthouse blowup, Freddie de Boer denounced her as “just a regular old Democrat now” in a New York magazine piece. Lily Sánchez in Current Affairs detailed “How AOC Went From Influencer to Influenced.” And Ben Burgis in Jacobin specifically denounced her early and decisive endorsement of Biden.
But if Yglesias had actually read my July 2023 article instead of just hunting around for examples of Leftists Hating AOC so he could hyperlink three instances, glancing at the headline (“AOC Shouldn’t Have Endorsed Joe Biden”), and deciding it would do, he would have found a nuanced but vastly more positive evaluation of her than my inclusion in the roundup suggests.
In a moment of lucidity three and a half years ago, AOC herself said that in a “any other country” she and Joe Biden wouldn’t even be part of the same party. That’s true. Whatever my reservations about AOC, she’s a social democrat who supports Medicare for All and walks picket lines during strikes in her district. During Biden’s years in the Senate, meanwhile, he was one of the most important supporters of the Iraq War on the Democratic side of the aisle, and he earned the nickname “the Senator from MBNA” for his cozy relationship with MBNA holding company — parent company of MBNA bank — headquartered in his state of Delaware. As president, he’s poured money into the military-industrial complex and oversaw the reversal of the temporary expansion of the welfare state during the COVID emergency.
In one of the countries where Biden and AOC weren’t members of the same party, she still might back him for president — at the point when Biden and an alternative to his right were the only options left on the table. For example, when France’s disastrous neoliberal president, Emmanuel Macron, was running against far-right candidate Marine Le Pen during the runoff portion of France’s two-stage election, French socialists and communists reluctantly supported Macron. But it would be hard to imagine them throwing their support to Macron before the first stage of the election had even happened.
Left-wing politicians who display their unity with a president most Democratic voters aren’t enthusiastic about, months before the primaries and over a year before the general election, may tell themselves that they’re securing whatever influence they can exert as junior partners in a Biden-led coalition. And if their only goal was to very slowly bring about a few modest reforms, that calculation would be understandable.
But if you think the level of economic inequality in contemporary American society is grotesque and unacceptable and you think that grave danger is posed to the entire planet by the twin threats of climate catastrophe and superpower tensions, it’s hard to justify this perspective.
If we’re going to build a real political alternative to both the neoliberal center and the resurgent right, we can’t count on a long-term strategy of nudging the center for incremental improvements. We need to draw clear lines between the center and the Left, and make a forthright case for the future we need. That means acting like we and Joe Biden don’t comfortably fit together in the same big tent.
That’s been my consistent position over the years. See, for example, my article last December (“To Reach the White House, AOC Needs a Focused Class Message”), which covered the ways that AOC has sometimes leaned into universalist, Bernie/Zohran-style messaging and sometimes veered in the wrong direction by trying to mix that communicative approach with the language of identity politics, and argued that the first of those options was the way to go (and pointed to signs that she’s starting to correct in that direction). In other words, as much as I like and very often agree with Lilly and Freddie, my position on AOC hasn’t been that she’s “a regular Democrat now” but that, while she’s sometimes imperfect or disappointing (as in her early Biden endorsement), overall I very much see her as a political ally.
In that essay, Yglesias wanted to counterintuitively praise AOC for her relative moderation and take the opportunity to do a bit of left-bashing. But of course, if she actually does run for president, I’ll be a strong supporter of her campaign, and the chances that Yglesias will start left-bashing her and defending the centrist candidates against her attacks hover right around 100%. The reason for that disconnect is that, whether or not you agree with my political beliefs, I at least, y’know, have some.
Yglesias…well, Matt Bruenig puts the point very well in his short essay “Yglesias, Israel, and Moderation.”
One of Matt Yglesias’s defining political positions is that Democrats should be more moderate in order to attract more votes. This is generally invoked as a critique of the left and so naturally attracts left-wing ire, which Yglesias seems to enjoy.
One issue I’ve long had with this moderation-or-not discourse is that it’s a moving target. If we define moderate as something like the median of the current distribution of political views (ignoring all the complications with that concept), then there must be people who organically and earnestly hold those specific views. Yet those people are only moderates for as long as their views happen to be at the median. If the underlying distribution of views changes, which it does, then people who were formerly moderates, so defined, no longer are.
But the people who advocate moderation, like Matt Yglesias, are almost never moderate in this organic sense.
Instead, Yglesias has to keep a constant eye on what the spectrum of earnestly held beliefs looks like at any given time, so he can pragmatically steer Democratic politicians toward the middle. As the vastly superior Matt documents in detail, in 2023 and 2024, this habit led Matt (Ygelsias) to advise Democrats to take positions on Israel/Palestine that, now that public opinion has decisively shifted, are as retroactively embarrassing to many centrists as “defund the police” stuff has become to many progressives six years after the hot summer of 2020.
Matt (Bruenig)’s conclusion is brutal but well-earned.
Free-riding off of earnest politics by having others do it and then, as if floating above it all, putting your finger on the median and going “there” can be very psychologically satisfying. It makes you feel like you are one of the only serious people in politics. But what it really does is turn yourself into a non-factor, someone whose political views twist in the wind based on how persuasive other political actors — the ones who don’t engage in strategic moderation — end up being.
Read the rest here.
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To be fair, this might be an exception.
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