Against My Better Judgement, I Dissected Nathan J. Robinson's Article About Matt Yglesias
What a Substackian clusterfuck we have here
I don’t usually respond to arguments made by Nathan J. Robinson. For those of you who aren’t terminally online — for those of you pissing your life away enjoying nature or spending time with your kids — Robinson is a socialist who founded Current Affairs magazine. Current Affairs sounds like something middle aged guys in suits would read on airplanes, but it’s actually 100 proof socialist messaging pumped straight into the veins of Current Affairs’ dozens of readers. My opinion is that Robinson is a professional name-caller and Twitter troll, and the only reason that he has any role in our discourse is that he’s mastered the technique of yelling at prominent people until they yell back. Also, I’m glad that I got on-record recently about my rules for when it’s okay to make fun of a person’s physical appearance, because it’s hard to talk about Robinson without mentioning that he looks like The Joker if he fronted a Dixieland jazz band. Behold:
Recently,1 Robinson wrote an essay titled “Matt Yglesias is Confidently Wrong About Everything”. I read the article and thought it was poorly-argued trash that read like one of those TikTok rants that people record in their car (why are they always in their car?). And then I posted this note:
Full disclosure: I like Matt’s work, and I also like Matt. I’ve been published in Slow Boring a few times, I’ve met Matt and exchanged emails with him, I consider us to be friendly. And I thought that Robinson’s monstrously flawed hit piece deserved some pushback. To my surprise, my joke about how Robinson will probably Streisand-effect Yglesias into some new subscribers elicited a response from Freddie deBoer, another Substacker with whom I’ve been on good terms.2
I didn’t like that reply. For starters, I am — at a minimum — a shithead, a know-it-all, a dickweed, and a twit, so Freddie’s claim that whinging about lefties is my “entire personality” is verifiably false. And I posted this reply:
As you can see, I have accepted Freddie’s homework assignment of responding to the claims in Robinson’s article. I’m not thrilled about this, because a Robinson article is like a Trump speech: It’s not really a coherent argument so much as a pile of quarter-true musings dredged from the same swamp of deeply confused beliefs about the world. Freddie’s claim that the essay “names specific things that Yglesias was wrong about” is barely true: I count nine claims — some not very consequential — of Yglesias being wrong among 4,000 words of name-calling, tone policing, and unsupported assertions. But I will take the bait and give a point-by-point account of what I see as the flaws in Robinson’s logic, which should at least establish why I think the appropriate spot for Robinson in our national dialogue is “guy in a park delivering diatribes about the evils of capitalism to squirrels.”