Do you know what your problem
is? Your problem is not that you are uninformed. That is what you might have thought
your problem was. Your problem is also not that you lack information. This
is a common misconception. In fact, people nowadays have lots of information.
Too much, even. No, your problem is the opposite. Your problem is that you
cannot interpret the information you have. You lack the guiding hand of
expertise. You need a vox dei, a little Voice of God whispering in your
ear, helping you along, telling you what it all means. You need someone to let
you know what’s what, to find the truth for you and analyze it and put it in
orderly stacks of notecards with little suggested opinions on them.
For the
past two years, Ezra Klein’s philosophy in running Vox.com has been precisely this: people do not
need facts, they need explanations. The ordinary person is
ill-equipped to interpret the facts, to figure out what they mean. Klein
rejects what he calls the “More
Information Hypothesis,” the idea that a better-informed citizenry could
have more productive political debates. In fact, because we see facts through
partisan lenses, facts alone are useless. People are irresponsible with
knowledge; facts just make them “better equipped to argue for their own side.”
Thus for Klein, the job of
experts is not to give the public raw information, so that it can come to its
own conclusions. The job of experts is to process the information themselves,
and tell the public what it ought to have concluded. They are not here
to help you figure out what you believe. You are a hopelessly irrational
consumer. They are here, rather, to tell you what to think.
Vox therefore does not
hesitate to make strong judgments. Its headlines frequently declare that “No, X
is not what you think it is…” or tell you “Here’s
the real reason why…” It promises to give everything you need to know on a
subject, eliminating the need for further curiosity on the reader’s part. If
you don’t know what the 18 best
television shows are, Vox will tell you. (Quantification is its
specialty; Vox builds trust by knowing the numbers, by having the
data.) The Vox “explainers” say it plainly: about this, there
can be no doubt.
Yet strangely, Vox staff
would likely bristle at being called mere manufacturers of “opinion” or
“commentary.” This is because when a Vox-er declares a scandal to be “bullshit,”
he intends it as fact rather than opinion. There is no attempt to
distinguish between the journalistic and the editorial. It all blurs together
as “analysis.” Vox is therefore an exercise in the simultaneous having
and eating of cake; it wishes to both make strong value-laden assertions and
be trusted as neutral and dispassionate. This means that Vox inherently
practices a crude and cruel form of rhetorical dishonesty: it treats matters of
profound complexity as if they are able to be settled through mere expertise.
If anyone disagrees with what the wonks have concluded, they must be dumb,
delusional, or both.
As conservatives quickly
pointed out after Vox’s debut, this ends up meaning that liberal
political values are implicitly assumed to be factually correct. It has
also meant that over the course of 2015-2016, Vox became a powerful
propaganda outlet for Hillary Clinton’s campaign. It would run features like “The
11 moments that define Hillary Clinton” (Of course there are exactly 11).
These would include important milestones like “How the 2008 loss turned Hillary into
a hipster” [Riley Stearns. Alex Ross Perry & Anna Bak-Kvapil.] but would completely leave out Goldman Sachs
and Clinton’s devastation
of Libya.
Clinton appeals so perfectly to
the Vox sensibility that its writers become puzzled when trying to
figure out how anyone could oppose her. So Ezra Klein will ruminate
on the mystery of why Hillary Clinton is distrusted by the public but liked
by those in her inner circle, concluding that it is because Clinton is a careful
listener who prefers paying attention to the views of others rather than
explaining her own. (Klein doesn’t mention the equally plausible thesis that
Clinton is distrusted because she tells
lies about things and treats
the public with cynicism and contempt.) Or Dylan Matthews will
wonder why Hillary Clinton is not being given credit for her incredibly
ambitious socially progressive policy platform. (Failing to consider that
almost nobody thinks Hillary Clinton will ever actually make any attempt to put
that platform into action.)
As Fredrik deBoer says in his
critique of Vox, the “explainer” stance is insidious, because it disguises
partisanship as objectivity, falsely assuming that there can be such a thing as
a “view from nowhere.” He shows how Vox used selective and highly
unreliable empirical data in order to attack Bernie Sanders, while cultivating
the illusion of rigor and neutrality. For example, by producing
a calculator showing people how much each candidate’s policies would
cost households in taxes, without disclosing how much these policies would save
households elsewhere, Vox made it look as if Bernie Sanders was
simply planning to drain families of all their money. As deBoer argues: “The
whole notion of ideology-free explanation of complex subjects is of course
itself ideology-laden… The pretense of neutral explanation simply deepens the
potential dangers of bias.”
In fact, it is curious that
Klein and Vox should have embraced the label of “explainers.” After all,
the word has some interesting connotations. Explanations (rather than, say,
“explorations”) are the provenance of the hyper-confident and the
sometimes-criminal: one explains away one’s misdeeds; the villain caught
red-handed shouts “I can explain!” as he is dragged away. Indeed, what Vox does
much of the time involves explaining away, usually pointing out why the
empirical data make it irrational to oppose Hillary Clinton’s policy
preferences. “Explanation” has also increasingly become associated with the
notorious act of “mansplaining,”
the ubiquitous tendency of male know-it-alls to buttonhole passing women and
show off their learning at generous length. Fittingly, the experience of
reading Vox can often feel like a protracted blind date with a garrulous
male Capitol Hill staffer.
It should be no surprise that
the main thing these explainers love to explain is “policy,” the more
complicated the better. Policy wonks love policies because they get to
explain them. Everyone else hates complicated policies, because everyone else
has to be subjected to them. The more inscrutable and byzantine the policy (and
the more confusing and misery-inducing those policies are for ordinary people),
the more jobs there are for wonks. Hence the site’s ongoing love affair with
the Affordable Care Act, which in its abstruseness, ineffectiveness, and
elitism has every ingredient dear to the heart of the wonk. And hence
everything from Matthew Yglesias’ hilariously erroneous early prediction that “Obamacare’s
implementation is going to be great and people will love it” to his current
cheerful call for a more
punishing mandate.
The site’s founders are
perfectly open about their passions. Witness the promotional blurb for the
site’s podcast, “The Weeds”:
Everyone is always warning
you not to get lost in the weeds. But not Vox’s Ezra Klein, Sarah Kliff, and
Matthew Yglesias. They love the weeds. That’s where all the policy is. This is
the podcast for people who follow politics because they love thinking about
health care, economics, and zoning.
Nobody sensible loves thinking
about zoning. For most of us, zoning regulations are a tedious necessity in the
service of a particular administrative end. It’s amusing that Vox-ers
deliberately disregard the old warning not to get “lost in the weeds.” That
phrase is supposed to offer an important caution: if you fetishize policy
detail, you lose sight of the actual broader purpose of policy, which is to
improve human living conditions. For Klein et al., however, the policy is
the purpose. (This is not an exaggeration: “The
point of politics is policy,” Klein writes.) Policies are ends in
themselves.
Klein might object to this.
“Actually I understand full well what policy is for.” (Every sentence spoken by a Vox-er
begins with an implicit or explicit “Actually.”) Klein would insist
that, of course, policies are not the point. But then why does he like
zoning? Why doesn’t he like buildings and see zoning as a means?
This is how we know wonks don’t care about the ends of politics: they
never talk about their actual political visions. What, for example, is
Ezra Klein’s utopian ideal? What kind of world does he wish to build? Nobody
knows, because he never tells us. He probably doesn’t even think about it.
Whenever I meet a progressive wonk-type, I always make sure to ask them: “If
you could wave a wand and fulfill your every political goal, what kind of world
would you build?” The answers inevitably consist of more policy. “A
nationwide jobs program,” “universal pre-K,” or “guaranteed annual income.”
(And those answers are from the true dreamers and visionaries among the wonks.
Frequently their utopias consist of things like “a 2% drop in the unemployment
rate.”) Each of these is a policy dream that forgets what policy is
supposed to be for.
The failure to think about ends
and ideals is important, because it reveals the fundamental oversight of
progressive wonk-ism. This is the idea that there ever can be such a
thing as a “correct” and “rational” political solution, that one can discuss
health care policy without discussing one’s values and convictions. As The
Federalist pointed out,
this is a fallacy: you may haul out your chart showing that ObamaCare decreased
the numbers of the uninsured, and believe you have proven it is the rational
policy choice. But those who object to ObamaCare see an individual mandate as a
form of unjustified coercion, and disputes over the nature of coercion are
philosophical and cannot be resolved through the display of empirical data.
Focusing on “the weeds” is sly, because it carefully avoids having to discuss
and defend your underlying moral assumptions. And by keeping the focus on
“explanation” rather than “discussion,” one can avoid difficult questions that
might force the interrogation of one’s preconceptions.
These disputes are philosophical and
cannot be resolved through the display of empirical data.
But one should be careful about
affirming Vox’s self-conception as an “news explainer” site to begin
with. Despite the hype, much of Vox is the same old dreary #content as
the rest of political media, with a bit more condescension and bar charts.
These range from pointless banalities (“If
America were Canada, the election would have been over long ago”) to
clickmongering contrarianism (“3
Reasons the American Revolution Was a Mistake”) to obsessive considerations
of the plusses and minuses of daylight
savings time and time zones.
There’s a hefty dose of the usual Democratic Party innuendo about Trump’s
supposed Russian connection (“Trump
is covering for a Putin plot against American democracy”—as Frankie Boyle
has recently pointed out, it’s amusing to see those who whine about the rise of
“post-truth politics” suddenly turn and declare that Donald Trump is a Russian
agent), as well as copious free advertising for Elon Musk (Is he too
ambitious? How
will he meet his next challenges?) The rest is the same insipid horse-race
stuff, plus the usual torrent of disdain for Trump and his supporters
(“Actually, Trump
supporters and Brexiteers
are racists”).
Peculiarly, Vox is only
loosely edited. For its core writers, it functions mostly like a blog. The lack
of editorial oversight means some truly oddball content sneaks in, such as this
5,000 word piece from Todd VanDerWerff which begins as a defense of the Hamilton
musical then digresses into a extended discussion of how VanDerWerff’s late
father may or may not have been a rapist. The hands-off approach to content
control lets wild and interesting things sneak in sometimes, such as the work
of Current Affairs editor Yasmin Nair
or Emmett Rensin’s skewering
of Daily Show-type liberal sanctimony. (It was odd to see Vox publishing
something that implicitly condemned the bulk of the site’s own content,
although Rensin was soon after suspended from the publication for being
too interesting.)
The lackadaisical approach to
quality control has also led to some extraordinary factual pratfalls.
(Remember, though, that it is not facts but explanations that Vox promises.)
In 2014, Deadspin
had fun compiling a list of “48 times Vox totally fucked up a story,” including
the site’s infamous assertion that Israel contained a road
bridge between the West Bank and Gaza. One might have excused these as
mere hiccups inevitable in a publication’s early life, but six months after the
Year of 48 Fuckups, the site ran an embarrassingly
error-ridden attack on Seymour Hersh, which managed to misstate the dates
of both the My Lai massacre and the Abu Ghraib scandal within a single
paragraph.
Vox’s factual
unreliability is not merely a product of Klein’s sloppy oversight, however. It
is in many ways inherent to the site’s model of content production, which
depends entirely on having incredibly young writers assume a position of
omniscient expertise. As Deadspin’s Kevin Draper observed:
These Bright Young People may well be
near-experts on one or two subjects, or at least close enough to pass as such
online, but Vox publishes at the same rapid pace as the rest of the internet,
on an exceptional and ever-growing number of topics, and there’s only so much
authoritativeness to go around.
Vox’s difficulty at getting the
facts right emerges from its confidence in the wisdom of 22-year-old D.C.
clickbait-churners. It is
“an explainer site by people who live way too much of their own lives outside
reality.” Corey Robin has
noted that the main qualification of the “Vox generation of
punditry” is that they “know their way around JSTOR,” yet have a broad
historical amnesia that leads to them to be totally oblivious to the place of
contemporary events in larger patterns over time.
James Fallows, in his deliciously
scathing 1991 look at The Economist, suggested that the magazine’s
intentionally anonymous bylines “conceal[ ] the extreme youth of much of the
staff,” quoting Michael Lewis’ observation that “if American readers got a look
at the pimply complexions of their economic gurus, they would cancel their
subscriptions in droves.” But Vox proves Fallows’ thesis false. The
pimpliness of Vox’s writing and editorial staff is evident in every word
they write. Yet instead of discrediting Vox, it is part of their brand.
As Corey Robin notes, the
Vox generation of pundits know their way around JSTOR yet have a broad
historical amnesia…
No writer better represents the Vox
ethos than co-founder Matthew
Yglesias. Yglesias went
straight to blogging as a Harvard philosophy undergrad, and his primary
qualification for punditry has been his ability to produce a
large volume of words at considerable speed [Quentin Tarantino. Kevin Smith. Howard
Stern. Jon Stewart]. Along with Klein, he in many ways
embodies what Vox-ism is all about.
Much of Yglesias’ work is simply boring
(Yglesias likes
writing
about
burritos).
But it’s also somewhat stunning for its extraordinary combination of arrogance,
erroneousness, and callousness. Yglesias is a perfect case study in how
highly-educated people can be embarrassingly stupid, making consistently
ludicrous factual and analytical statements. Yglesias muses aloud “I’d been
interested to know what, if anything, is legally or practically preventing
[Miami] from just expanding further and further west if anyone happens to know”
(Many wrote in to point out the existence of a rather large expanse of swamp
known as the Everglades.) Or he portentously
announces that “in many ways, the Chipotle burrito is very similar to the
iPhone.” Yglesias is perhaps the man whose work is most synonymous with
the “#SlatePitch,”
the intentionally irritating, click-hungry denunciation of some perfectly
innocuous truth or convention (hence “The
Case Against Eating Lunch Outside”).
The Yglesias oeuvre…
But if Yglesias were simply
naive and pompous, one could comfortably laugh at him. However, like the similarly contrarian Nicholas Kristof, he delights in
taking up noxious positions designed to unsettle liberal sensibilities and
thereby prove his independence of mind (and perhaps reassure him that he is
less of a bore than his C.V. implies).
Hence articles like “Against
Transparency,” in which Yglesias insists that journalists shouldn’t be able
to view government email, without ever considering the potential real-world
effects of giving the powerful new ways to conspire free of
public accountability. One senses that Yglesias makes arguments like
this with a delighted smirk, aware that he is annoying people, but convinced
that their annoyance proves their irrationality rather than his intolerability.
The worst of Yglesias’
mischievous endorsements of horrendous moral stances was his column on factory
safety. Immediately after the 2013 collapse of the Bangladesh garment factory
that killed over 1,000 people, Yglesias took to Slate to
explain why workplace
safety regulations actually inhibited the operation of free markets.
Yglesias explained that high-risk jobs have high compensation, and just like
people might choose to be lumberjacks, they might choose to work in highly
dangerous garment factories for a premium. Thus “it’s good that different
people are able to make different choices on the risk–reward spectrum.” The
article was accompanied by a photograph of Bangladeshis loading dead bodies
onto a truck.
The column was classic
Yglesias, in managing to be both ignorant and appalling. Appalling since
Yglesias published it the same day as the factory collapse, as the
rubble was still being cleared. Ignorant because Yglesias adopted the most
delusional Heritage Foundation economic myth, that somehow people in Bangladesh
work in dangerous garment factories because working in dangerous garment
factories is what they most want to do. As Mark Brendle summarized:
Yglesias champions one of
the most horrifying and widespread implements of oppression and misery yet
conceived—factories taking advantage of cheap labor, lack of environmental
regulations, and a disregard for human life by those who profit most from
having those factories in their countries—then pretends that it exists in a
vacuum, where people in “those countries” are happy for these jobs, instead of
acknowledging the closed system of the global economy, where those conditions
are not only systemic, but inevitable and structural, in order for the wealth
and prosperity of the “first world” to exist at all.
When confronted with this
outrage, Yglesias simply wrote another explanation
of why his original work was justified, admitting that his reaction to the
criticism “as a writer and a human being” was annoyance. (It should go without
saying that if one’s first reaction “as a human being” to being asked to show a
little compassion for dead Bangladeshis is “annoyance,” then one is not a human
being at all.) Here is Vox-ism in a nutshell: it is impossible to
stop explaining and think, impossible to understand that there are more
questions in heaven and earth than “What do the data say?” (Like perhaps, “Am I
a good person?”)
Yglesias perfectly demonstrates
the operation of “Pundit Tenure,” a phenomenon by which established political
commentators can never become discredited no matter how wrong they are.
Provided they continue to emit a sufficient daily wordcount, and provided they
do not question too many Beltway orthodoxies, they can bounce from publication
to publication for the duration of their natural lives. Yglesias semi-seriously
tweets “the
Nazis had a lot of good ideas” and titles articles “Dumb
Jewish Politicians,” yet none of this affects him. If any merit-based
criteria were operating in determining who gets to be a pundit, Yglesias would
long ago have ceased to make a living putting words together. And yet he
persists.
I once
attended a public talk Yglesias gave on housing policy to promote on his (62-page) book The Rent Is Too Damn High. Yglesias was placed in conversation with Yale Law School
professor Robert Ellickson, a bona fide expert on housing
and zoning with approximately four decades of experience in the field. Goodness
knows why anyone thought to pair the two up, as Ellickson is notoriously grumpy
and does not suffer fools with much equanimity. The discussion was one of the
most satisfying I have seen. Ellickson clearly had no idea who Yglesias was,
and took pleasure in ripping Yglesias’ pamphlet to shreds for its basic
economic ignorance. Ellickson practically pondered aloud why a frivolous
20-something blogger was being treated as an expert on housing, pointing out
the numerous ways in which Yglesias’ arguments were flimsy and ill-considered.
But
watching Ellickson flay Yglesias, I was most struck by the fact that Yglesias
was completely unfazed. Far from being ashamed at his humiliating defeat,
Yglesias did not even seem to acknowledge that he was even being defeated
or humiliated. He didn’t attempt to defend himself. He just… kept talking, as
if the numerous arguments that had been made proving him wrong simply didn’t
exist.
This refusal to back down or
admit fault is apparently characteristic of Yglesias generally. When a
conservative publication interviewed him about his defense
of dishonesty in politics, Yglesias simply told them “go
fuck yourself,” and hung up. Recently, Yglesias tweeted a reprehensibly
xenophobic remark aimed at Glenn Greenwald, unambiguously implying that
Greenwald didn’t care about America because he lived in Brazil. (As is
well-known, Greenwald moved to Brazil because of anti-LGBT discrimination in
U.S. law, making Yglesias’ remark even more tactless.) When confronted, instead
of apologizing, Yglesias doubled down, falsely accusing others of twisting his
words. Yglesias is an enthusiastic practitioner of one of the most obnoxious
tendencies in the human character: the belief that if people hate you, it must
be because you’re right rather than because you’re an asshole. Thus when people
criticize you for taking the opportunity of a deadly factory disaster to
explain why workplace safety standards are Actually Not As Good As You Think,
your default reaction is not contrition or self-doubt but annoyance that
people fail to recognize your rationality.
This is what is most irritating
and dangerous about the Vox mentality. It is the same tendency that
afflicts mansplainers generally: the refusal to entertain the possibility that
it could be you who is wrong. “Explanation” implies certitude. For the
explainer, information flows in a one-way channel, from the mouth of the
explainer to the ear of the explained-to. Vox does not need to listen; Vox
knows. After all, these are the three charts you need to read about
the Trans-Pacific Pipeline. Here’s the real truth about Donald Trump’s
taxes, in five simple statistics. Everything you need to know, explained.
People have good reason for not
trusting fact-checkers and wonks. That is because they lie. And they
torment people with those lies, by portraying disagreement as an
irrational refusal to acknowledge objective empirical truth. They treat
political disputes as questions of fact rather than value, and steadfastly
refuse to acknowledge their own considerable biases.
When Vox emerged,
there was some
speculation as to whether it would survive. But it has consistently done
well, and of course it will survive. It will survive because
we are all insecure and confused, and promises of explanation and certitude are
appealing in a chaotic world. Ezra Klein is right that we do not know what to
do with the barrages of information we encounter every day, and his
let-me-explain-it-to-you business model is savvy.
But the more Vox persists,
the less hope there is for American politics. The Vox model is
premised on the idea that people shouldn’t think for themselves, that the important
parts of political thought and decision-making should be outsourced to experts.
Inevitably, these experts will produce solutions nobody likes, because the
moment one is convinced that all opposition must be founded in ignorance, one
will always be right no matter how many people are hurt or how many people
complain. The point of politics is no longer to help us live together and
understand one another. The point is policy, and our job is to
listen to the explainers. After all, they have the facts. They’ve got them
here in 5 charts. It’s everything you need to know.
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