Wonks, neoliberalism, etc

(an old comment I posted at rortybomb regarding Freddie de Boer)
I’d be happier if Ezra Klein threw at the batter’s head once in a while too (We have Atrios for that). It doesn’t take 3700 words to get that across.

Freddie’s been complaining about the neoliberal left for a while now, but in all the blogging and commenting he’s done over the last couple of years I haven’t seen anything resembling the hint of a political vision. It seems that he wants a vigorous hard left but he wants somebody else to work out what feasible socialism is. I want it too but I can hardly complain if I can’t figure it out myself (Since 1990 I’ve been trying to imagine a concrete political agenda that matches the emotional force of Billy Bragg’s first two albums and I’ve got next to nothing. I think I’m going to settle on making everybody get off their fat asses and ride bikes).

But I kind of see where Freddie’s coming from. I dropped Matt Yglesias from my rss reader a couple of days ago. I read pretty much every word the guy wrote from 2004-2010, including his book, but he’s actually pretty boring, and I’m tired of his dialogues with libertarianism (With Ezra Klein and him it’s not so much neoliberalism as it is Tyler Cowanism). I even agree with most of his zoning stuff but he’s only about an inch deep with it. It’s not great.

Freddie has it exactly backwards. We don’t need fewer wonks and more utopian reveries. We need harder wonks and a lot more of them. (Maybe then somebody could tell me if the MMT crowd are cranks or not.) Matt’s problem is that he’s soft-serve. Even EK should step up his game. There are better wonks around now and these guys are getting left behind.