In Defense of Wonks (and Moderates)

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In Defense of Wonks (and Moderates) Another rant against the “Juicebox Mafia” wonks has appeared; this one is written by Bhaskar Sunkara, editor of Jacobin Magazine. To paraphrase his diatribe: Ezra Klein, Matthew Yglesias, and the like are not liberals; they are machines; and they are ruining liberalism because they like to back up their positions with facts. A sample of the quality of this piece: But at some point, Klein and company stopped being liberals. They even stopped being human. The singularity—a technological superintelligence—was upon us. I think I’m choking on the hyperbolic shrillness. And there’s more where that came from: In science fiction, cybernetic revolts often begin benevolently. Humans are fallible, petty, prone to argument and war. Synthetics are precise, dispassionate, above jealousy and strife. Wouldn’t our interests be better served kneeling at the altar of disinterested judgment? By now, one would literally think that he thinks that Ezra Klein is actually a robot, that we are living in a dystopian society, and that all will go to hell unless the wonks are terminated. I mean, sheesh, spare me the drama. If it was just the prose that was so maddening, I wouldn’t be so annoyed. This, however, is one of Sunkara’s arguments: Klein is the archetype for the bankruptcy of modern liberalism, so much so that he disavows being a liberal at all. He’s a technocrat, obsessed with policy details, bereft of politics, earnestly searching for solutions to the world’s problems through the dialectic of an Excel spreadsheet. He told The New Republic’s Alec MacGillis, “At this point in my life, I don’t really think of myself as a liberal. That’s not the project I’m part of, which is to let the facts take me where they do.” So he is not a “liberal” because he “let[s] the facts take [him] where they do.” And that’s a bad thing? I suppose Sunkara would
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