Yglesias Derangement Syndrome

Does Yglesias love it when workers die?

Introduction

I remember years ago hearing about someone who harbored deep hatred for the philosopher Derek Parfit—a mild-mannered, altruistic, elderly philosopher in the years leading up to his death (before that he was younger). I thought this was indicative of particularly profound derangement; Parfit is almost singularly decent and inoffensive. Hating him would be like hating a puppy.

Parfit haters, however, are few and far between. Much more common is hatred of shrimp hero Matt Yglesias. Yglesias is a lot like Nate Silver, in that he seems to generate completely unhinged reactions despite being just about the most boring and milquetoast policy wonk conceivable. There’s certainly room to disagree with Yglesias—many fine people have done so—but the extreme Yglesias is utterly deranged.

A while ago I wrote about Nathan Robinson’s absurd attacks on Yglesias. Yet this is just the tip of the iceberg. The world is filled with people calling Yglesias a fascist, complaining about how you can’t threaten to kill Yglesias, and threatening to kill Yglesias (with a hammer, no less). Obviously the most extreme Yglesias critics are atypical—very few people threaten to kill others with hammers—but even the less deranged Yglesias critics seem to have a bizarrely deep visceral hatred of Yglesias.

For this reason, I thought I’d go through some of the most popular pieces criticizing Yglesias and defend a fellow milquetoast liberal named Matt who is concerned about shrimp welfare! I will argue, among other things, that you should not kill Yglesias with a hammer—or even some other weapon!

When I googled “Matt Yglesias is bad,” I fairly quickly came across a piece that was pretty representative of the genre of Yglesias bashing (of the sort that doesn’t involve hammers). It followed the general formula: egregiously misrepresent what he says, whine about unpleasant-sounding claims even if they are true, and aggressively polemicize even if you have nothing to say. Extreme dishonesty ran throughout the piece to an almost disturbing degree. Though the article has one major positive: it was…