Should-Read: Ezra Klein (2007): My Honor…Defended!

Should-Read: Ezra Klein (2007): My Honor…Defended!: “I actually watched a bit of [Mickey] Kaus’s Bloggingheads… too petulant to be genuinely offensive… http://ezraklein.typepad.com/blog/2007/03/my_honordefende.html

…But his assault demonstrates something interesting…. His criticisms of me… take two main forms… that I’m on “the far left”… that I’m young. Now, unless your spectrum runs from Al From to Sam Brownback, it’s six types of absurd to place me on the “far left.”… Maybe Mickey is such a firebreathing conservative that advocating for universal health care really does make me a Communist… [but] Mickey’s latest post at Slate is anchored by a gushing encomium to my friend Jon Cohn…. Jon is, if anything, farther left on health policy than I am….

For Kaus, the question is style points. Jon Cohn and I both focus on social policy, both believe approximately the same things, and both are working towards much the same outcome. But I’m the “far-left.” Why? Style. I’m young, I’m partisan, I’m pro-union, I’m insufficiently impressed with Mickey’s years in the trenches of neoliberalism. Temperamentally, I’m the anti-neolib. And that’s enough. Indeed, it’s too much. That’s what’s so fundamentally unimpressive…