There’s a question that’s nagged at me for some time, and now’s as good a time as any to raise it. Maybe Hector, if he’s around and reading the blog this week, can answer it.
Our former Author and current commenters, Hector, often talks with disdain about the chattering classes. One place and three names always come up in this context. The place is Santa Monica, and the names are Hugo Schwyzer, Amanda Marcotte, and Matt Yglesias.
I won’t ask why Santa Monica, when none of the three Chief Chatterers lives there (as far as I know, even Hugo has never actually lived in Santa Monica). I won’t ask because “Why Santa Monica?” seems to have an easy answer. Santa Monica is an upper middle class city, according to Wikipedia “consistently among the most educated cities in the United States, with 23.8 percent of all residents holding graduate degrees,” and possessed of a median family income of $109,410. It’s also both a politically and a socially liberal city. For good measure, it’s not far from Hollywood. What better place for the chattering classes to live?
Likewise, I won’t ask why Hugo Schwyzer and Amanda Marcotte. Hugo and Amanda are both well known in the feminist blogosphere, are both strongly pro-choice, and are both part of the sex-positive, hookup friendly, we may critique the messages in porn but we won’t object to porn per se part of the feminist blogosphere (as opposed to the cultural feminist part of the feminist blogosphere that tends to be more anti-sex-work and to see more difference between how men and women approach sex). I don’t suppose Hector would agree with the cultural feminists (who these days are in the minority), but he’d agree with sex-positive feminism less. Besides, Amanda has blogged about that abortion that she totally would have gotten, if she’d actually been pregnant, and Hugo, inveterate confessional blogger that he is, has blogged about any number of past deeds. I won’t mention most of them, in order to avoid attracting the roving Internet debate about Hugo’s character, but I’ll mention two which I know troubled Hector, the abortion that Hugo’s high school girl friend got (which Hugo does not regret), and the child who may or may not be Hugo’s, but the girl friend who had him picked the other guy as the better father. Suffice to say that neither Amanda nor Hugo is in line with Hector’s views on sexual morality.
The puzzle, for me, is why Matt Yglesias? I know Yglesias as the guy who as a college aged blogger supported the Iraq War, and who, burned on that war and realizing his mistake, wrote a book urging his fellow Democrats to reject the aggressive nationalism of the right and return to a tradition of liberal internationalism. I know him as a blogger about economic issues, one who favors more progressive taxes than most Republicans and less economic regulation than many Democrats, one who takes the stimulus side of the current stimulus vs. austerity debate, is critical of Angela Merkel’s choices within the EU, and who has a particular interest in the ways in which zoning policies ensure that The Rent Is Too Damn High.
While these economic views place Yglesias to the right of Hector, they seem unlikely, to me, to be the reason that he is placed with Hugo and Amanda at the head of the chattering classes. He would have to have earned that place with his social views, which he doesn’t actually seem to blog about all that much, relative to how much he blogs about other issues. I’m pretty sure that he does, in fact, disagree with Hector on such issues, that he’s in favor of keeping abortion legal, that he doesn’t have any particular problem with casual sex. But I can’t think of what he’s actually said about social issues that would stand out, that would make him, and not one of the many other liberal bloggers who probably lean left on social issues but who don’t write much about them, the poster child for the chattering classes. Certainly it won’t be confessions about his personal life that earned him this spot, since Matt Yglesias, unlike Hugo Schwyzer, has blogged little about his personal life. We know that he’s the son of two novelists, that he went to a nice prep school and then to Harvard, that he majored in philosophy, that he’s Jewish, and that he recently got married (only once); there’s nothing scandalous there.
I probably missed it, whatever it was; I read Matt Yglesias off and on, so he could well have said any number of things that would appall Hector during a time when I wasn’t reading him. So, would Hector, or anyone else, care to enlighten me? Just what awful things has Matt Yglesias been chattering about?
Wow, I had no idea I was the topic of such intense interest. :)
I don’t really have time or space at the moment, but I’ll get to it sometime later today. My resentment of Matt Yglesias as a public intellectual are only partly related to his actual ideas, and are partly bound up with the fact that he’s almost a perfect textbook example of how Ivy League institutions allow supremely unqualified people, who make no genuinely valuable contributions to society, to achieve wildly disproportiate amounts of money, power, and social influence. For full disclosure, I graduated from an Ivy League university around the same time as Yglesias: I’m at a large, flagship public research university now, and every year since I graduated I’ve gotten more and more convinced that the Ivy League and its imitators are bad for society, in every possible way. I’ll flesh this out later, but Matt Yglesias exemplifies, almost more than Hugo or Amanda do, the out-of-touch, Ivy League educated, New York intellectual, whose idea of cultural diversity is having a Korean barbecue filled taco for lunch, and whose idea of economic justice is taking the jobs away from Detroit autoworkers, giving them to robots, and then handing out welfare checks and Xanax pills to the unemployed autoworkers to make them happy.
On a more important note, Lynn, I hope your chemotheraphy has been going well and that you’re holding up OK, and on your road to recover. I’ve been lousy about my prayer life, this summer, honestly, due to a whole variety of emotional stresses. But I’ll remember to pray for you.
Got it.
“Matt Yglesias exemplifies, almost more than Hugo or Amanda do, the out-of-touch, Ivy League educated, New York intellectual”
Matt Yglesias definitely exemplifies an Ivy League educated intellectual more than Amanda does. Well, more than Hugo does, too, given that Hugo was educated at Berkeley, but if I remember right Amanda, in particular, has a decidedly less upper middle class background than either of the others (small town in Texas, ordinary Texas state school education, parents not possessed either of their own Wikipedia entries or of faculty positions, got her blogging start while working a regular office job, and first won notice in the feminist blogosphere by exercising her gift for snark and mockery on columns of silly dating advice for women). If I had to guess on who, between Matt Yglesias and Amanda Marcotte, would have a stronger gut level support for unions, I’d guess it would probably be Amanda. (Not that unions are her usual topic.)
On the more important note, I’ll have a blog post up tomorrow morning on my current status. Thanks for your prayers.
Korean barbecue filled taco for lunch
LOL. I have a cousin who’s an adopted Korean. Obviously, he appears Korean but he was raised from infancy by a redheaded man of German/Irish descent and a California girl from Culver City. Other than by fate of birth, he’s not the least bit Korean, but I’m sure the Elizabeth Warren types would welcome him as adding diversity. It was just last week when I was talking to a woman of 100% Chinese descent that I thought of my cousin as “Korean” for the first time although he’s about 30 years old. He’s just Darren to us.
I suppose a really serious sex-positive feminist would have an abortion even if she WASN’T pregnant?
I’ll have to tell her what a slacker she was :-).
Getting married only once is a sure sign of being a liberal. If the Pope were a Republican, divorce would be the 8th Sacrament.