Liberal label / Tourist tips

Today: Tom Scocca, editor of Indignity; writer and editor Maria Bustillos; and Trevor Alixopulos, comics artist and author of The Hot Breath of War.

Issue No. 386

Yakkin’ about The Argument
Tom Scocca and Maria Bustillos

Rookie Moves
Trevor Alixopulos

Yakkin’ about The Argument

by Tom Scocca and Maria Bustillos

“The left gets a new publication,” was the striking headline a couple of days ago for the announcement in Semafor of the coming launch of The Argument, started by what Tani called “a group of left-leaning writers and journalists” led by editor and CEO Jerusalem Demsas. It’s funded with $4 million by a group of very rich philanthropists and, Tani writes, “aims to push back against the populist right by strengthening the ideas and arguments of modern liberalism and convincing readers of their legitimacy.”

Tom Scocca: My first question about this is, who are the liberals?

Maria Bustillos: A good question. The announcements aren’t very explicit about their aims or definition, but the donor list is pretty clear.

If you think the tone of the website and launch video sounds like Third Way, home of Bill Clinton’s and Tony Blair’s neoliberal policies—“liberalism” meaning pro-business “free markets” in the style of Adam Smith, plus having your well-to-do gay friends over to dinner—you’d be on the right track. One of The Argument’s funders, Rachel Pritzker, is literally the current chair of Third Way.

TS: One major and apparently worsening problem in political discourse right now is that nobody seems to agree on what any of the nouns are supposed to mean. The launch video included a shot at “the post-liberal left” accompanied by a clip about Biden administration anti-China tariff policy? And a freeze on the headline of a David Leonhardt story called “The Hard Truth About Immigration.”

I have no idea whether these people were holding up David Leonhardt as a misguided person or as a person offering a corrective to the misguided. Certainly the Times newsletter voice of absolute Panglossian complacency is not in any identifiable sense “left”!

MB: Very true about the silky self-regard. I’ll be amazed if this isn’t a staunchly pro-Leonhardt publication.

TS: I would think so but it’s an anti-immigration piece of his, and these people are largely the Abundance people.

Among the contributors is Matthew Yglesias, who is simultaneously the author of One Billion Americans, calling for immigration-based growth, and a perpetual anti-woke-scold who holds that defending immigration against the current White House campaign of ethnic cleansing simply makes a damaging issue for Democrats more salient.

MB: The confusion here is coming from inside The Argument’s website, too, which is positioning itself as “liberal” right out of the box. “A mission to revitalize liberalism.” “We’re libbing out,” an attempt I guess to be youthful and “with-it” on the lingo, there. But not explicitly “left.”

TS: Yes, they have staked a claim on being “liberal” and it's not easy to tell what they mean by it, from the roster and the initial series of gestures they’ve made. It doesn’t help with that question that they somehow reversed their mission statement’s position on trans rights overnight. It went up as “defining and defending gender norms” and then became “ensuring freedom of gender expression.”

via Bluesky

Before:

via Bluesky

After:

via Bluesky

MB: So they whiffed instantly on the most volatile topic in U.S. news right now, and I bet not by accident. The billionaire funders listed here I think may not be too comfortable with direct opposition to the far right, or to Washington, on this issue.

Demsas says they are starting this publication because “the battle for America will be won if we can convince people that the issues they care about are best addressed through liberalism.”

In fact there is no vacuum for The Argument to fill. Our colleague Osita Nwanevu—a real, self-avowed leftist—is a better champion against the Republicans by far than anyone at The Argument has been or is likely to be; his new book The Right of the People makes the case for the left, not with a vaguely warmed-over Third Way prosperity gospel, but with clear arguments for pursuing the bedrock goals of democracy: political equality, responsiveness, and majority rule. 

There is an actual left and it is telling the truth but will likely not be funded by billionaires, who do not really appear to care for democracy.

TS: I don’t understand exactly how this publication chose these particular people to all stuff in one bag.

MB: The donors and investors funding The Argument have a pretty clear track record of expecting a bang for their philanthrocapitalist buck, whether ideologically or in cold hard returns. In this case I suspect purely the former.

There are names here connected with Stanford, with charter schools, and the privatization of public schools, with Effective Altruism, and, as you mentioned, Abundance, which on the face of it seems like just a fresh lick of paint on the Third Way flavor of trickle-down economics. There are connections to Peter Thiel, the far-right sponsor of JD Vance, and secret murderer of Gawker: Thiel reportedly gave $1 million in seed money to Tyler Cowen for Emergent Ventures, which is listed as a grantee to The Argument. (Cowen is also a contributor to Bari Weiss’s publication, the Free Press.)

TS: Well this is the problem with pure debate, isn’t it? The people promoting it all seem to have all this terrible context dragging around behind them, and they present the exchange of ideas as a thing that requires one to set aside one’s knowledge. 

Ideologues can fund an institute at George Mason but it is unfair to draw any conclusions or even ask any questions about how that affects the output of the participants. Everyone is trying to reboot their audience to a condition of innocence.

MB: Which brings me to something you wrote yesterday that really struck me, your description of the New York Times as (ideally) “a mainstream newspaper that aims to give its readers a reasonably accurate picture of the world.”

That’s what funding for media at this level has become, an attempt to buy that kind of authenticity, like this is obviously what an ordinary, well-educated person would think and believe. That’s what makes it worth it for right-sympathizing donors to pour titanic amounts of dough into these things.

TS: These people landed on a set of arguments that were meant to yank the Kamala Harris administration in a certain direction—toward some much-needed opening up of housing construction, with a whole bunch of deregulation desired by the tech sector riding in the slipstream—and they want to make the Democrats sign up for them now, while Texas Republicans are literally holding a Democratic legislator prisoner in the chamber as they try to steal five House seats. The president says he’s going to ban voting by mail.

MB: The word ‘fascist’ appears nowhere in Demsas’s introductory essay and nowhere in Tani’s Semafor piece.

TS: For all the talk about how they’re going to roll up their sleeves and get liberalism going again, this whole promotional package comes across like a slain body going through the last automatic motions of living. There’s a point early on in the video where Demsas tries to say that liberals—the wrong kind of liberals, the liberals not properly braced by the Argument yet—have taken on William F. Buckley Jr.’s role of “standing athwart history yelling ‘Stop!’” To illustrate this, the video starts with clips of NIMBY people opposing offshore wind construction and a homeless shelter, which are not liberal positions per se but are certainly positions that people who identify as liberals often adopt when their general support of a better world turns into “the world around me personally should be nice.”

But then Demsas tries to fold this into a relatable posture about how this world today does feel so gosh-darn overwhelming if you let it, and the headlines that flicker by are about Gaza, AI, and ICE. And it’s just, like, hold up, no, that there is actual history, with its jackboots on, and you’re goddamn right we want it to stop—not because it’s going so fast that we’re challenged by the adjustment, but because it’s actual evil. It doesn’t have shit to do with wind farms! Except that Trump is destroying wind farms now to try to burn the entire world in the belly of Petroleum Moloch.

MB: Ah here are two of The Argument’s contributors having a chat.

via Bluesky

MB: This seems to me to be like an actual sin, to type that out in a world where Aaron Bushnell lived and died.

To say it in public the very next day after you’ve been praised at Semafor for writing in the new publication for “the left” strikes me as real inauspicious for that publication, especially in tandem with the already-transphobic mission statement they had to revamp, already.

TS: It professes to be preparing an agenda but it seems to be trying to find a pose.

MB: I agree. The pose they’re trying to achieve has I think a public-facing side and a covert one. The public side is, “We’re the reasonable people who like Social Security, and wind farms, but not ‘the status quo.’” The covert one is, “We are going to support wealth and power in a more attractive manner than the Republicans have done.”

With maybe some tasteful handwringing about “overreach” regarding the undesirables who are being terrorized and thrown in gulags.

TS: I hope there’s more to it than that, because it seems like that niche is already pretty well occupied.

JUST A FEW HOURS LEFT to enter HYDRANYM NO. 13

Play HYDRANYM No. 13!!

T W G F F H S

(The word game for Flaming Hydra subscribers)

SOME FIRE BREATHING

Miles Klee

David Roth

Ana Marie Cox

Rookie Moves

by Trevor Alixopulos

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