No one familiar with the world of politics would mistake Vox co-founder Matthew Yglesias as anything but a long-time, card-carrying leftist. As pointed out by the Washington Free Beacon,
He advocated for lying about the benefits of Republicans' tax cuts. He dismissed Joe Biden's plagiarism habit. He tacitly endorsed terrorizing Tucker Carlson's family.
No longer with Vox, Yglesias runs his own podcast and Substack newsletter, farming for attention with provocative posts on his X account.
Posts like this:
Though he doesn't specify what "like this" means, I'd say it's fair to assume he's referencing our hyper-partisan, super-polarized, unforgiving, graceless political environment. If that's the case, as I feel certain that it is, I have to again ask how so many people can rise to prominence in the world of political analysis and be so painfully unaware of American political history, particularly when it comes to presidential campaigns?
Has Yglesias not ever taken the time to read the things the John Adams campaign said about Thomas Jefferson in 1800 and vice versa? These were founding fathers, and co-architects of American independence for crying out loud, but they were brutal to one another.
And don't tell me that men like Ygelsias have never read the "Jackson's wife is a whore" campaign strategy of Adams' son John Quincy in 1828, or the "Adams pimped for the czar of Russia" retort from team Jackson.
And should those campaigns be too obscure for him, Ygelsias could just take a gander at the things said about the most hated (in his time) president we've ever had - Abraham Lincoln.
I know it's asking a lot to expect men like Ygelsias to stop gaslighting Americans about some pristine political past, but it's still unscholarly and annoying.
But more egregious than his apparent remedial understanding of U.S. political history is his goofy analysis that fingers conservatism as the source of our current tumult.
He's kidding, right? This is all an act intended to win a few more subscriptions from Voxxers, yes?
There's simply no other explanation for how a man of Ygelsias' pedigree could see Donald Trump as the cause of this contemptuous moment rather than a response to it.
Anyone with a functioning brain should recognize Trump is a fruit of that division, not a root.
If Ygelsias is serious about looking for root causes of the current angst, it will demand a level of courage and forthrightness extraordinarily uncommon on the Left - a level that's willing to ask serious questions. If leftists are serious about wanting to return to a more civilized political moment, they should remove the Aliskyite plank from their own eye before trying to pluck the orange speck from their neighbor's.
Consider:
Whose was the first modern campaign built entirely around the "community organizing" model? That is, the demonization of opposition, agitation of disaffected communities, and exploitation of media's sensationalist preferences to attain power and effect "change"?
Whose campaign was it that painted one of the most affable, calm, genial men in the history of American politics, Mitt Romney, as a felon, tax cheat, and murderer who, if given the opportunity, would put black people "back in chains?"
And which one caricaturized Romney's running mate, the perennially polite Paul Ryan, as shoving wheelchair-bound grandmothers off a cliff?
Four years prior, which party campaigned on "hope and change" as it sowed racial bitterness against an aging war hero, John McCain?
Yglesias may not like it, but he can't change history.
Donald Trump is the anti-Obama.
After eight years of being bullied, maligned, misrepresented, and painted as racist radicals, the Right went out and hired a bully of their own. Had there been no Obama, there would have been no Donald Trump.
I don't disagree with Yglesias that Republicans could turn the page on Trump-style MAGA methods in framing their political agenda. But when Democrats won't turn the page on the community-agitating tactics of Barack Obama, why should they?
