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Matthew Yglesias

Matthew Yglesias - Matthew Yglesias is a fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.
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Matthew Yglesias is a fellow at the Center for American Progress. His first book, with the working title Heads in the Sand: Iraq and the Strange Death of Liberal Internationalism, scheduled to be published next spring by John Wiley and co., deals with the Democratic Party's struggle to find a post-9/11 foreign policy, focusing primarily on the rise and (hopefully) fall of the liberal hawk movement.

Previously, he was a staff writer at The American Prospect and an Associate Editor at TPM Media, where he contributed to the group blogs Tapped and TPMCafe. His main blog, now at The Atlantic, has existed in various forms since the dark ages of the blogosphere in January 2002.

His writing has appeared in The Guardian, Slate, The New Republic, and The Washington Monthly, and he is a regular on BloggingHeads.tv and makes the occasional radio or television appearance.

Desperately out of touch with the American mainstream, Yglesias was born and raised in Manhattan and studied philosophy at Harvard where he was editor in chief of The Harvard Independent, a campus alternative weekly.

His latest writings can be found on the Matthew Yglesias blog.

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Goldberg Variations

By Matthew Yglesias

Apr 11 2007, 8:46 AM ET Comment

Jonah Goldberg tries to deploy a couple of hand-wavy references to "culture" along with an argument from authority citing Seymour Martin Lipset to explain why the French health care system, despite its seeming superiority to the American, won't work in the USA. Conveniently, the culture explanation lets Goldberg run the argument without saying (or, indeed, knowing) anything about health care policy in France or the United States. Henry Farrell smells a rat. Goldberg, gets upset.

John Holbo retorts that Goldberg is now deploying "the two-step of terrific triviality." How does this work? "Say something that is ambiguous between something so strong it is absurd and so weak that it would be absurd even to mention it. When attacked, hop from foot to foot as necessary, keeping a serious expression on your face." Exactly. I don't think enough attention has been paid yet to the way Goldberg is misunderstanding the Lipset argument he's invoking.

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