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Last Sunday, in his weekly "Left Ed" diary, "Left Ed: Where Are the Journalists?" jeffbinnc gave the Washington Post his "Duncehat Award" for its editorial "High-scoring school reforms". The next day, Matt Yglesias in effect answered the question Jeff asked in his diary title with a big fat, "Not here, dude!" No journalism for Yglesias, no-siree! Facts? Uh-uh. Context? You gotta be kidding! Yglesias often writes tight, cogent little posts. Not this time, though. This time, he went with something worthy of a "Chatty Cathies" nomination. So much so that, despite the fact that Jeff himself called attention to it in quick hit that same day ("Matt Yglesias Doesn't Agree With Me"), I felt it necessary to to examine the incident in a full-blown diary.
You see, not only did Matt deliberately ignore the actual content of Jeff's diary to take aim at "teacher-bashing" phrase, he was actually proud of his disdainful refusal to even consider what Jeff was saying. Here's the very first sentence in Matt's post:
One tic I really don't understand is the practice of referring to performance pay plans for K-12 teachers as "teacher-bashing".
Well, one tic I really don't understand is the practice of saying that you don't understand something as a way of proving your superiority. Since when is being dumb and incurious something for would-be progressives to be proud of? The same pattern was in evidence when Jamelle Bouie criticize me while substituting for Matt a couple of weeks back. That piece started off in a strikingly similar manner:
I need help understanding how OpenLeft's Paul Rosenberg can credibly argue that Barack Obama has manically embraced "discredited conservative ideas" and "helped enormously in extended the hegemonic continuity of [the] Nixon-Reagan Eara. [Emphasis his]"
What's more, both pieces proceeded by making no attempt whatsoever to understand--or even look into--that which they claimed to find puzzling. Instead, they simply regurgitated whatever self-validating glop they could find. They're giving intellectual laziness a bad name. How hard would it have been, really, to make intellectual laziness look normal? All they would have had to do was phrase things a tiny bit differently. Matt could have written:
One tic I really don't understand that really bothers me is the practice of referring to performance pay plans for K-12 teachers as "teacher-bashing".
And Jamelle could have written:
I need help understanding how I'm really surprised that OpenLeft's Paul Rosenberg can credibly argue that Barack Obama has manically embraced "discredited conservative ideas" and "helped enormously in extended the hegemonic continuity of [the] Nixon-Reagan Eara. [Emphasis his]"
Both their diaries would still have been utterly lame. But they wouldn't quite have been calling attention to their own intellectual laziness as a matter of pride. It may seem like a small thing, but this sort of snobbery is just par-for-the-course trickle-down from Obama's "new tone" in Versailles. It's an attitudinal "tell" that a neoliberal apologist has nothing but junk in their hands--and they know it in their guts, even if their beautiful minds are otherwise engaged in fooling themselves as well as everyone else in sight.
Turning from tell-all tone to content, the bottom line here is fairly simple: Jeff called out an egregious example of mindless Versailles teacher-bashing--which has pretty much always been a staple of the decades-long corporate/conservative hegemonic war on public education. And Yglesias, unable to defend it, played dumb.
It needs to be stressed here that Yglesias was being blithely indifferent to one of the most basic strands in conservative hegemonic warfare--so basic, in fact, that it constitutes the textbook example for explaining the Overton Window, the example that Overton himself introduced: privatizing education is the prime exemplar in defining the functioning of conservative think-tanks in hegemonic struggle. (See, for example, my discussion in "Three Waves And A Wall: 2008 And The American Future-Pt. 4" in the section titled "Think Tanks".)
In Overton's view, privatizing education was the libertarian conservative agenda on education. The desired end-state was "No government involvement in education." That was it, period. What's more, to push his ideas, Overton--in typically delusional libertarian fashion--falsely designated the opposite educational policy extreme that libertarians were doing battle with as "Children taken from parents and raised as janissaries"--a position promoted by no one outside of the paranoid fantasies of libertarian crazies. This is the decades-long political reality that Yglesias simply ignored in order to take a mindless star turn in puerile Versailles-style sophistry. And that sort of sophistry is precisely what conservatives are counting on to keep winning their battles, even when they're losing elections.
A blow-by-blow look at what Jeff said and how Yglesias bungled it on the flip.
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