What is the best website for left-wing political commentary?
If I had to pick one, it would be Progressive Policy Institute.
The standard that I hold up to someone on the left is to ask what you do when prominent figures on the left take a stand that is contrary to what you have long believed. Your choices are:
a) support their position, because they are on your team, abandoning your previous beliefs
b) don’t completely abandon your previous beliefs, but don’t come out and criticize the problematic position
c) come out and say that you disagree with the position
The folks at PPI are willing to do (c). So is Bill Galston. So is Alan Blinder. My reading of Paul Krugman is that he will do (a) much more than (c).
I worry that most of the intellectuals on the left who are willing to do (c) are over 60.
I should emphasize that I respect people who change their minds. I just don’t respect those who change their minds in order to support their team.
What about me and the right-wing “team”?
I oppose Republican fiscal policy, which consists of tax cuts without spending cuts. I oppose trade warring. I oppose re-privatizing Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae–and I know that stance has made me personal non grata to Congressional Republicans.
So I think I have occasionally taken option (c). I hope that I am never guilty of (a).
2018 US tax revenues were 1% higher than 2017. So far in 2019, revenues are up over 3%, but spending is up 6%.
How do you know that tax revenues would have been even higher without the tax rate decreases? Is it some sort of macroeconomic fact that you adhere to that the economy would have grown without them?
What is your politically practical approach to handling federal spending? Do you have a spending cut plan or would you increase tax rates to whatever level is necessary to achieve a balanced budget? Is the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2019 completely meaningless?
George Will says that China has to follow trade rules but rejects tariffs, bravely offering nothing as an alternative. Are you saying the US should follow this approach, maybe huff and puff a little and do nothing? That is the previous approach taken by US presidents, do you claim that approach was a huge success? Is there something about global Chinese hegemony that gives libertarians a warm, fuzzy feeling?
Stirner says “Is not all the stupid chatter of most of our newspapers the babble of fools who suffer from the fixed idea of morality, legality, christianity and so forth, and only seem to go about free because the madhouse in which they walk takes in so broad a space?”
“How do you know that tax revenues would have been even higher without the tax rate decreases?”
We don’t and we can’t. No one has a second economy lying around to let us run the experiment and our singular economy is too complicated to say for certain what the alternative will do.
None of that matters. What we do know is we just spend $1 trillion more than we taxed. We know that $1 trillion was borrowed from somewhere and will need to be paid back. We know that $1 trillion was not available for other productive uses.
Finally we know from microeconomics that since people didn’t voluntarily spend that $1 trillion, they had other preferential uses for that cash, uses they valued more than what we actually spent it on.
Everything I’ve read by Cass Sunstein seems to be very neoliberal (a big fan of F.D.R. and the New Deal) yet he seems to be very knowledgeable about libertarian arguments; I think he’d do very well on an Ideological Turing Test. Though they are both constrained by party politics since serving under the Obama administration, I’d like to see/hear a debate between Sunstein and a thoughtful libertarian on the size of federal government and Samantha Power defending her Responsibility-to-Protect (R2P) based interventionist foreign policy preferences against any skeptic. I think they are both very good at c)
Kling says:
That stance is correct, but generally unpopular, I think. The key question is how to make Pareto improvements to these massive and entrenched institutions that have left a significantly distorted market in their wake. Unintended consequences loom ominously.
If a person on the left were asking the same question, what site would you recommend?
Shouldn’t there be a case (d)? Investigate the reasons given by those “prominent figures” for their changed positions and decide whether there are good enough that you should change your own views.
Just my own opinion but I would say Counterpunch. It has a long respected history and isn’t a fair weather leftist site.
Counterpunch is sassy. 10 years ago when I knew it, it seemed highly heterodox, publishing excitable people who tended to be Left, but without any core holding it together. Thus you could find all kinds of interesting stuff there, some of which made sense and that you wouldn’t see elsewhere.
The internet has let all kinds of polemicists find an audience. Paul Gottfried in an American Conservative column referred to “rhetorically gifted deviationists” who make effective arguments on certain points. Such people are on both the Left and Right, probably.
Fair but I would generally say that by definition would holds true of any leftist or rightest site whereas when I see some like the PPI I think “this is simply a centrist site slightly left of the slight right” and ditto the inverse on something like Reason or Cato. Once you leave the center opinions become “extreme” but equally I feel they represent a large swath of the unheard masses in those camps. Counterpunch and Taki (Steve Sailor) might be sassy but I think they are closer to the average groundtruth in their perspective camps as opposed to the slight left/right two sides of the same coin centrist counterparts in PPI/Cato.
Could you elaborate (or point to a blog post) on why are you against re-privatizing Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae?
This strikes me as an unreasonably uncharitable take.
Clearly, this judgement is based on what got passed through the political process, not based on what Republican figures have championed. Republicans did push in 2017 for cost controls on government healthcare spending, and they got crushed politically. Next, looking at the ideas proposed by leading Democrats like Medicare for All, or Free College, or the Green New Deal. We do have a two party system, it is reasonable to compare the two parties to each other, and in terms of reigning in spending, the Republicans are the more responsible of the two.
My favorite left-wing political blog site is slatestarcodex.com (SSC). Although I don’t think he’s really left wing. He clearly labels himself a left-wing liberal, however, I think it much more reasonable to categorize his writing and ideology on the right.
I’d be curious what Kling’s favorite or most respected websites are for right-wing commentary, pro-Trump commentary, populist commentary, and reactionary commentary?
Certainly any enacted policy needs to go through the political process and won’t be pristine. On the other hand, I seem to recall the entire Republican leadership railing against profligate spending during the Obama years and not hearing a chirp since 2016. Even Rush Limbaugh now says he doesn’t think anyone was ever serious about constraining spending.
If there we Republicans advocating for health care cost controls in 2017, they weren’t very vocal about it. Yes, we had a “repeal and replace” vote but that seemed more like theater than a legitimate polity thrust. The Republicans (especially leadership, and here I’m looking at Ryan, McConnell, and Trump) had promised a vote but never actually put any effort into crafting a policy which might pass. Once they had the vote, it was quickly dropped to move to the President’s real priority, tax cuts.
This is a wonderful standard. As someone on the left (for America anyways), I find myself just reading the blogs of people who have integrity and a spine, regardless of where they are politically.
Before Freddie DeBoer effectively left public life due to mental health issues he definitely qualified as someone on the left under 60 that was not afraid to challenge left-wing consensus.
One of the good things I noticed about the Progressive Policy Institute site is what appeared to be a total absence of identity politics. Refreshing.
Thanks, that’s helpful. By “best” I had in mind not “Whose intellectual integrity do I most respect?” but “Where can I find the most cogent presentations of left-wing ideas?”, but your answer might well be the same.