This week at the beach I also got a chance to read Chris Hayes’ superb social commentary, “Twilight of the Elites.” Instead of gathering thoughts later to write a blog post, I tweeted some thoughts as they occurred to me. For those of you not on twitter (or don’t follow me, or missed it) here is a collection of those. I was very pleased that Chris Hayes himself commented and urged his readers to join in the conversation.
<iframe src=”//storify.com/criener/my-tweets-on-twilight-of-the-elites/embed” width=”100%” height=750 frameborder=no allowTransparency=true>[View the story “My Tweets on Twilight of the Elites” on Storify]
Really enjoyed these — thanks Cedar.
One note: the iframe containing your tweets isn’t rendering properly in Chrome.
Also: the Yglesias quote at the end is a bit rich. I’m not a fan of Yglesias either: like, REALLY not a fan. For anyone who supported the US invasion of Iraq to mouth off today about “who deserves to be taken seriously”… well, the answer seems a bit obvious. Nobody who supported the invasion should ever be taken seriously on any subject, ever again. The fact that Yglesias and the rest of those murderous clowns all still have prominent writing gigs at prestigious publications is evidence of the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of those publications. It’s not like there’s a shortage of people who were screaming and yelling and trying to throw themselves in front of that runaway train back in 2002. And plenty of them are tremendous writers.
The same logic applies to the economic crisis of 2008: why are the bankers and economists who drove the bus off the side of the mountain still being taken seriously, about anything? How many times do you have to be 100% wrong about the most central and important questions of your age, in your purported field of knowledge, before you lose your job as a prognosticator? I think THAT is a (rhetorical) question that dovetails nicely with your point about the lack of real consequences for the elite political operators post-Vietnam, post-Watergate, etc.
Yup. that’s a good point. One of the reason that I hold a low opinion of many columnists is that they never return to earlier opinions or predictions to give themselves feedback. They simply shout into the void and go back into a cave to write the next column. I think the only thing that would cause someone to lose such a job would be if they stopped being provocative, and they seem to get better at that as time goes on.