No More Pretending

One of the more interesting things to happen over this election cycle is to see how many liberal pundits don't actually care about liberal causes or principles.  After the 2010 Citizens United decision, the idea that money is an inherently corrupting force in politics was a standard thing.  Obama alluded to it in his State of the Union address the following year, and with the rise and popularity of Elizabeth Warren and Sherrod Brown, the party had enough capital to stake out a position where it stood against the free flow of money and corruption and wanted to clean politics up.  But then Hillary Clinton runs for President on the backs of a lot of dark money fundraising and well, suddenly, who's to say that campaign donations are a bad thing?  Surely she's only getting that money because all those industries think she's the better qualified candidate, right?  They certainly don't expect anything in return for those donations, oh no.

Leading the way in abandoning policy positions and goals because they make Clinton look bad,has been Vox, Ezra Klien's pet project originally launched with the mission to provide deep-dive policy wonk articles but written so people would actually find those discussions interesting.  Whether or not it ever really was that is a matter for another time, but for now, let's just say the site as done an admirable job doing ideological cover for Clinton in painting every criticism of her from the left as being just like when Republicans shout "Benghazi!" or "Vince Foster" when they drag out the classics. So now that the idea of an open and transparent government via the Freedom of Information Act is causing trouble for Hillary Clinton, it's Matthew Yglesias to the rescue in his Tuesday "Against Transparency" piece.

The thesis of the piece is basically that emails shouldn't be held to the same record keeping standards or FOIA requests as paper documents because they're more informal and that the eventual release of those communication records will make people speak less in policy or conversational terms but more in "how is this gonna look on Politico five years from now" terms.  It's an incredibly stupid and painful article to read, but I do have to give points for Yglesias to actually force this nonsense out into the world.  It's commitment, if nothing else.

It is entertaining though, to imagine Yglesias flail about as he tries to find some way or rhetorical trick to make it seem like people can't communicate in their emails.  He seriously spends the majority of the piece trying to spin this tale of a government that is hapless to do anything official because if they use email those emails will someday be *gasp* read by the people.  It seems strangely odd that Ygelsias thinks that for a government to be more effective, it has to actively hide more of its activities from the people they represent.  Yglesias even makes the argument at one point that since emails are subject to archival and public release like paper memos, that the people in the emails will be less interested in discussing the issues of the day in real terms and more concerned with how they'll look in history or the political tabloids.

The hysterics Yglesias works himself into while discussing these things is, like I said, entertaining, but so, so, pitiful.  For one thing, if people in say, the State Department, want to have a in depth discussion about their own personal and their policy goals over email, they can.  Those emails will more likely than not be slapped with some level of classification and those emails aren't released until the executive branch deems it appropriate.  So, absent a leak or a hack those emails aren't coming out in any immediate future, so Yglesias can stop worrying about people's hurt feelings when someone says something mean about them when discussing who to assign a specific project.

Also, if anyone wants to avoid those records, they can just talk to each other, in person.  Yglesias knows this, because he makes a big to-do over how people will end up having face-to-face meetings to talk about anything important to scuttle disclosure laws.  Look, I'm all for transparency, but I realize that some conversations need to had without people taking notes so that you can figure out what those positions will be when you actually do go on the record.  That's fine, a bit underhanded when abused, sure, but there has to be a give and a get.  But the Yglesias speaks as if this isn't a practice that's already happening, he makes his point in such dire bad-moon-on-the-rise language that I honestly wonder what he ever did that justified the position he has as a respected and deep thinker.

The other argument Yglesias makes is trying to draw a distinction between what he sees as useful and non-useful disclosures.  He says that things like the Bureau of Labor Statistics and other government agencies who collect and release statistical work are the good kinds of disclosures because they keep the country informed, basically, of how things are going.  he even makes an interesting suggestion about letting the IRS and BLS share data so the latter can have a better data set about what pay goes with what jobs in all fields.  Officials emails though, he claims, are in no way a part of the public interest like those statistics so they should just be locked away forever where no one can see them.  That anyone can make this argument in the era of Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning is incredible.  Knowing what the government is doing and who they are doing that business with is always, pretty much by definition, going to serve the public interest.  That a journalist can't see that, or, more accurately, is working to obfuscate that point has decided that the only thing that matters is making sure powerful people will want to pat him on the head and call him a good boy so he can get a good treat.

Look, I get it.  The Clinton email story won't go away.  There aren't any bombshells, no bribes, no nothing.  All they reveal is that Clinton, like every other politician, gives face time and access to people who give them lots of money.  The Sun set in the West today, film at 11.  So, because of that, the liberal punditry is desperately trying to get people to move on to something, anything else, and they keep failing to do so.  What Ygelsias and his ilk still can't seem to understand that a political system that doesn't blink at donors making donations to private foundations run by political figures while they're out of office than leverage those same donations for access when they go back in to office is a shitty system.   People's problem isn't that someone handed the Clintons a bag of money for the foundation in exchange for whatever they wanted.  People's concern is that, when push comes to shove, who does the government actually work for?  Who's interest will it pursue?  And the answer to that question basically comes down to who is in the room while you're making those decisions.  The main reason the email story won't go away is because none of hagiographers have ever dealt with the core issue that bothers people about them; sure, they don't reveal anything criminal, but they do confirm that if you're rich and give enough money to people, that's going to open a door and give you a chance to be heard above the din of well, everyone else.

Maybe, in later years, people can look back on this time and mark this election as the beginning of the end for our current era of journalism, one where the media failed to pass itself off s objective and intelligent while acting as the propaganda arms of  one or the other political party.  At least, I hope that happens, because if we have to live with disgraces like Yglesias for much longer and they're still seen as credible, I think we'll forget what actual journalism or just intelligent, principled, thought in general is supposed to even look like.