An Abundance of Sleaze: How a Beltway Brain Trust Sells Oligarchy to Liberals
There’s a famous scene in the movie Annie Hall illustrating the dream of every competitive person engaged in an argument. Woody Allen is annoyed by a man in line making loud pompous comments to his date about media scholar Marshall McLuhan. So Allen in a sequence breaking the fourth wall pulls McLuhan into the movie, and McLuhan says to the man, “You know nothing of my work!” The scene is iconic and still cited today, because it is so fundamentally satisfying. It brings control to argument — a sense of truth and objectivity that real life lacks.
The tactic of showing someone’s own sourcing to disprove their claims is used often in politics. And a well-known writer just tried to do it to BIG. Derek Thompson, a former writer for The Atlantic , wrote an article titled The Anti-Abundance Critique on Housing is Dead Wrong. I’m going to explain this article, not just for its intrinsic substance, but because it is, in microcosm, quite revealing about the nature of modern politics, and how opponents of populism operate.
Thompson is very skilled, a latter-day slightly-less-talented version of Malcolm Gladwell, who can make the upper class chatter. For instance, he recently wrote about how young people aren’t partying or drinking much anymore, which is a perfect topic for a 15 minute conversation between two lawyers in DC. Subjects like automation taking jobs, weight loss drugs, the fabulous innovation at Google, etc., are his bread and butter. He’s got the right timing and framing to generate some buzz.
