Chait's counteroffensive

Jonathan Chait's counteroffensive against FireDogLake’s David Dayen was a pleasure to read, even if Chait's fundamental argument--that raising Medicare's eligibility age is a warrantable political concession--remains unwarrantable. It was a pleasure simply because I don't like FireDogLake for the same reason Jonathan Chait doesn't like FireDogLake: It's "committed ... to producing the mirror image of redstate.com analysis in which your party can always win if it just fights harder."

Chait, as noted, is still wrong--extraordinarily wrong, as I wrote the other day. But Dayen's "progressive" assault on him is all too characteristic of something else that's wrong with contemporary progressivism: dissent from within is tolerated about as well as within the tea party's ranks. Violate a progressive piety and one is banished and branded as the lowest form of sell-out corporatism, which only amuses the "sell-out" and weakens progressivism's intellectual robustness.

Comments

[AnneJ]

Well as the late Richard Jeni said, "If you go too far left, or too far right, you've simply gone too far".

Just because the far left and the far right have opposite views, doesn't mean they don't share the same personality traits.

[Janicket]

Well said, Anne.