A couple days ago

Start your day with TPM.
Sign up for the Morning Memo newsletter

A couple days ago I mentioned my new article in the Washington Monthly, an effort to put together a general theory of the administration’s pervasive mendacity or what Barron’s columnist Alan Abelson recently called their “regrettable aversion to the truth and reality when the truth and reality aren’t lovely or convenient.”

The heart of the matter, I think, is the administration’s revisionism.

Revisionists are by their nature always at war with established expertise, whether it’s orthodox Marxists picking apart mainstream economics and anthropology as the creations of ‘bourgeois ideology’ or Frenchified academic post-modernists who ‘deconstruct’ knowledge in a similar fashion, revisionist ideologues always seek to expose ‘the facts’ as nothing more than the spin of experts blinded by their own unacknowledged biases.

Across the board, the history of the last thirty months has been one of often open warfare between ideology and expertise in the executive branch. Of course, the history of early 20th century Progressivism shows that the cult of expertise is itself capable of excesses. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Here’s the article.

Latest Editors' Blog
Masthead Masthead
Founder & Editor-in-Chief:
Executive Editor:
Managing Editor:
Associate Editor:
Editor at Large:
General Counsel:
Publisher:
Head of Product:
Director of Technology:
Associate Publisher:
Front End Developer:
Senior Designer: