Covering Ground: An Interview With Matthew Yglesias

A conversation with one of the most astute political thinkers today.

Yglesias is a rare jewel as far as online thinkers go since it’s unusual to find anyone at all, anyone in the whole world, who changes his stance on really anything, especially when his paycheck depends on staying relatively the same. It seems that most of our lives are spent trying to change others in one way or another (without much success no matter what we do), so it’s nothing short of a marvel to see someone change on their own, and altering a political stance when doing so today carries so much risk is another thing entirely. Change of one’s own volition seems so deeply human, and not in the general everyday sense, but in that miraculous sense we’d attribute to Adam, an image of God fashioned into flesh; truly and remarkably human.

Yglesias is the cofounder of Vox News, Senior Fellow at the Niskanen Center, host of The Weeds, and creator of SlowBoring, one of the best and biggest platforms on all things politics and policy available. You won’t find a more astute political thinker online (or a funnier one, which means a lot) so subscribe to his substack and follow him on twitter for more. 

My first question has to do with what initially inspired me to reach out, which is that I have no idea what your politics are. I read that you are the cofounder of Vox but you seem too funny online to be liberal, and so I haven’t had any way to position you squarely and I just assume your politics have evolved. But evolved in which direction exactly, and how? It’s not very common as far as I’ve seen that, once being linked to a political group, one deviates on his own and defines himself—that’s risky business liable to bring on exclusion from relationships and opportunities to even entire institutions. How did you get here?