A Losing “Argument” | The Nation

This week, a new media venture unveiled itself and staked its claim to a firm defense of liberalism—something that’s apparently in short supply. Under the gently rage-baiting headline, “The left gets a new publication,” Semafor announced that “a group of left-leaning writers and journalists” would be forming an outlet called The Argument. It’s run by former Atlantic writer Jerusalem Demsas, and its masthead draws from that outlet of left-baiting resistance fare, along with Vox, Semafor, and abundance-focused Substackers.

It’s early days, but it sounds so far like a smaller, scrappier version of Demsas’ last employer. With The Atlantic’s vaunted yet now-cluttered star system, it’s not a surprise that some of its employees would want to jump ship for something without the history of endorsing war crimes but squarely within the proud, reasonable centrist standard. The Argument’s motto is “Join us. We’re Libbing Out.”

But there’s a call to action here, too. “We’re not just going to explain,” said Demsas in an introductory video. “We’re going to persuade.”

If only it were so easy. The dictum is revealing, though: This is a crowd of commentators with a quantitative and data-driven bent, and many of them have backgrounds in writing explainers or otherwise translating insider policy shop-talk and wonk-speak for the lay public. In the case of some prospective contributors—like the perpetually and confidently wrong pundit Matt Yglesias—they seem to have few fixed views at all and little experience with actual reporting.

But that might change. “We’re going to fight for the solutions” to problems, said Demsas, implying that this publication will believe in something. The question is: Will it just be repackaged Democratic Party orthodoxy?

The Argument claims to be fighting “the illiberal drift on both the left and the right”—a hoary false equivalency that could be cribbed from the mission statements of Persuasion, The Free Press, Liberties, or several other elite-flattering journals of opinion. In Demsas’ introductory video, the examples of leftist excess are President Joe Biden approving tariffs on Chinese goods and a David Leonhardt column about immigration in The New York Times.

In an opening essay, Demsas laments “the rising anti-growth, anti-individualist parts of liberalism and the left”: “Whether it comes from obsession with tariffs; a suspicious love of localism, minoritarianism and decentralization; antipathy toward open debate and empiricism; poorly reasoned anti-immigration attitudes or just plain NIMBYism, postliberal ideas have sprouted up from the furthest-left corners of the internet to the center-left pages of The New York Times.”

Not to overlook the raging menace of “a suspicious love of localism,” but none of this is anywhere nearly equivalent to the political right’s ascendant fascism. And none of this has much to do with “the left,” whose broad political demands—wealth redistribution, Medicare for all, climate action, controls on capitalism, an end to a US-assisted genocide—might seem illiberal if your new paycheck depends on the goodwill of some of the richest people in the country.

Unlike a typical boot-strapped media start-up, The Argument is launching with $4 million in venture-capital funding at a $20 million valuation. Like a tech start-up, the company’s value is notional, a bet on its future. The Argument’s backers include Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz; former Enron trader John Arnold; a Pritzker family heir; a Niskanen Center board member; and Stripe cofounder Patrick Collison. Perhaps you’re sensing the vibe: billionaires and the rationalist thinkers who love them.

This convergence of interests also fueled the new publication’s first brush with online scandal—a report that Kelsey Piper, a writer recruited from Vox, where she wrote a series of tech-boosting columns under the title-says-it-all rubric “Future Perfect,” had collaborated on a eugenics-themed fanfic project on a message board with Eliezer Yudkowsky, an AI guru with a distinctly red-pilled view of human evolution. The project apparently involved several contributors who, like Yudkowsky, are adherents of effective altruism—a rationalist cult advocating long-term ethical commitments that comport easily with the resource-hoarding agenda of the wealthy. The jailed crypto baron Sam Bankman-Fried is the best-known champion of the movement, but Argument funder Dustin Moskovitz also is a major backer.