I'll have an obscenely long and detailed piece on Chait's article going up soon, but for now, his reply to Matt starts off with a wrong-headed, and rather low, swipe:
If I have bolstered Yglesias's reputation in a way that advances his career, I'm glad to have helped. I think he's the best blogger there is and entirely deserving of the breathtaking success he has enjoyed. But, given his astonishing success--a large base of readers, a job with The Atlantic, a book contract, all before his 26th birthday--it is odd that Yglesias believes the incentive structure of political journalism punishes his ideology. How much higher does he think he should have risen?
What Matt said is that Chait's article "misunderstands the objective incentive structure in the United States (where the forces pushing liberal writers to exaggerate our heterodoxies are far more powerful than those pushing us to stifle them) and reflects an oddly conspiratorial view of the netroots that runs through the article." Matt is not saying these trends have hurt him, nor showing himself churlish before his success. Quite the contrary: Matt's the perfect example of this incentive structure.
The "Blogfather" over at Atlantic World HQ is Andrew Sullivan, who has named a recurrent reward after Yglesias -- a reward for criticizing your own party. Chait, in his article, lauds Matt for running "one of the most independent-minded liberal blogs." And, indeed, a quick glance at Matt's many accolades and the great esteem conservatives hold him in prove the point even further: No small part of Matt's sterling reputation, and thus his success, springs from a belief in his appetite for heterodoxy. I've always found this strange, as Matt's never struck me as very heterodox at all, but it's certainly the prevailing perception, and it's played no small role in his ascension to house liberal for a major centrist magazine. Given that Matt actually is Matt, he's in a particularly good spot to notice and document this effect, and explaining one of the factors behind his rise is not the same as displaying a lack of gratitude for his position.
