Matt Zeitlin: Impetuous Young Whippersnapper

I’ve had a very progressive week. On Tuesday, I was working at Campus Progress’ Journalism in Action Day, where young aspiring journalists reported a story on health care, and then progressive writers critiqued them. Wednesday was the Campus Progress National Conference, where “Liberal Heroes Bill Clinton and Matt Yglesias Woo Interns At Conference,” and yesterday was the Campus Progress/The Nation Journalism conference. Yglesias, who flitted through the conference proceedings on the way to and from his office in the Think Progress blogcave, was basically well to the right of most of the attendees, who ranged from John “massive, explicit subsidies to newspapers” Nichols to Ana Marie “I used to write for a basically small-m Marxist publication” Cox to William “Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country” Greider. And while, and I’m being serious here, I really enjoyed all three days of conference events and was edified by every panel or discussion that I attended or somehow assisted, I need a little hardcore reaction to give some balance to this immense week of progressivism.

And for that, let me say that I agree nearly in toto with Megan McArdle’s takedown of Matt Taibbi’s infamous Goldman Sachs piece.

You should read her entire critique, but I’ll just add that the common thread between Taibbi’s examples of Goldman’s supposedly dastardly behavior is that he can’t really establish that Goldman was doing something so much worse than the rest of the big investment banking world. His desire to find one powerful, satisfying villain is the original sin of the piece. I understand why, as someone who likes writing satisfying, well constructed narratives — which Taibbi often does — he went with this approach, but it doesn’t make his piece particularly enlightening or informative.

I’m not saying that the big financial institutions aren’t responsible for our current predicament and are using their political clout to block sensible, important reforms. I’m just saying that the focus ought to be on the industry as a whole, not on just on one company that has been particularly sucessful.