Right Wing Excusers aren’t misguided allies—they’re your enemies
There is infinite money in telling oligarchs what they want to hear, and what they want to hear is that the left is bad, moving the left more towards the right is right, and you’re such a special little boy for thinking it.
Are you afraid of the left, but don’t want to lose your social circle by relocating to Trumpworld? Don’t worry, there’s no shortage of reasonable, liberal-branded opportunities to fight against the increasingly mainstream democratic socialist-left that is about to elect Zohran Mamdani and shows up in droves to Bernie and AOC’s Fighting Oligarchy tour.
The newest example of this liberal-branded reaction is a Substack publication called “The Argument,” which launched in August off a $4 million investment, and features a murderers row of people who are consistently wrong about everything. These pundits, which include centrist wonk par excellence, Matthew Yglesias, are mostly connected to “Abundance”, a well-financed attempt to popularize a new brand of politics that primarily exists as the subject of intra-elite grievance over why its own brand isn’t popular. But while the money and website are new, pick three articles’ “Arguments” at random and it is pretty easy to see the same old centrish shlock:
-An article Arguing that if the US taxed immigrants more and denied them more services, Democrats would get more popular than Republicans.
-An article Arguing that universities should adopt affirmative action policies to hire more conservative academics, even when they are less qualified
-An article Arguing that Zohran Mamdani is less popular than the right wing Democrats he polls better than.1
The common thread of these Arguments is to treat the right as an agencyless force of nature whose actions are determined primarily by the overreach of “the left,” a group it mainly defines through a mixture of decontextualized poll numbers and random anecdotes. These Arguments then conclude that the only way to stop the right is for the left to underreach and move to the right.
Their Arguments are wrong. Democrats just ran on the most right wing border bill in US history and lost. Universities are already strangled by an omnipresent bad faith campaign designed to bring all its aspects under right wing domination, and if you think that’s bad, why help them? And, is Zohran less popular than the moderates? The article’s own data shows he’s not!
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Radical Centrists Right Wing Excusers
This extremely tired phenomenon is regularly eviscerated by the podcast If Books Could Kill, while the electoral wrongness has been chronicled by Anat Shenker-Osorio, so we don’t have to dive into why it’s wrong. While this phenomena has become known as “radical centrism” or “reactionary centrism”, these terms are now sanitizing the project, especially at this stage of fascism. Instead, the project is better understood as one of Right Wing Excusers. The Arguers at The Argument, and other writers in their milieu, distort facts and displace agency to sanitize the evils of the right. This is the primary effect that the entire centrist edifice from the Atlantic to NY Times Op Ed board to The Argument achieves.
What defines Right Wing Excusers? It’s that whatever the facts, they must be cherry picked, distorted, or outright made up to fit the same story:
1. When the right does something bad, it’s the left’s fault—not the right.
2. Anyone who wants to oppose the right should stop supporting left wing policies and support more right wing policies.
3. And if you don’t, you are the cause of the right winning.
When You Blame The Left, You Excuse The Right
Perhaps the ur-example of Right Wing Excuses emerged last month when for some reason, the entire internet had to hear Ezra Klein argue that the way to prevent hateful and violent politics from spreading was to be more accepting of those very politics, instead of “shaming” them by telling the truth of how they are bad.
As for all Right Wing Excusers, Klein goes through mental gymnastics to make a trademark right wing evil, political violence, into the fault of the left. He then looks for what compromises to make with the right, landing at “run anti-abortion democrats in states where abortion is more popular than democrats.” When called out on this factual error, he says, well, it was just an “illustrative example,” it could be some other thing. The fact that his go to compromise would fail on its own terms isn’t the point, it’s finding compromises as an end in itself.
But least noted in the discourse is one of the places from where he tries to derive his authority: the far right itself. Klein, without shame, says that what “right-of-center podcasts” have told him informs his analysis of why we should be more welcoming to the right. Uh, hold on now. Does this include Ben Shapiro, who he had on his own podcast about “how to take the temperature down”? I may not write for the New York Times, but I can tell you that Ben Shapiro does not want to take the temperature down. His entire life goal is to burn the place up.
What Klein–and the other Right Wing Excusers, who pal around with open racists like Richard Hanania-either fail to recognize, or won’t acknowledge, is that far right figures like Ben Shapiro literally always always lie about everything. Not only does Klein take these right wing liars at face value, but he launders their justifications for all kinds of reprehensible shit through the New York Times and gives them his own stamp of trust. This isn’t “listening” or “building coalitions,” it’s actively trafficking right wing propaganda to new unsuspected audiences. The only tent that grows is the right’s.
A Compromising Fetish
In most cases, these writers defend themselves from the charge of being full MAGA by claiming to be about compromise, something the left is supposedly so unable to do it needs every single op ed page of every major publication to write 12 articles a day about it. But if the Right Wing Excusers paid as much attention to the actual left as to the right, they’d find a movement that is actually quite open to compromise, when it makes sense tactically.
After all, Zohran Mamdani began his mayoral primary by moderating on police funding. If a significant portion of the left actually acted the way the Right Wing Excusers caricature claimed we do, would 50,000 volunteers have powered him to the largest primary victory in New York City history?
Here’s another leftist open to compromise:
There are different kinds of compromises. One must be able to analyse the situation and the concrete conditions of each compromise, or of each variety of compromise… anyone who is out to think up for the workers some kind of recipe that will provide them with cut-and-dried solutions for all contingencies … is simply a charlatan.
That’s Vladimir Lenin. He wrote a whole book about the folly of blanket refusal to compromise. And however you feel about him, you can’t say he wasn’t successful at taking power away from the right.
The point is, there’s compromise to enable the continued fight, and compromise to give up the fight, but for Right Wing Excusers, this distinction never seems to exist. It’s always time to compromise more. Sure, the least lazy ones may throw out a few things they wouldn’t advocate just to make it seem like they don’t support every compromise, but only as a rhetorical flourish
“Stupid or Evil?”
We can try to figure out: do the Right Wing Excusers genuinely want more left wing outcomes, and just wrongly believe that always moving right is the only way to get closer to them? Or do they just want more right wing policies and are dressing it up as a strategy? Are they Yglesian bullshitters, or Kleinian dupes?
But, given how easy it is to just join DSA or volunteer for Zohran or find the next No Kings Day, is this really the best use of our time in 2025?
As Toni Morrison said: “The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being.” Look at how much work debunking, refuting, and defending basic principles there is against the Right Wing Excusers—is distraction not the same mechanic the Right Wing Excusers use on the left? After all, advocating to make the US’ less-racist political party more racist is one of their main priorities.
But as tempting as it is to say, “log off, touch grass, ignore it,” this won’t cut it. In the war for the attention economy, we can’t just stand down. The pages of the New York Times and even weird substacks written by and for elites affect the millions who don’t read them. If they weren’t designed to steer anyone with power to the right, oligarchs wouldn’t bother funding them.
Fortunately, having had my long share of angry quote tweeting, hatereading, and long discussions over all the ways wrong people are wrong, I think I can give some insight on a more constructive politics approach. So let’s turn to the classic debate about politicians: “stupid or evil?”
For so long, I played the stupid or evil game about politicians. It’s self explanatory, and yet, so frustrating. Are we mad that they are wrong factually, or mad that they are wrong morally? Did Joe Biden allow Netanyahu to commit a genocide in Gaza because he was idiot who believed Netanyahu’s lies or was he an evil man who was fine with it? Does it matter?
One of the great things about spending your time actually organizing for a better world is how much it frees you from this trap. When you’re in the fight yourself, it no longer matters if your opponent is constantly doing evil because they are stupid or because they are evil. What matters is forcing them to change by building and exercising power.
So let’s do what organizers do with the evil or stupid debate and internalize power’s cold truth: we don’t have to know what’s in the heads of Right Wing Excusers, we just have to make them think a lot harder before opening their mouths.
Don’t wonder if Matthew Yglesias is wrong on purpose or by accident, if Ezra Klein hosting Ben Shapiro is a misstep or malevolence, if Jerusalem Demsas is just spitballing bad ideas or is a true bad idea believer. Just tell them that they’re Right Wing Excusers, and that they should stop excusing fascism.
So the next time you see the Argument posting a terrible take, don’t sit around debunking it. Just call their ass out: “You’re a Right Wing Excuser and no one should listen to you.” Let someone out there refute the data, sure. But just look around you. We don’t need more data on why it’s wrong to excuse the right. We need more people making it unacceptable to do so.
No more excuses. The right is wrong. Anyone who says otherwise is as bad for us as them.
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- This Argument is paywalled so I signed up for a premium The Argument trial to read the full piece, thinking there must be some kind of twist. Nope! It pretty much just argues what’s in the headline. ↩︎