My Year In Review

I won't apologize for things I got wrong because I'm not pompous enough to presume you care. This is my best.

There is a story, probably apocryphal, about the legendary American newsman Edward R. Murrow meeting the legendary Israeli military leader Moshe Dayan.

Dayan told Murrow he was a great admirer of Murrow’s brave stance against Joe McCarthy. Oh no, Murrow demurred. McCarthy destroyed himself.

Then Dayan told Murrow he was a great admirer of his wartime radio broadcasts from London. The real credit, Murrow said, should go to my team at CBS News.

Then Dayan told Murrow he was a great admirer of his TV documentary “Harvest of Shame,” about the exploitation of farm laborers. Again, Murrow said, that work was done largely by my producers.

Exasperated, Dayan finally told Murrow: “Don’t be so modest. You aren’t that good.”

I think of this parable whenever I see columnists compile year-end mea culpas about what they got wrong during the previous 12 months. Yes, I think, of course they got some stuff wrong. What makes their mistakes so goddamned important that I have to read an accounting of them? This is self-aggrandizement masquerading, as it often does, as humility. The kids call it “humblebragging.”

In a contrary spirit, I am ending 2022 not with self-important breast-beating about my mistakes, which I’d just as soon forget, but with a re-posting of what, looking back, constituted my best work. I’m not so good that I can presume you’ve read and admired it already. I wish others would do this for themselves so I could catch up on good columns and other pieces that I missed, and not have to rely on David Brooks, whose interests tend not to match mine.

Washington Is Not A Swamp. This was a piece about the “Asknots,” the invisible band of civil servants, public-interest lawyers, and NGO workers who kept the lights on during the Trump years. They deserve much better than to be derided as the “Deep State.”

May God Save Us From Economists. How economists seized control of the federal government; the price we all pay for Economism; and the areas of government (criminal justice, health care, and climate change) where we need most urgently for economists to butt out.

Why Isn’t Everybody Rich Yet? Why John Maynard Keynes’s prediction that “the economic problem” would be solved right about now failed to come true. A review of Brad DeLong’s Slouching Towards Utopia (a complete mess of a book with lots of interesting stuff in it) and Thomas Piketty’s optimistic A Brief History of Equality (elegant even in translation, and surprisingly optimistic).

These three pieces appeared in The New Republic, where I’m a staff writer. In addition, I reviewed a couple of books about the history of the Democratic Party for the New York Times and I posted, here on Backbencher, an essay decrying the pathologizing of grief. Oh, and I also wrote, in The New Republic, a piece people seemed to like explaining about why it takes me longer to read something in Axios than it does to read something written in the mother tongue. And maybe I’ll throw in “Defund the Dead,” a year-end essay I was very pleased with that appeared on The New Republic’s website on Christmas Eve 2021, so nobody read it.

Wishing you a Happy Hanukkah, a Merry Christmas, a Joyful Kwanzaa, and an Exuberantly Boastful New Year.