Looking Back: The New Republic's list of Overrated Policy Intellectuals From 2011

Recently I stumbled across The New Republic's 2011 list of "overrated" policy intellectuals.

I admit to not recognizing every name on the list (I did not remember previously hearing of Drew Westen), and to not being in a position to judge some of those I did recognize because of my knowing something of their work only secondhand--and especially the particular charges the list's makers laid against them (as with Rachel Maddow).

Where those I could judge are concerned I did not think that Ayn Rand belonged on the list at all, not because of any strengths or weaknesses of her work, but because she died almost thirty years before the list was made, in contrast with everyone on the list who was, at least at the time, among the living and actively part of the scene.

Of the others many seemed entirely appropriate. Fareed Zakaria? Definitely, and for exactly the reasons the list's makers say: "a creature of establishment consensus, an exemplary spokesman for the always-evolving middle," and frankly, an off-putting "mix of elitism and banality."

Parag Khanna? Likewise a fair choice. I reviewed his book The Second World. He got enough right that, a more generous reviewer then than now, I was on the whole favorable to the work--the more in as I was inclined to emphasize the positives over the negatives. Still, it was not one for the ages, and Khanna's next, How to Run the World, left me deeply unimpressed--"a self-congratulatory anthology of clichés and platitudes—the life of the mind, Davos-style" in the Republic's words. And nothing I have heard or read of him since has suggested I needed to bother with his work.

Still, I would say that this portion of the list was at best right fifty percent of the time--which also made it wrong fifty percent of the time, with Frank Rich one such case. The Republic's charge was simply that he is "an utterly conventional pundit of the old salon liberal variety." Even were that true it seems to me that his being an "old school salon liberal" would still leave him several cuts above the competition given the degeneration of the quality of political commentary across the spectrum of mainstream opinion, such that he has injected into that mainstream much that needs saying and is ever less likely to be said within its bounds these days--not least at his paper, the New York Times. Indeed, remarking the Republic's list Salon, in its worthwhile contemporary comment, characterizes the inclusion of Rich as a cheap piece of hippie-punching, which seems to me a very plausible reading of that item.