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Ep. 87: Nate Silver and the Crisis of Pundit Brain

Added 2019-09-18 14:48:46 +0000 UTC

Nate Silver tells us Joe Biden’s inconsistent political beliefs are, in fact, a benefit. They’re “his calling card” and evidence he “reads the room pretty well.” Venality, we are told, is “a normal and often successful [mode] for a politician.” Insurgent progressive groups like Justice Democrats shouldn’t call Biden out of touch with the base because, Silver tells us, “only 26 of the 79 candidates it endorsed last year won their primaries, and only 7 of those went on to win the general election.”

On Twitter and in his columns, high-status pundit Nate Silver has made a career reporting on the polls and insisting he’s just a dispassionate, non-ideological conduit of Cold Hard Facts, just channeling the holy word of data. Empirical journalism, he calls it. But this schtick, however, is very ideological - a reactionary worldview that prioritizes describing the world, rather than changing it. For Silver - and data-fetishists like him - politics is a sport to be gamed, rather than a mechanism for improving people’s lives.

We are joined by Current Affairs editor-in-chief Nathan J. Robinson.

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Guest

Nathan J. Robinson is the founder and editor-in-chief of Current Affairs. A columnist for The Guardian, his writing has also appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, The Nation and elsewhere. Robinson is a graduate of Yale Law School and is a PhD student in Sociology and Social Policy at Harvard University. Follow him @NathanJRobinson.

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