OK, here’s a nauseating flipside to that James Traub article we were dissing the other day. Where Traub, journo apologist for the benign authority of high-finance elites, calls his upscale readers to the barricades against the barbarian hordes, Irwin, evidently one of the same, takes a different approach. In the Times column self-parodyingly entitled “The Upshot,” Irwin takes a good hard look in the mirror and concludes that these people in favor of, say, rent control, who he’s spent a career agreeing with his corporate cohort are nothing but naive at best, might actually have a critique with its own fascinatingly weird coherence, its own set of exotic values entirely alien to those of the international corporatism he presumes on the part of his readers. Turns out, if you just shift your frame of reference, there might be something bizarrely understandable about all this irrational rejection of what the elites know is best for everybody.

A light is actually dawning for this poor guy. In 2016.

Favorite lines:  “…international businesspeople and others who make up the economic elite (including journalists like me who are peripheral members of it)…” Um, yeah. That’s been a bit of a problem, the access-oriented coziness of people like you with those you’re supposed to be covering. It’s been mentioned a number of times — out here in the real world, that is.

“But what if those gaps between the economic elite and the general public are created not by differences in expertise but in priorities?” Holy crap. Yeah: what if? Gosh, this might change everything! (I withhold comment on the faulty parallelism of the “not…but” construction. Well, no, I guess I don’t.)

“Yes, rent control is a bad idea if you’re worried about the long-term prospects for economic efficiency. But maybe the people who advocate these policies know exactly what they’re rooting for, and that’s not it.” Nothing wrong here that a few years in a Maoist reeducation camp wouldn’t fix.

“Life isn’t just about money, and jobs aren’t just about income.” Wait, what? Sorry. Need time to process.

I find this piece more offensive than Traub’s. At least Traub is sticking to his guns as a class warrior for his people. This other dude has essentially wasted his whole career selling what he now seems a bit blithely — flexibly — inclined to deem a blinkered line of gab. It’s like just because this fool’s suddenly had an idea — probably the first he’s ever had — legitimacy may now be officially conferred upon decades’ worth of argument and activism on the other side. Because that turns out to be, you know, the upshot. Now he can start mining a whole new vein of thinky pieces with fake reporting, because there must be a dozen wrinkles to be pressed out of this one, dim insight. So really, it all works out.

In related news, David Brooks has been tooling down the Monongahela like Stuart Little, looking into the “real pain” he’s recently learned is “out there,” reporting back this hot news: “Whoa, it really sucks here, people, who knew!” And yet Brooks has already tipped that he’s leading us right back where he started: we’re gonna need a few more Teddy Roosevelts. That’s just what he thought back in the ’90’s, when he and Bill Kristol were laughing it up over the nanny state while all those irrational meatheads were getting set to lose their jobs. The upshot: amazingly enough, he’s always been right. Just for different reasons now.

Haters gonna hate. And what I hate are these God-damned nescient sons of bitches and the complacent, supercilious, self-regarding middlebrow journalistic culture they rode in on.