It’s not surprising that Geoff Shullenberger doesn’t know very much about me. After all, I only learned of his existence late last month when I tweeted an excerpt of an article in Compact Magazine. In the piece, someone named Zach Mottl argued that MAGA policy should be focused on the “America First” principles of “protecting workers, promoting industry, and balancing trade” while also getting mad at a Trump decision regarding the higher education sector that actually aligned with those exact principles.
Pointing out this amusing contradiction piqued Geoff who is apparently the managing editor of Compact and has a bunch of unrelated grievances about higher education. Here is a sampling of the incredibly stupid exchange that followed:
From an argument perspective, this should be a very humiliating exchange for Geoff.
He initially tries to argue that exporting 600,000 units of higher education only creates administrative jobs, which is both obviously untrue but also beside the point: even if it only created those kinds of jobs, it would still be the case that these education exports balance trade, promote industry, and create middle class jobs, which is what Mottl says MAGA should focus on.
Then he complains that America is price-gouging the Chinese by charging them high tuition only to later claim he never said that. He did say that (the tweet remains undeleted), but, more importantly, as with the first argument, he seems totally unaware of the irrelevance of this point. Charging foreigners high prices for our exports promotes the “America First” principle of “balancing trade,” which is what Mottl says we should focus on.
Throughout the exchange, Geoff clearly lacks an understanding of what industrial policy is as well as the mental precision to distinguish between the claim “American governments provide subsidies to American universities” and the claim that “American governments subsidize the tuition of foreign students.” This puts him in the hilarious position of somehow arguing that we both gouge Chinese students and subsidize them.
Although this was my first introduction to Geoff, I’ve actually met dozens of Geoffs in my life, especially when I used to participate in competitive debate. Geoff is a particular type of person who does not understand how arguments work, does not realize that he lacks this ability, and so winds up spinning his wheels saying things that sort of look like arguments but that are actually just adjacent claims about some of the subjects being argued about. He’s the kind of guy who hangs on at the bottom-rung of academia or the debate circuit who cannot ever figure out why nobody else seems to think his stuff is any good. He can’t see how what he is doing differs from what others are doing because he doesn’t understand arguments have an internal logic, that when you make them you are constructing a system of claims that has to hang together, not just spewing random, disconnected thoughts that express your feelings about something. When he does occasionally write something that works as an argument (I assume this happens), it is like when ChatGPT writes something good: it’s a simulation that happened to hit, not the result of achieving the actual human mental state of understanding.
Bernie Bro Elegy
First impressions can sometimes be misleading. But, unfortunately, my second impression of Geoff — formed after reading a piece called “Bernie Bro Elegy” that was sent to me by several people — is much the same as the first. Geoff is a man who is so unable to understand argument that he can only comprehend people making them as either supporting or opposing the specific players that the argument is about. The idea that someone might have a specific argumentative line they are pursuing, one that hangs together with the available facts and is consistent with a broader theory, is totally lost on him. For Geoff, if you don’t like something or someone, then you will support all negative arguments about it or them, regardless of how flimsy or contradictory they are. And if you don’t do that, then that means you do like it or them or that you have some other kind of nefarious motivation that can be deduced through speculative psychoanalysis.
Geoff thinks everyone is Geoff.
The jumping off point for Geoff’s “Bernie Bro Elegy” is that Jacob Savage wrote a piece at Compact called “The Lost Generation” in which he argued that, starting in 2014, 30-something white male professionals began losing out on a lot of economic opportunities because “DEI became institutionalized across American life.” Savage’s argument is that this spike in affirmative action happened in the media (Section I), academia (Sections II and III), and “Everywhere Else” (Section IV). Savage’s piece also includes a theory as to why aggregate statistics may understate the extent of the change that took place, which is that the DEI-branded affirmative action operated to prevent new white male entrants into PMC jobs but did not clear out the white male incumbents.
As Geoff writes, this piece went “mega-viral” and even got picked up by Ross Douthat at the New York Times. Through these viral mechanisms, it got to me.
When I read the piece, I thought it was very interesting because it makes very clear claims with specific time frames and age ranges that can be checked with Census data. The author attempted to support his theory with a handful of examples from specific employers and then speculated that this was happening more generally. But we don’t need to speculate about whether it was happening more generally because we have data that lets us look at the experience of a representative sample of 30-something white male professionals from 2014 to 2024.
I was curious about what that data said and so I spent thirty minutes or so grabbing it from IPUMS and writing some code to get the answer. I then posted the results to People’s Policy Project with a few paragraphs of analysis. It turns out that the Census data does not really back up Savage’s theory: 30-something white males over this period increased their Bachelor’s and post-Bachelor’s degree attainment and employment, while holding steady in the arts/media sector and in the upper echelons of the personal earnings distribution. Thus it appears that, though affirmative action disfavoring 30-something white males probably ramped up in certain areas (like Hollywood writing rooms, the example Savage starts with), it did not do so across the labor market generally.
When I was sent Geoff’s “Bernie Bro Elegy,” I thought he might have an actual critique of my piece. Maybe he spotted an error in my calculations or in my brief commentary on them. But he did not. Instead he tries to come up with a theory to explain why I wrote it in the first place.
His theory starts by stating that People’s Policy Project and The Bruenigs podcast (I’d also add NLRB Edge and my legal practice, which is actually my main job) exist “outside of mainstream legacy institutions” and have “avoided all institutionalization.” This is why I am “doing fine,” because these things are “independent enterprises that avoided the dynamics that overtook elite left-of-center institutions during the 2010s.”
Given all of this, he says it is a puzzle why I am (A) “devoting [my] efforts to debunking Savage’s criticisms of the legacy institutions.” But he has figured out the solution to this puzzle which is that I am (B) “reliant on subscriber bases that are mostly aligned with the politics of those institutions” and therefore (C) “if [I] took too forceful of a stance against identitarianism, [I] would alienate many of [my] subscribers.”
Every single bit of this is false.
My piece was focused on Savage’s claim that widespread affirmative action had significantly hurt the economic prospects of white male millennial professionals not his “criticisms of the legacy institutions.” I wasn’t trying to debunk his claim. I was trying to see if the Census data supported it. It turns out that it doesn’t, but I did not know that when I wrote the code.
Writing responses to popular economic pieces that are wrong is a lot of what I do at People’s Policy Project. The piece I wrote just before this one was a response to Michael Green’s viral article in The Free Press in which he argues that the real poverty line is $140,000. As with the response to Savage, this piece is driven by my analysis of Census microdata. The two pieces I wrote just prior to that one was a response to Jacobin articles that argued that Nordic countries rely mostly on market income compression, not the welfare state, to achieve low inequality. Jacobin is probably the closest thing to “my audience” as there is (I currently have 203 pieces on the Jacobin website and have spoken at multiple Jacobin-sponsored events) and yet here I am criticizing one of their writers, not once, but twice, including with a piece I headlined “Do Predistribution People Know How to Read?” This is what I do.
I actually don’t specifically know who my audience is (they are all anonymized on the various crowdsourcing platforms). But I definitely don’t play to any particular audience. This is not even my main job. I am a lawyer. But if I had to guess, I’d say that my audience likes critiques of identitarianism. The reason I would guess this is because I have been an outspoken critic of it for over a decade and am kind of known for doing it. Here are just a few of my earliest pieces on it:
- 2012: Identitarianism’s class problem
- 2013: Class and intersectionality
- 2013: Identitarianism and the Working Class
- 2013: Liberals and Class
- 2013: What does identitarian deference require?
The last piece is actually among the most shared things I’ve ever written and is still frequently shared today. I’ve continued to write about this sort of stuff into the present. For example, five years ago I wrote a piece titled “Identitarian Deference Continues to Roil Liberalism” where I talked about how identitarianism is being cynically used to fire people. I’ve produced piece after piece highlighting the centrality of class over race as the driver of inequality in the US. In January of this year, I even wrote a piece specifically about DEI titled “Corporate DEI Was a Mess” in which I argued that DEI is empty HR nonsense and that only unions can offer real checks on employer abuses. Again, this is what I do.
Sidelining Class Politics
The most clueless aspect of Geoff’s piece is the last paragraph, which ends this way:
Writers like Adolph Reed and Jennifer Pan have long argued that the function of the DEI regime is to neutralize any serious broad-based challenge to the current political and economic order. That socialists remain so reluctant to criticize that regime is evidence of its continued success on that front.
I am very familiar with Reed’s arguments on this subject, in part because Reed frequently cites my supportive statistical work when he makes those arguments. Here he is citing me in a piece he wrote with Walter Benn Michaels (of The Trouble With Diversity fame) in 2020 and here he is citing me in an interview he gave to JSTOR in 2021. Reed and I have the same position! Don’t take my word for it. Just ask him!
Ultimately, because of Geoff’s struggle with argumentation, he cannot understand that it is possible for DEI to distract from or neutralize class-based politics while also not actually being implemented in the form of broad-based affirmative action in education and employment. That is a common argument about DEI from the left, that politicians (like Clinton) and institutions (like Goldman Sachs) make a big show about how they care about it, but don’t actually do anything about it. According to this argument, DEI is basically one big land acknowledgement: a performative gesture that does not actually change anything. It’s an often cynical political black hole that also swallows a lot of well-meaning political participation.
If this is what you believe, which is what I think the weight of the evidence supports, then Savage’s argument must be wrong. It can’t be that (1) DEI was cynical corporate nonsense and that (2) DEI was a widespread affirmative action program sidelining millions of 30-something white men. Geoff cannot understand this because he just scans (1) and (2) as saying negative things about DEI and thinks that if you don’t like DEI them you must support both (1) and (2) without regard for whether they are contradictory or false. And because he cannot grasp that actually a good argument can’t say both (1) and (2), he cannot understand what someone is doing when they pick one or the other but not both. So, he’s left to try to make sense of the world with the dumbest possible psychoanalysis.
I wish I could say he was doing so because he is captured by his audience of Compact-reading midwits. But really it appears that he is himself a midwit.