Public service announcement: Steve Benen’s new blog chez Maddowblog

Steve Benen’s blog is dead, long live Steve Benen’s blog.

It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of Steve Benen’s blogging. So I was pretty sorry to hear last week that he would no longer be blogging for the Washington Monthly and would be working instead for Rachel Maddow. While it’s of course a triumph for Steve, and well deserved, I was afraid that in transforming himself from blogger to talking head Steve would deprive me of most of his dead-on content and Stakhanovite output.

Not to worry. After a very brief lull, Steve is up and blogging on the Maddowblog, with a format that looks much as it did on Political Animal. The link to his content specifically is: http://maddowblog.msnbc.msn.com/_nv/more/section/archive?author=steve-benen

Meanwhile, Ed Kilgore, whose work I’ve always liked (he’s slightly to my right, I guess, but compared to Gingrich and Boehner the daylight between me and a New Democrat hardly matters anymore), is ably, though differently, filling Steve’s old shoes at www.washingtonmonthly.com (Political Animal).

Update: fixed to make the text URLs into hyperlinks (which I thought I’d done already). Thanks to Uncle Vinny for the catch.

Author: Andrew Sabl

I'm a political theorist and Visiting Professor (through 2017) in the Program on Ethics, Politics and Economics at Yale. My interests include the history of political thought, toleration, democratic theory, political ethics, problems of coordination and convention, the realist movement in political theory, and the thought of David Hume. My first book, Ruling Passions: Political Offices and Democratic Ethics (Princeton, 2002) covered many of these topics, with a special focus on the varieties of democratic politics and the disparate qualities of mind and character appropriate to those who practice each of them. My second book Hume's Politics: Coordination and Crisis in the History of England was published in 2012; I am currently finishing a book on toleration, with the working title The Virtues of Hypocrisy, under contract with Harvard University Press. A Los Angeles native, I got my B.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard. Before coming to Yale I taught at Vanderbilt and at UCLA, where I was an Assistant, Associate, and Full Professor; and held visiting positions at Williams, Harvard, and Princeton. I am married to Miriam Laugesen, who teaches health policy and the politics of health care at the Mailman School of public health at Columbia, and we have a twelve-year-old son.

10 thoughts on “Public service announcement: Steve Benen’s new blog chez Maddowblog”

  2. Ed Kilgore, whose work I’ve always liked (he’s slightly to my right, I guess…

    Sounds like he is aiming for a future slot on TeeVee too…

    1. I have to say that this comment is totally unfair to Kilgore. He’s held the political positions he has for decades, and comes by them completely honestly. Nor would leaning centrist (not that Ed does that nowadays; as said, old-style New Democrats have started to seem like plain old liberals, sometimes even angry radicals, when faced with today’s Right–read Kilgore’s blog posts if you don’t believe me) be the way to get on Maddow’s show. Please inform yourself of the guy’s opinions and background before insulting them.

    1. Pedantry Alert:

      “вредительство” refers to the so-called “crime” itself (which may be loosely translated as “sabotage”). I think the word you want to describe the “perp” would be “вредитель.”

      /pedant

  4. Also and not besides the point at all, Kilgore has clearly been trying to earn some liberal bona fides. He knows that he needs to work to win the trust of Benen fans. He has been denouncing Republicans and conservatives with great vigor. I almost think that he was holding back before. Or maybe he’s just trying to trick me into DLConcessions now. But I sure like his posts.

    1. Ed’s Political Animal columns seem consistent with his last five years or so.

      Sometime during the Bush administration, a lot of centrist Democrats got radicalized. Try reading a 1999 Krugman column–the economics is pretty much the same, but the political economy and the tone are completely different. Nobody holds Krugman’s 1999 columns against him. Nor should they hold Ed’s DLC associations against him, either.

      There are still a few unrepentant Wall Street Democrats–the kind of folk whose progressivism stops short at economics. But they’re pretty rare these days among the commentariat, although all too common among elected officials.

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