There are three general categories of wrongheaded political arguments. Encountering the first category, the reader will think, “I understand why the writer believes this.” Encountering the second category, the reader will think, “I understand why the writer believes that there is an audience that will believe this.” Encountering the third category, the reader will recognize that nobody would believe this, which raises the question of what exactly the writer and the writer’s audience get out of the shared experience of the argument.
Peter Beinart, once a serious writer, has sadly fallen into the habit of writing things that can only fall into the third category. Today’s New York Times column by Beinart is a classic of the genre:
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