The Saga of Mickey Kaus

This might be too inside baseball for a lot of people, but those who have been reading political bogs for a long time might find it interesting. BuzzFeed has a lengthy profile of Mickey Kaus.

When I first started taking politics seriously in the mid-nineties, Kaus was a writer for The New Republic, and a very good one at that. He was someone I paid a lot of attention to. He was very much in the mold of Michael Kinsley, who at that time was basically the go-to guy for sensible liberal commentary. He was also one of the first serious political bloggers, largely responsible for defining the genre. He was a blogger for Slate for most of the early aughts.

But I started reading him less, and then stopped paying attention to him altogether, once it was clear he was just becoming more and more of a crackpot. Contrarianism can be a good thing, but not when you're being contrary just for its own sake. The BuzzFeed profile fills in some blanks about what has happened to him over the years. It is not a happy story:

Kaus finally stopped blogging this year when he got fired from The Daily Caller for criticizing Fox News — from the right. And while his old friends from top New York and Washington publications are now Top Thinkers and people Who Run Things, he is sitting in a coffee shop in Venice, talking about how he’s going to light up the Congressional switchboard with calls about immigration. He now lives off his savings, and writes solely on Twitter, where he has emerged as an unlikely man of this political moment: a Democratic intellectual who thinks that Donald Trump is the “most credible” candidate for the presidency. This is based on what Kaus sees as the central issue of our time, immigration (“I am not as worried about immigration and terrorism…as immigration and wages”) — an issue that polling suggests is the original core of Trump's angry appeal.

“The hope, maybe even Trump's hope, is that by going `too far' Trump may push us to go `far enough'” in limiting immigration, said Kaus in a recent email. A total outsider, seen by even his close friends as a bit unhinged, Kaus offers a glimpse at how we got to the ugly place in which we find ourselves at the end of 2015.