Abundance

Wonks are a useful sort to have around; no governing class should be without them. A wonk is someone who makes technical improvements to the existing order of things while remaining obedient to its premises. No social order can run entirely on its own propaganda. There does, somewhere, need to be some group of sober and dutiful people applying themselves to secular problems. For 21st-century America, this has been the “juicebox mafia,” a group of liberal bloggers who came of age in the early 2000s. Ezra Klein, Matthew Yglesias, Markos Moulitsas and Noah Smith were self-conscious wonks – the first, indeed, to treat wonkery as a personal credo. They called their articles “explainers” rather than op-eds.