Kevin Drum, R.I.P.

An OG blogger -- and friend -- exits the stage.

Photo by Nick Morrison on Unsplash

Before Drezner’s World, before Spoiler Alerts, before my time at Foreign Policy, I was just a simple blogger. I started blogging in September 2002, mostly because the technology seemed accessible at a time when the op-ed pages seemed walled off from me. I was fortunate, in that within a month or so my blog had gained some traction. And I remember exactly the moment when I realized that the whole enterprise might have legs: it was when I received a lovely, encouraging email from fellow blogger Kevin “Calpundit” Drum.

Earlier this week Kevin’s wife announced on his Jabberwocking blog that Kevin had passed on March 7th of this year after a long battle with cancer. During a year in which American decency has taken a severe beating, it’s a gut punch to see one of the country’s most decent bloggers exit the stage.

Over the last two decades Kevin and I cited each other, debated each other, and messaged each other on a semi-regular basis. Despite the fact that I only met him in person once, I liked him immensely. Kevin always impressed me with his ability to combine rigorous analysis with a fundamentally gentle mien. His writing was fair-minded without being wishy-washy.

Describing Kevin strictly as a blogger does not do his oeuvre justice. His 2013 Mother Jones essay arguing that lead emissions from automobiles explained the 1970s-1990s surge in violent crime in the United States was one of the most persuasive magazine essays I have ever read. But Kevin was also an outstanding OG blogger. He had a gift for taking the news story of the day, placing it in context, and filtering out all of the framing and BS that surrounded it. I did not always agree with Kevin’s interpretation of events, but I always valued his takes.

The New York Times’ Clay Risen penned a lovely obituary for Kevin, noting:

His curiosity was broad, and he wrote on a variety of subjects from a variety of perspectives — sometimes casually observational, sometimes rigorously analytical — in a way that set him apart from the assorted camps that defined the blogosphere, including academics, politicos and ideologues.

“He was able to absorb and summarize and comment on what all of those different camps were saying with a judiciousness and fair-mindedness that a lot of the others lacked,” Paul Glastris, the editor of Washington Monthly, who hired him in 2004 to write its Political Animal blog, said in an interview….

Like other bloggers, Mr. Drum cultivated a lively comments section, which in the days before social media served as a kind of online meeting place. But while some blogs tolerated rank partisanship, name-calling and worse, he set a tone of civility and respect, in his writing as well as in his comment moderation.

He also invented Friday cat blogging.

Former Mother Jones editor Ben Dreyfuss also wrote affectionately about Drum, noting that he had refused any raises from the magazine, insisting that the money go towards “into paying the [writing] fellows more and giving them a better stipend or lower premium for healthcare.” This despite the fact that by 2020 a lot of those fellows deemed Drum to be insufficiently woke to work at the magazine. Dreyfuss wrote, “One time I DM’d him and started to bring up a lot of the problems I have with our former friends in the leadership of Mother Jones. Even then, he wasn’t as petty as me. ‘They have to do what they have to do,’ he said.”

That was the thing about Kevin — I can’t remember a time when he was petty in his prose. That’s exceptionally rare for someone who was an integral part of the public discourse for decades. And it is something that I will try to remember for my own writing in the years to come.

R.I.P., Kevin.