As a blogger, what do you see as your main contribution to the progressive cause?

The main thing I try to do is to connect events in the news to elements of a bigger picture. I spend a lot of time reading things, researching topics and then trying to shed a little bit of light – going a little bit deeper than what you see in news accounts – on what the real policy dynamics are.

I particularly enjoy your blog’s rebuttals of Wall Street Journal opinion page pieces, which often – especially when it’s a politician writing them – are based on emotion or personal experience, without much regard for the facts. Having a blogosphere that subjects these claims to more rigorous analysis strikes me as an important counterbalance that was missing even a decade ago.

Part of the way op-ed pages work is that people get access to them by virtue of holding, or of having held, political office, or as a reward for a career of good service at a newspaper. Oftentimes they don’t really know a great deal about the issues that they’re writing about, and it is possible to try to provide some sort of corrective.

Do you get a lot of feedback?

I get lots and lots of feedback from different people, of all different kinds. The thing about writing online is that you get a ton of constant feedback and comments – on email, on Twitter, on Facebook. One criticism I sometimes get is of not being totally in touch with the human element of everything. I’m not doing a lot of narrative reporting.

Do you feel that you’re making a difference to people who hold different political views from yours?

On the good days, you get feedback from someone who you’ve actually persuaded of something. Mostly people write in to complain. But as long as people are bothering to complain, I take some pleasure in the idea that they’re bothering to come and read me. Because it’s not the same as an op-ed that’s been plopped into a major newspaper – people are only coming to my site voluntarily.

These are important issues you’re scrutinising, though. For example, I thought the back and forth you had with Greg Mankiw – chairman of George W Bush’s Council of Economic Advisors – after he posted a link on his blog suggesting that the American tax system was the most progressive in the developed world, was fascinating. But isn’t one of the main problems that the majority of people don’t think about the progressiveness of the tax system at all? They vote Republican because they’d like their own taxes to be lower, or they think George Bush would be nice to have a drink with.

There are a lot of different aspects to it. But yes, one is that people are not actively engaged as much as they should be. Not just in formal political activity, but in talking to other people – to co-workers, to family members – about what they care about. That’s something I really encourage readers to do. Don’t just participate in self-selected online communities, express your political views in other communities that you’re part of. Try to engage more people. The other thing is that public policy is always difficult. It’s not just raw competition of power, there are tricky issues in play. I’m always trying to understand them better, and trying to help other people to understand them better. Even with people who have all sorts of convictions in terms of their values, it’s always possible to gain better knowledge of these things.

Yes, in the discussion you had with Mankiw – even with explanatory comments from others who weighed in – I was left undecided whether you were right or whether Greg was. It’s incredibly complicated.

Sometimes it’s hard to know. It is difficult. Sometimes people develop a very cartoonish understanding of good guys versus bad guys – that we need to get together and beat the bad guys. Certainly there is some of that in the political world. But there are also just questions of what the best way to handle things is, and how to make the world a better place. These are questions of knowledge that are not simple to overcome.