Imagining a Guy: Names Edition
The Post found a progressive who doesn’t exist and caught her betraying a belief she doesn’t hold.
The Washington Post’s right-wing opinion section did it again.
Back on June 21, the paper ran a column by Rob Henderson, a Manhattan Institute senior fellow, under the headline, “The latest data on baby names reveals a progressive paradox.” A week later, the Post Opinions account put out a video version with Henderson delivering the argument to camera. That’s when it ended up on my radar. Here’s how it opens:
“The most progressive parents in the United States are giving their children the most traditional names. The latest baby name data from Washington, D.C., reads like a roll call of 19th-century senators and their wives. Lucy, Eleanor and Caroline for girls. Charles, John and George for boys. These are not the names you might expect from one of the most progressive cities in the country.”
Not the names you might expect? From whom, though? Based on what? Weirdly, the column never gives coherent answers to those questions.
The liberal in this column doesn’t exist, and neither does the belief she’s supposedly betraying
Henderson constructs a bit of a straw man, ascribing beliefs to liberals and progressives that they don’t actually hold… based on beliefs on related issues that they do hold? It’s weird.
“Upper-middle-class professionals often talk a big game about openness, inclusion and social experimentation. They tend to say that people should be free to invent themselves,” writes Henderson.
Okay?
“They are wary of old rules and outdated hierarchies. Baby name experts told NBC News that ridiculing an unusual name can reveal ‘uncomfortable classism.’ The unease suggests that even those who preach against the judgment know it is real,” he continues.1
Yes. And?
He goes on to highlight the fact that people with unique names often face social and professional penalties. I guess the point he’s trying to make here is that… if liberals don’t think someone should be discriminated against or mocked for having a strange name, they have an obligation to give their kids odd names? That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Actually, strike that; it makes no sense at all.
Henderson’s (extremely questionable) framework is “luxury beliefs,” his own coinage, which he defines as ideas that “confer status on members of the upper class at little cost while inflicting costs on persons in lower classes.” (It’s similar to “virtue signaling” in how it gets used.) As it applies to names: rich progressives loudly insist that weird names are great, give their own kids something boring, and the poorer parents who took them at their word about how awesome odd names are get their kid’s resume thrown in the trash.
If this is hypocrisy, there needs to be someone actually doing this. Is there? Here is the closest the column comes to producing one:
“An educated professional in a blue city may say that all names are equally valid. Or she might go one step further and say that unconventional names should be celebrated. She might even go so far as to suggest that giving your child a traditional name is a sign of unoriginality or narrow-mindedness.”
“May.” “Might.” “Might even go so far as to.”
No name, quote, tweet, book, survey, or study. There’s not even an anecdote from a dinner party. This liberal is made out of a handful of hypotheticals and a guess about what people like her think and do. Henderson’s entire argument rests on this hypothetical woman’s shoulders.
It’s another entry into the category of “making up a guy to get mad at,” a favorite genre of mine. The formula never changes: Liberals claim to be fine with [weird but harmless thing]. And yet liberals do not personally do [weird but harmless thing]. Checkmate.
Yes! That’s how tolerance works.
Nobody holds the belief that “everyone should give their kids unusual names.” That’s a strawman that Henderson seems to have invented from whole cloth so that he can then accuse them of hypocrisy. Liberals’ actual position is that you shouldn’t hold a person’s name against them, which is about how you treat other people, not a set of instructions for filling out your own kid’s birth certificate. Thinking a kid named Nevaeh deserves the same callback as a kid named Charles does not obligate someone to name anyone Nevaeh. There’s no hypocrisy here.
And one of the reasons liberals hold that position, in case anyone wants to check, is that the discrimination in hiring is real and it’s been measured, especially when it comes to names coded as Black.
The belief is that employers shouldn’t be doing this, not that parents owe their kids something unusual. Henderson took a claim about how hiring managers behave, invented something that liberals supposedly believe (that kids should have unique names), saw that the most common names in a solidly liberal city were, well, common, and called it hypocrisy.
A list of the 10 most popular names is always going to be a list of popular names
There’s a second problem, and it’s the kind that should have been caught by an editor.
Henderson’s evidence is a top-10 list. A top-10 list of baby names is, by definition, a list of names that lots of people picked. That’s how names get on the list. A name cannot chart unless thousands of strangers independently landed on the same one. You could not build a top-10 list out of unusual names if you tried. The unusual ones are unusual. That’s the whole deal.
So Henderson went and looked at the most popular names in Washington and found that they were... popular. Yeah, man! That’s how it works. You’re never going to see some wild, obscure name atop the list of popular baby names. Ever. And it doesn’t say something about society or whatever. It just says
One researcher he cites found close to the opposite of what he says they found
Henderson writes: “J. Eric Oliver, a political scientist, has studied naming patterns and found that educated mothers tend to favor common, conventional names.”
The paper he links is Oliver, Wood and Bass in Political Behavior. Here’s the sentence from the abstract (bolded emphasis mine):
“Although higher status mothers of all races favor more popular birth names, higher status, white liberal mothers more often choose uncommon, culturally obscure birth names.”
This marks the second time in his column where he cut off the back half of a sentence that contradicts his point. He used the first half of that sentence, sure. But the second half is the finding that high-status liberal mothers are the exception, which is to say the group his entire column is about, doing the thing he says they don’t do. It’s in the same sentence he took the first half from. Groan…
So what are we even doing here? What’s the point of this column?
In February 2025, Jeff Bezos announced that the Post’s opinion section would be “writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets,” and that “viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.” It’s shifted hard to the right, leaning into “owning the libs.”
“Luxury beliefs” is a very good tool for this. Feed it anything and it hands back the same answer: the real problem is liberals and the left. Is it factual? Who cares! Checking the numbers underneath is somebody else’s job, and evidently nobody’s.
Once the replies started coming in, Henderson went back to promote the video anyway, with a note: “The very calm and very sane replies indicate that maybe I’m onto something.”
Sure. Once being wrong counts as evidence that you’re right, there’s nothing left in the world that could talk you out of it.
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The actual quote from that NBC News article is “uncomfortable classism and racism.” Henderson omitted “and racism” from his quote because that would have wrecked the column.
I really believe these people don’t have any real problems. Because who the hell would come up with this as a story and actually publish it without being embarrassed? I’ve lived in DC for 28 years and just can’t believe how Bezos has wrecked the Washington Post. I’ve cancelled and completely forgotten about them.
He made sure we know that he went to Yale. You know, that famous working class school.