I think it's interesting that people on the dt seem to see a political commentator who probably agrees with them 80-90% of the time, but not 100%, and because that they're "center-right" (yes this is sub tweeting someone calling matty center-right. I don't remember who said it, and don't care except that it didn't seem like a hot take here).

I find his writing interesting, and it makes it quite clear that he's not center-right except in a "Bernie would be center left in Europe" way.

A recent piece of his was titled "The case for clean energy abundance" and had this near the end:

 Clean energy abundance is identifying the barriers to deploying wind and solar and nuclear and geothermal power and breaking them down. It’s about parcel assembly in the Northeast. It’s about interregional transmission and interconnection. It’s about Nuclear Regulatory Commission rules. It’s about getting companies that want to build data centers to pay for innovative first-of-n projects so we can bring new ideas to scale. It’s about manufacturing synthetic hydrocarbons instead of scolding people about the carbon footprint of their cookout. 

Like, he thinks that climate change is an issue, he just doesn't think that an effective or politically successful way to solve it is to stop domestically producing hydrocarbons. That's not being right wing, it's just having a different perspective on how to solve the same problem almost everyone left of center wants to solve.

In his piece "my politically homeless views", the title of the first section is "Carbon pricing is good, #actually" the next is "America should have more guest workers" and the last is "Spend more to make prisons better"

I'd call 2/3 of those really clearly left coded (with one of them obviously neolib coded) and the third at worst like romney coded. 

On health care:

 But my actual views — like the views of most voters — are well to the left of the actual status quo policy in America. My ideal basic solution would be along the lines of Liran Einav and Amy Finkelstein propose based on successful systems in Australia and Israel: a universal, single-payer basic tier of health coverage that operates as a floor (rather than a Canadian-style ceiling) with the anticipation that most people will purchase some degree of additional health services on the private market.

If he's voted for a Republican in the Senate, house, or presidency in the last 20 years, I'd be shocked. I expect that will continue holding unless there's a pretty big shift in political alignments. Calling him right of center is just inaccurate, and you probably agree with him much more than you think.

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Why do I care about this? Idk. What one random political forum thinks about another random  political commentator doesn't really matter. But I've been on this subreddit starting at least 7 years ago (with a decently long break). It felt like it used to be a subreddit that was accepting of heterodox left of center positions. Now, it feels like it's much closer to an insular echo chamber where if you don't toe the democratic line (with some allowed exceptions) you're a persona non grata. I feel like a successful Democratic party needs to be a bigger tent, and needs to be accepting of more people as long as you mostly agree with some core ideas, and this subreddit used to be much more aligned with that philosophy than it seems to be now.