... i.e., it doesn't spend enough time arguing about object-level things.

The way I'm using it in this post, "object-level" might include these kinds of things:

While serving as Secretary of State, did Hillary Clinton send classified information to an insecure email server? How large was the risk that attackers might get the information, and how much harm might that cause?
What are the costs and benefits of various communications protocols (e.g., the legal one during Clinton's tenure, the de facto one Clinton followed, or other possibilities), and how should we weight those costs and benefits?
How can we best forecast people's reliability on security issues? Are once-off mistakes like this predictive of future sloppiness? Are there better ways of predicting this?

"Meta" might include things like:

How much do voters care about Clinton's use of her email server?
How much will reporters cover this story, and how much is their coverage likely to influence voters?
What do various people (with no special information or expertise) believe about Clinton's email server, and how might these beliefs change their behavior?

I'll also consider discussions of abstract authority, principle, or symbolism more "meta" than concrete policy proposals and questions of fact.

This is too meta:

Meta stuff is real. Elections are real, and matter. Popularity, status, controversy, and Overton windows have real physical effects.

But it's possible to focus too much on one part of reality and neglect another. If you're driving a car while talking on the phone, the phone and your eyes are both perfectly good information channels; but if you allocate too little attention to the road, you still die.

When speaking the demon's name creates the demon

I claim:

There are many good ideas that start out discussed by blogs and journal articles for a long time, then get adopted by policymakers.
In many of these cases, you could delay adoption by many years by adding more sentences to the blog posts noting the political infeasibility or controversialness of the proposal. Or you could hasten adoption by making the posts just focus on analyzing the effects of the policy, without taking a moment to nervously look over their shoulder, without ritually bowing to the Overton window as though it were an authority on immigration law.

I also claim that this obeys the same basic causal dynamics as:

My friend Az

...

Bystander Effect

Blog posts

See also

Bystander Effect

Blog posts

See also