He was the former national editor for Politico. He resigned from Politico on November 22, 2016, after publishing the home addresses of white nationalist[2]Richard B. Spencer on Facebook.[2] Hirsh called Spencer a Nazi after Spencer declared "Hail Trump!" and "Hail our people!" at a conference in Washington, D.C., declarations in response to which audience members performed Nazi salutes.[3]
Hirsh's first book, At War with Ourselves: Why America Is Squandering Its Chance to Build a Better World, was described by Bill Keller in The New York Times as "well-informed, historically literate, nonideological common sense. That may sound like faint praise, but in an America that sometimes seems poised between reckless adventure and helpless inertia, centrist common sense is something to be treasured." In his second book, Capital Offense: How Washington's Wise Men Handed America's Future over to Wall Street, Hirsh argues that in the 2008 financial crisis, "otherwise intelligent and capable men like Greenspan, Rubin and Summers and later Hank Paulson and Tim Geithner permitted themselves to believe, in the face of a rising tide of contrary evidence, that markets are for the most part efficient and work well on their own."[4] Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times called the book "provocative" and noted that while much of its content had previously been covered in books by other authors (namely Nouriel Roubini and Stephen Mihm together, David Wessel, Daniel Gross and Joseph E. Stiglitz), Hirsh still "does a highly informed, if decidedly opinionated, job of situating these developments within a historical context, and the book makes for useful and succinct reading".[4]