User Tag List

+ Reply to Thread
Page 1 of 4 1234 LastLast
Results 1 to 10 of 32

Thread: The problem with liberal elitism

  1. #1
    Points: 78,723, Level: 68
    Level completed: 43%, Points required for next Level: 1,327
    Overall activity: 0.1%
    Achievements:
    OverdriveSocial50000 Experience PointsVeteran
    resister's Avatar Senior Member
    Karma
    154141
    Join Date
    Oct 2016
    Posts
    29,399
    Points
    78,723
    Level
    68
    Thanks Given
    23,242
    Thanked 10,122x in 7,595 Posts
    Mentioned
    264 Post(s)
    Tagged
    0 Thread(s)

    The problem with liberal elitism

    Wonder why Democrats struggle to attract new party members? They alienate and ridicule the common man and wonder why they cant persuade people to sign up. They look down with disdain and contempt, because after all, stupid hicks and racist are well...stupid.

    To bad they don't grasp they are talking about middle America, you know, the majority of voters. Keep up the good work, liberal elitist you are a gift to the Republican party. Keep right on looking down your collective noses as you wonder how on earth Donald Trump is the President.

    https://www.vox.com/2016/4/21/114513...can-liberalism



    There is a smug style in American liberalism. It has been growing these past decades. It is a way of conducting politics, predicated on the belief that American life is not divided by moral difference or policy divergence — not really — but by the failure of half the country to know what's good for them.In 2016, the smug style has found expression in media and in policy, in the attitudes of liberals both visible and private, providing a foundational set of assumptions above which a great number of liberals comport their understanding of the world.It has led an American ideology hitherto responsible for a great share of the good accomplished over the past century of our political life to a posture of reaction and disrespect: a condescending, defensive sneer toward any person or movement outside of its consensus, dressed up as a monopoly on reason.The smug style is a psychological reaction to a profound shift in American political demography.Beginning in the middle of the 20th century, the working class, once the core of the coalition, began abandoning the Democratic Party. In 1948, in the immediate wake of Franklin Roosevelt, 66 percent of manual laborers voted for Democrats, along with 60 percent of farmers. In 1964, it was 55 percent of working-class voters. By 1980, it was 35 percent.The white working class in particular saw even sharper declines. Despite historic advantages with both poor and middle-class white voters, by 2012 Democrats possessed only a 2-point advantage among poor white voters. Among white voters making between $30,000 and $75,000 per year, the GOP has taken a 17-point lead.
    Finding comfort in the notion that their former allies were disdainful, hapless rubes, smug liberals created a culture animated by that contempt
    The consequence was a shift in liberalism's intellectual center of gravity. A movement once fleshed out in union halls and little magazines shifted into universities and major press, from the center of the country to its cities and elite enclaves. Minority voters remained, but bereft of the material and social capital required to dominate elite decision-making, they were largely excluded from an agenda driven by the new Democratic core: the educated, the coastal, and the professional.It is not that these forces captured the party so much as it fell to them. When the laborer left, they remained.The origins of this shift are overdetermined. Richard Nixon bears a large part of the blame, but so does Bill Clinton. The Southern Strategy, yes, but the destruction of labor unions, too. I have my own sympathies, but I do not propose to adjudicate that question here.Suffice it to say, by the 1990s the better part of the working class wanted nothing to do with the word liberal. What remained of the American progressive elite was left to puzzle: What happened to our coalition?
    Why did they abandon us?What's the matter with Kansas?
    The smug style arose to answer these questions. It provided an answer so simple and so emotionally satisfying that its success was perhaps inevitable: the theory that conservatism, and particularly the kind embraced by those out there in the country, was not a political ideology at all.
    Learn more

    How politics makes us stupid

    The trouble is that stupid hicks don't know what's good for them. They're getting conned by right-wingers and tent revivalists until they believe all the lies that've made them so wrong. They don't know any better. That's why they're voting against their own self-interest.
    As anybody who has gone through a particularly nasty breakup knows, disdain cultivated in the aftermath of a divide quickly exceeds the original grievance. You lose somebody. You blame them. Soon, the blame is reason enough to keep them at a distance, the excuse to drive them even further away.Finding comfort in the notion that their former allies were disdainful, hapless rubes, smug liberals created a culture animated by that contempt. The result is a self-fulfilling prophecy.Financial incentive compounded this tendency — there is money, after all, in reassuring the bitter. Over 20 years, an industry arose to cater to the smug style. It began in humor, and culminated for a time in The Daily Show, a program that more than any other thing advanced the idea that liberal orthodoxy was a kind of educated savvy and that its opponents were, before anything else, stupid. The smug liberal found relief in ridiculing them.
    The internet only made it worse. Today, a liberal who finds himself troubled by the currents of contemporary political life need look no further than his Facebook newsfeed to find the explanation:Study finds Daily Show viewers more informed than viewers of Fox News.
    They're beating CNN watchers too.
    NPR listeners are best informed of all. He likes that.
    You're better off watching nothing than watching Fox. He likes that even more.
    The good news doesn't stop.Liberals aren't just better informed. They're smarter.They've got better grammar. They know more words.Smart kids grow up to be liberals, while conservatives reason like drunks.Liberals are better able to process new information; they're less biased like that. They've got different brains. Better ones. Why? Evolution. They've got better brains, top-notch amygdalae, science finds.The smug style created a feedback loop. If the trouble with conservatives was ignorance, then the liberal impulse was to correct it. When such corrections failed, disdain followed after it.Of course, there is a smug style in every political movement: elitism among every ideology believing itself in possession of the solutions to society's ills. But few movements have let the smug tendency so corrupt them, or make so tenuous its case against its enemies."Conservatives are always at a bit of a disadvantage in the theater of mass democracy," the conservative editorialist Kevin Williamson wrote in National Review last October, "because people en masse aren't very bright or sophisticated, and they're vulnerable to cheap, hysterical emotional appeals."
    The smug style thinks Williamson is wrong, of course, but not in principle. It's only that he's confused about who the hordes of stupid, hysterical people are voting for. The smug style reads Williamson and says, "No! You!"

    Elites, real elites, might recognize one another by their superior knowledge. The smug recognize one another by their mutual knowing.
    Knowing, for example, that the Founding Fathers were all secular deists. Knowing that you're actually, like, 30 times more likely to shoot yourself than an intruder. Knowing that those fools out in Kansas are voting against their own self-interest and that the trouble is Kansas doesn't know any better. Knowing all the jokes that signal this knowledge.
    The studies, about Daily Show viewers and better-sized amygdalae, are knowing. It is the smug style's first premise: a politics defined by a command of the Correct Facts and signaled by an allegiance to the Correct Culture. A politics that is just the politics of smart people in command of Good Facts. A politics that insists it has no ideology at all, only facts. No moral convictions, only charts, the kind that keep them from "imposing their morals" like the bad guys do.
    Knowing is the shibboleth into the smug style's culture, a cultural that celebrates hip commitments and valorizes hip taste, that loves nothing more than hate-reading anyone who doesn't get them. A culture that has come to replace politics itself.
    The knowing know that police reform, that abortion rights, that labor unions are important, but go no further: What is important, after all, is to signal that you know these things. What is important is to launch links and mockery at those who don't. The Good Facts are enough: Anybody who fails to capitulate to them is part of the Problem, is terminally uncool. No persuasion, only retweets. Eye roll, crying emoji, forward to John Oliver for sick burns.
    The smug style has always existed in American liberalism, but it wasn't always so totalizing. Lionel Trilling claimed, as far back as 1950, that liberalism "is not only the dominant, but even the sole intellectual tradition," that "the conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse ... do not express themselves in ideas, but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas."
    The smug style has always existed in American liberalism, but it wasn't always so totalizing
    Richard Hofstadter, the historian whose most famous work, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, this essay exists in some obvious reference to, advanced a similar line in writing not so well-remembered today. His then-influential history writing drips with disdain for rubes who regard themselves as victimized by economics and history, who have failed to maintain correct political attitudes.
    But 60 years ago, American liberalism relied too much on the support of working people to let these ideas take too much hold. Even its elitists, its Schlesingers and Bells, were tempered by the power of the labor movement, by the role Marxism still played in even liberal politics — forces too powerful to allow non-elite concerns to entirely escape the liberal mental horizon. Walter Reuther, and Bayard Rustin, and A. Philip Randolph were still in the room, and they mattered.
    Sixty years ago, the ugliest tendencies were still private, too. The smug style belonged to real elites, knowing in their $#@!tail parties, far from the ears of rubes. But today we have television, and the internet, and a liberalism worked out in universities and think tanks. Today, the better part of liberalism is Trillings — or those who'd like to be, at any rate — and everyone can hear them.

    On June 26, 2015, the Supreme Court found that denying marriage licenses to same-sex couples constituted a violation of the 14th Amendment. After decades of protests, legislation, setbacks, and litigation, the 13 states still holding out against the inevitable were ordered to relent. Kim Davis, a clerk tasked with issuing marriage licenses to couples in her Kentucky county, refused.
    At the distance of six months, it is surprising that she was, beyond a few short-lived and empty efforts, the only civil bureaucrat to do so. One imagines a hundred or a thousand Kim Davises in the country, small administrators with small power, outraged by the collapse of a moral fight that they were winning just a few years prior.In the days between the June decision and the July 1 announcement that the American Civil Liberties Union would represent four couples who had been denied marriage licenses by the Rowan County Clerk's office, many braced for resistance. Surely compliance would come hard in some places. Surely, some of the losers would refuse to give up. There was something giddy about it — at long last, the good guys would be the ones bearing down with the full force of the law.
    It did not take long for the law to correct Davis. On August 12, a judge ordered a stay, preventing Davis from refusing any further under the protection of the law. The Sixth Circuit, and then the Supreme Court, refused to hear her appeal.Despite further protest and Davis's ultimate jailing for contempt of court, normal service was restored in short order. The 23,000 people of Rowan Country suffered, all told, slightly less than seven weeks without a functioning civil licensure apparatus.Davis remained a fixation. Dour, rural, thrice divorced but born again — Twitter could not have invented a better parody of the uncool. She was ridiculed for her politics but also for her looks — that she had been married so many times was inexplicable! That she thought she had the slightest grasp of the Constitution, doubly so.When Davis was jailed for five days following her refusal to comply with the court order, many who pride themselves on having a vastly more compassionate moral foundation than Davis cheered the imprisonment of a political foe.
    There is no God but Resister and Refugee is his messenger’.

    Book of Democrat Things, Chapter 1:1






  2. The Following 2 Users Say Thank You to resister For This Useful Post:

    Kalkin (01-19-2018),Trumpster (01-19-2018)

  3. #2
    Points: 10,517, Level: 24
    Level completed: 59%, Points required for next Level: 333
    Overall activity: 0.1%
    Achievements:
    Veteran10000 Experience Points
    Kacper's Avatar Senior Member
    Karma
    1027
    Join Date
    Aug 2017
    Posts
    2,404
    Points
    10,517
    Level
    24
    Thanks Given
    495
    Thanked 1,017x in 747 Posts
    Mentioned
    9 Post(s)
    Tagged
    0 Thread(s)
    Not liberals' fault. No need to buy a ladder when nature provides you so many low hanging fruits

    j/k

    The DNC should have never abandoned the south even when the blue dogs fled the party of Bill Clinton.

  4. #3
    Points: 664,072, Level: 100
    Level completed: 0%, Points required for next Level: 0
    Overall activity: 89.0%
    Achievements:
    SocialRecommendation Second ClassYour first GroupOverdrive50000 Experience PointsTagger First ClassVeteran
    Awards:
    Discussion Ender
    Chris's Avatar Senior Member
    Karma
    433118
    Join Date
    Feb 2012
    Posts
    197,305
    Points
    664,072
    Level
    100
    Thanks Given
    31,902
    Thanked 80,707x in 54,607 Posts
    Mentioned
    2009 Post(s)
    Tagged
    2 Thread(s)
    Reminds me of what Sowell called the vision of the anointed, Hayek, more ominously, the fatal conceit.
    Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire. ― Gustav Mahler

  5. The Following User Says Thank You to Chris For This Useful Post:

    resister (01-19-2018)

  6. #4
    Points: 78,723, Level: 68
    Level completed: 43%, Points required for next Level: 1,327
    Overall activity: 0.1%
    Achievements:
    OverdriveSocial50000 Experience PointsVeteran
    resister's Avatar Senior Member
    Karma
    154141
    Join Date
    Oct 2016
    Posts
    29,399
    Points
    78,723
    Level
    68
    Thanks Given
    23,242
    Thanked 10,122x in 7,595 Posts
    Mentioned
    264 Post(s)
    Tagged
    0 Thread(s)
    Quote Originally Posted by Kacper View Post
    Not liberals' fault. No need to buy a ladder when nature provides you so many low hanging fruits

    j/k

    The DNC should have never abandoned the south even when the blue dogs fled the party of Bill Clinton.
    Ridiculing them sure is not a successful recipe to gain them back. It does, however cause other less nasty party members to reevaluate why they remain in a party that looks down on their friends and neighbors, with such sneering contempt. A great example are the late night pundits that peddle it as "entertainment" I almost want to puke if I watch those.
    There is no God but Resister and Refugee is his messenger’.

    Book of Democrat Things, Chapter 1:1






  7. #5
    Points: 10,517, Level: 24
    Level completed: 59%, Points required for next Level: 333
    Overall activity: 0.1%
    Achievements:
    Veteran10000 Experience Points
    Kacper's Avatar Senior Member
    Karma
    1027
    Join Date
    Aug 2017
    Posts
    2,404
    Points
    10,517
    Level
    24
    Thanks Given
    495
    Thanked 1,017x in 747 Posts
    Mentioned
    9 Post(s)
    Tagged
    0 Thread(s)
    Quote Originally Posted by resister View Post
    Ridiculing them sure is not a successful recipe to gain them back. It does, however cause other less nasty party members to reevaluate why they remain in a party that looks down on their friends and neighbors, with such sneering contempt. A great example are the late night pundits that peddle it as "entertainment" I almost want to puke if I watch those.
    It is about money. Hollywood/tech mega-rich people pony up money. Factory workers don't (except to the extent their union extorts it from them) so screw the little guy. Bills gotta get paid.

    Not saying that is what they should do, but that is their apparent thinking on the matter.

  8. The Following User Says Thank You to Kacper For This Useful Post:

    resister (01-19-2018)

  9. #6
    Original Ranter
    Points: 297,248, Level: 100
    Level completed: 0%, Points required for next Level: 0
    Overall activity: 27.0%
    Achievements:
    SocialRecommendation Second ClassOverdrive50000 Experience PointsVeteran
    Mister D's Avatar Senior Member
    Karma
    416461
    Join Date
    Jun 2011
    Posts
    117,673
    Points
    297,248
    Level
    100
    Thanks Given
    25,273
    Thanked 53,406x in 36,393 Posts
    Mentioned
    1102 Post(s)
    Tagged
    1 Thread(s)
    Quote Originally Posted by Kacper View Post
    Not liberals' fault. No need to buy a ladder when nature provides you so many low hanging fruits

    j/k

    The DNC should have never abandoned the south even when the blue dogs fled the party of Bill Clinton.
    They had to choose. They can barely hold their base together now.
    Whoever criticizes capitalism, while approving immigration, whose working class is its first victim, had better shut up. Whoever criticizes immigration, while remaining silent about capitalism, should do the same.


    ~Alain de Benoist


  10. The Following 2 Users Say Thank You to Mister D For This Useful Post:

    Kacper (01-19-2018),resister (01-19-2018)

  11. #7
    Points: 10,517, Level: 24
    Level completed: 59%, Points required for next Level: 333
    Overall activity: 0.1%
    Achievements:
    Veteran10000 Experience Points
    Kacper's Avatar Senior Member
    Karma
    1027
    Join Date
    Aug 2017
    Posts
    2,404
    Points
    10,517
    Level
    24
    Thanks Given
    495
    Thanked 1,017x in 747 Posts
    Mentioned
    9 Post(s)
    Tagged
    0 Thread(s)
    Quote Originally Posted by Mister D View Post
    They had to choose. They can barely hold their base together now.
    They didn't really have to choose. The dems owned the house forever. It was taken for granted. Once they lost it in the 90's, they freaked out. I can never support the DNC as a party again. I used to work for dems. This snotty attitude is largely the reason I stopped working for them. They can sit in DC and jazz up the choir, but those are my relatives and people I know who are not villains that they vilify and I had enough.

  12. The Following 2 Users Say Thank You to Kacper For This Useful Post:

    Mister D (01-19-2018),resister (01-19-2018)

  13. #8
    Points: 78,723, Level: 68
    Level completed: 43%, Points required for next Level: 1,327
    Overall activity: 0.1%
    Achievements:
    OverdriveSocial50000 Experience PointsVeteran
    resister's Avatar Senior Member
    Karma
    154141
    Join Date
    Oct 2016
    Posts
    29,399
    Points
    78,723
    Level
    68
    Thanks Given
    23,242
    Thanked 10,122x in 7,595 Posts
    Mentioned
    264 Post(s)
    Tagged
    0 Thread(s)
    Quote Originally Posted by Kacper View Post
    They didn't really have to choose. The dems owned the house forever. It was taken for granted. Once they lost it in the 90's, they freaked out. I can never support the DNC as a party again. I used to work for dems. This snotty attitude is largely the reason I stopped working for them. They can sit in DC and jazz up the choir, but those are my relatives and people I know who are not villains that they vilify and I had enough.
    Congrats on breaking free!
    There is no God but Resister and Refugee is his messenger’.

    Book of Democrat Things, Chapter 1:1






  14. The Following User Says Thank You to resister For This Useful Post:

    Kacper (01-19-2018)

  15. #9
    Original Ranter
    Points: 297,248, Level: 100
    Level completed: 0%, Points required for next Level: 0
    Overall activity: 27.0%
    Achievements:
    SocialRecommendation Second ClassOverdrive50000 Experience PointsVeteran
    Mister D's Avatar Senior Member
    Karma
    416461
    Join Date
    Jun 2011
    Posts
    117,673
    Points
    297,248
    Level
    100
    Thanks Given
    25,273
    Thanked 53,406x in 36,393 Posts
    Mentioned
    1102 Post(s)
    Tagged
    1 Thread(s)
    Quote Originally Posted by Kacper View Post
    They didn't really have to choose. The dems owned the house forever. It was taken for granted. Once they lost it in the 90's, they freaked out. I can never support the DNC as a party again. I used to work for dems. This snotty attitude is largely the reason I stopped working for them. They can sit in DC and jazz up the choir, but those are my relatives and people I know who are not villains that they vilify and I had enough.
    All I'm saying is that it's kind of hard to balance the interests of the white south with those of northern progressives, blacks and the parade of freaks the Democrats were calling a base by the late 1990s. Democrats now try to portray the loss of the south as a consequence of the CRA of 1964 which is quite frankly, both an insult and a lie. As you note, the Democrats did not lose the south until the mid 1990s.
    Whoever criticizes capitalism, while approving immigration, whose working class is its first victim, had better shut up. Whoever criticizes immigration, while remaining silent about capitalism, should do the same.


    ~Alain de Benoist


  16. The Following User Says Thank You to Mister D For This Useful Post:

    Captdon (01-19-2018)

  17. #10
    Points: 172,455, Level: 98
    Level completed: 71%, Points required for next Level: 1,195
    Overall activity: 31.0%
    Achievements:
    50000 Experience PointsSocialVeteran
    donttread's Avatar Senior Member
    Karma
    88473
    Join Date
    Nov 2013
    Posts
    51,785
    Points
    172,455
    Level
    98
    Thanks Given
    18,180
    Thanked 20,441x in 14,732 Posts
    Mentioned
    318 Post(s)
    Tagged
    0 Thread(s)
    Quote Originally Posted by resister View Post
    Wonder why Democrats struggle to attract new party members? They alienate and ridicule the common man and wonder why they cant persuade people to sign up. They look down with disdain and contempt, because after all, stupid hicks and racist are well...stupid.

    To bad they don't grasp they are talking about middle America, you know, the majority of voters. Keep up the good work, liberal elitist you are a gift to the Republican party. Keep right on looking down your collective noses as you wonder how on earth Donald Trump is the President.

    https://www.vox.com/2016/4/21/114513...can-liberalism



    There is a smug style in American liberalism. It has been growing these past decades. It is a way of conducting politics, predicated on the belief that American life is not divided by moral difference or policy divergence — not really — but by the failure of half the country to know what's good for them.In 2016, the smug style has found expression in media and in policy, in the attitudes of liberals both visible and private, providing a foundational set of assumptions above which a great number of liberals comport their understanding of the world.It has led an American ideology hitherto responsible for a great share of the good accomplished over the past century of our political life to a posture of reaction and disrespect: a condescending, defensive sneer toward any person or movement outside of its consensus, dressed up as a monopoly on reason.The smug style is a psychological reaction to a profound shift in American political demography.Beginning in the middle of the 20th century, the working class, once the core of the coalition, began abandoning the Democratic Party. In 1948, in the immediate wake of Franklin Roosevelt, 66 percent of manual laborers voted for Democrats, along with 60 percent of farmers. In 1964, it was 55 percent of working-class voters. By 1980, it was 35 percent.The white working class in particular saw even sharper declines. Despite historic advantages with both poor and middle-class white voters, by 2012 Democrats possessed only a 2-point advantage among poor white voters. Among white voters making between $30,000 and $75,000 per year, the GOP has taken a 17-point lead.
    Finding comfort in the notion that their former allies were disdainful, hapless rubes, smug liberals created a culture animated by that contempt
    The consequence was a shift in liberalism's intellectual center of gravity. A movement once fleshed out in union halls and little magazines shifted into universities and major press, from the center of the country to its cities and elite enclaves. Minority voters remained, but bereft of the material and social capital required to dominate elite decision-making, they were largely excluded from an agenda driven by the new Democratic core: the educated, the coastal, and the professional.It is not that these forces captured the party so much as it fell to them. When the laborer left, they remained.The origins of this shift are overdetermined. Richard Nixon bears a large part of the blame, but so does Bill Clinton. The Southern Strategy, yes, but the destruction of labor unions, too. I have my own sympathies, but I do not propose to adjudicate that question here.Suffice it to say, by the 1990s the better part of the working class wanted nothing to do with the word liberal. What remained of the American progressive elite was left to puzzle: What happened to our coalition?
    Why did they abandon us?What's the matter with Kansas?
    The smug style arose to answer these questions. It provided an answer so simple and so emotionally satisfying that its success was perhaps inevitable: the theory that conservatism, and particularly the kind embraced by those out there in the country, was not a political ideology at all.
    Learn more

    How politics makes us stupid

    The trouble is that stupid hicks don't know what's good for them. They're getting conned by right-wingers and tent revivalists until they believe all the lies that've made them so wrong. They don't know any better. That's why they're voting against their own self-interest.
    As anybody who has gone through a particularly nasty breakup knows, disdain cultivated in the aftermath of a divide quickly exceeds the original grievance. You lose somebody. You blame them. Soon, the blame is reason enough to keep them at a distance, the excuse to drive them even further away.Finding comfort in the notion that their former allies were disdainful, hapless rubes, smug liberals created a culture animated by that contempt. The result is a self-fulfilling prophecy.Financial incentive compounded this tendency — there is money, after all, in reassuring the bitter. Over 20 years, an industry arose to cater to the smug style. It began in humor, and culminated for a time in The Daily Show, a program that more than any other thing advanced the idea that liberal orthodoxy was a kind of educated savvy and that its opponents were, before anything else, stupid. The smug liberal found relief in ridiculing them.
    The internet only made it worse. Today, a liberal who finds himself troubled by the currents of contemporary political life need look no further than his Facebook newsfeed to find the explanation:Study finds Daily Show viewers more informed than viewers of Fox News.
    They're beating CNN watchers too.
    NPR listeners are best informed of all. He likes that.
    You're better off watching nothing than watching Fox. He likes that even more.
    The good news doesn't stop.Liberals aren't just better informed. They're smarter.They've got better grammar. They know more words.Smart kids grow up to be liberals, while conservatives reason like drunks.Liberals are better able to process new information; they're less biased like that. They've got different brains. Better ones. Why? Evolution. They've got better brains, top-notch amygdalae, science finds.The smug style created a feedback loop. If the trouble with conservatives was ignorance, then the liberal impulse was to correct it. When such corrections failed, disdain followed after it.Of course, there is a smug style in every political movement: elitism among every ideology believing itself in possession of the solutions to society's ills. But few movements have let the smug tendency so corrupt them, or make so tenuous its case against its enemies."Conservatives are always at a bit of a disadvantage in the theater of mass democracy," the conservative editorialist Kevin Williamson wrote in National Review last October, "because people en masse aren't very bright or sophisticated, and they're vulnerable to cheap, hysterical emotional appeals."
    The smug style thinks Williamson is wrong, of course, but not in principle. It's only that he's confused about who the hordes of stupid, hysterical people are voting for. The smug style reads Williamson and says, "No! You!"

    Elites, real elites, might recognize one another by their superior knowledge. The smug recognize one another by their mutual knowing.
    Knowing, for example, that the Founding Fathers were all secular deists. Knowing that you're actually, like, 30 times more likely to shoot yourself than an intruder. Knowing that those fools out in Kansas are voting against their own self-interest and that the trouble is Kansas doesn't know any better. Knowing all the jokes that signal this knowledge.
    The studies, about Daily Show viewers and better-sized amygdalae, are knowing. It is the smug style's first premise: a politics defined by a command of the Correct Facts and signaled by an allegiance to the Correct Culture. A politics that is just the politics of smart people in command of Good Facts. A politics that insists it has no ideology at all, only facts. No moral convictions, only charts, the kind that keep them from "imposing their morals" like the bad guys do.
    Knowing is the shibboleth into the smug style's culture, a cultural that celebrates hip commitments and valorizes hip taste, that loves nothing more than hate-reading anyone who doesn't get them. A culture that has come to replace politics itself.
    The knowing know that police reform, that abortion rights, that labor unions are important, but go no further: What is important, after all, is to signal that you know these things. What is important is to launch links and mockery at those who don't. The Good Facts are enough: Anybody who fails to capitulate to them is part of the Problem, is terminally uncool. No persuasion, only retweets. Eye roll, crying emoji, forward to John Oliver for sick burns.
    The smug style has always existed in American liberalism, but it wasn't always so totalizing. Lionel Trilling claimed, as far back as 1950, that liberalism "is not only the dominant, but even the sole intellectual tradition," that "the conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse ... do not express themselves in ideas, but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas."
    The smug style has always existed in American liberalism, but it wasn't always so totalizing
    Richard Hofstadter, the historian whose most famous work, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, this essay exists in some obvious reference to, advanced a similar line in writing not so well-remembered today. His then-influential history writing drips with disdain for rubes who regard themselves as victimized by economics and history, who have failed to maintain correct political attitudes.
    But 60 years ago, American liberalism relied too much on the support of working people to let these ideas take too much hold. Even its elitists, its Schlesingers and Bells, were tempered by the power of the labor movement, by the role Marxism still played in even liberal politics — forces too powerful to allow non-elite concerns to entirely escape the liberal mental horizon. Walter Reuther, and Bayard Rustin, and A. Philip Randolph were still in the room, and they mattered.
    Sixty years ago, the ugliest tendencies were still private, too. The smug style belonged to real elites, knowing in their $#@!tail parties, far from the ears of rubes. But today we have television, and the internet, and a liberalism worked out in universities and think tanks. Today, the better part of liberalism is Trillings — or those who'd like to be, at any rate — and everyone can hear them.

    On June 26, 2015, the Supreme Court found that denying marriage licenses to same-sex couples constituted a violation of the 14th Amendment. After decades of protests, legislation, setbacks, and litigation, the 13 states still holding out against the inevitable were ordered to relent. Kim Davis, a clerk tasked with issuing marriage licenses to couples in her Kentucky county, refused.
    At the distance of six months, it is surprising that she was, beyond a few short-lived and empty efforts, the only civil bureaucrat to do so. One imagines a hundred or a thousand Kim Davises in the country, small administrators with small power, outraged by the collapse of a moral fight that they were winning just a few years prior.In the days between the June decision and the July 1 announcement that the American Civil Liberties Union would represent four couples who had been denied marriage licenses by the Rowan County Clerk's office, many braced for resistance. Surely compliance would come hard in some places. Surely, some of the losers would refuse to give up. There was something giddy about it — at long last, the good guys would be the ones bearing down with the full force of the law.
    It did not take long for the law to correct Davis. On August 12, a judge ordered a stay, preventing Davis from refusing any further under the protection of the law. The Sixth Circuit, and then the Supreme Court, refused to hear her appeal.Despite further protest and Davis's ultimate jailing for contempt of court, normal service was restored in short order. The 23,000 people of Rowan Country suffered, all told, slightly less than seven weeks without a functioning civil licensure apparatus.Davis remained a fixation. Dour, rural, thrice divorced but born again — Twitter could not have invented a better parody of the uncool. She was ridiculed for her politics but also for her looks — that she had been married so many times was inexplicable! That she thought she had the slightest grasp of the Constitution, doubly so.When Davis was jailed for five days following her refusal to comply with the court order, many who pride themselves on having a vastly more compassionate moral foundation than Davis cheered the imprisonment of a political foe.
    The influenial dems are all rich some may not be super rich but they are rich. they have no more connection to everyday people than they do to the land

  18. The Following User Says Thank You to donttread For This Useful Post:

    resister (01-19-2018)

+ Reply to Thread

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts