Posted on 04/22/2016 9:53:33 AM PDT by dennisw
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.
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 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 the Franklin Roosevelt, 66 percent of manual laborers voted for Democrats, along with 60 percent of farmers. In 1964, it was 55% of working-class voters. By 1980, it was 35%.
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 notions 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 center of intellectual gravity.
(Excerpt) Read more at vox.com ...
_____MORE__________
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 evangelical revival, 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.
but by the failure of half the country to know what’s good for them.
This is the underlying philosophy of liberalism. They, because of their smarts and understanding of the complications of life, do know what’s best for people even if they themselves don’t
Bkmrk.
Except it isn’t “liberalism.” It’s leftist totalitarianism, more akin to what was seen in Soviet Russia, and it is a religion to its adherents.
It’s more like CONDESCENDING SMUGNESS.......................I’ve known a few....................
I’m surprised by this column.
I truly, honestly, didn’t think anyone on the Left noticed the general ‘holier than thou’ attitude most Lefties carry with them.
I still think most of them don’t.
I’m surprised by this column.
I truly, honestly, didn’t think anyone on the Left noticed the general ‘holier than thou’ attitude most Lefties carry with them.
I still think most of them don’t.
From VOX of all places
So, is a similar article coming sometime soon from Salon?
Doubtful. Salon is the go to reading for the smug leftist
Specifically, it's Hillayism. She created an army of female liberal idiots who couldn't defend her totalitarian policies to save their lives. So her solution was to teach them to sneer, to bark, to violate decency, to shock and outrage, to live depraved, aggressive lives full of backstabbing deviancy and massive amounts of alcohol.
As a result, millions of women in America today live openly demonic lives. These are the creatures who ate their children's hearts, and crapped out the snowflake metrosexuals and massively entitled and arrogant feminists. These are the females that high five and glossy over Hillary's many outrages and crimes. They are the orcs of our day, lacking all conscience and so, at a soul level, no longer even human.
bkmk
One of my 30-something sons, who went from conservative to libertarian, to liberal, to nutjob liberal, and seems now to be veering back to his roots (praise G*d) posted this at Facebook yesterday. Made my day! It’s just too, too true!
This is the one I tweeted you last night. Lefty perspective, but very insightful.
The first article in Vox that was actually worth reading. The author is a lib, but he gets it about the elites (of both parties when you think about it). He even had the courage to point out that the average Republican is smarter and better informed than the average Dim.
The attitude that anyone not a leftist just doesn’t know what’s good for him is extremely insulting. That they don’t realize this is just more evidence of their inability to even consider views other than their own.
IMHO
When you look at the driving core of liberalism - we know what is best for you - and their distain for any new thoughts is there any difference between them and the absolute monarchies leading up to the 18th century?
Very good article, shockingly so when considering the source.
For "smug" read "arrogant" and you might translate it into a conservative perspective, but the basic case is sound: what has happened to the progressive Left is that it has abandoned, or found itself abandoned by, its old working-class base, and has rationalized that by the conclusion that those populating that base are too ignorant to know their own best interests.
If the smug style can be reduced to a single sentence, it's, Why are they voting against their own self-interest?
Encapsulated in that question is the premise that the asker transcends that class and for some reason knows that class's interests better than its occupants. That certainly is an example of intellectual hubris and goes largely unexamined by people whose self-image is one of superiority to the bugs under their intellectual microscope. To question that self-image is literally to risk an existential crisis.
The source of that question is to be found in Marx, where the occupants of an economic class who voted for other interests did so out of "false class consciousness", in need of guidance by cadre of the knowing. That model is a perfect fit of what is going on here. That such concepts as "working class" are, in reality, highly questionable is the root of the problem. One can easily dismiss them as stupid and unaware of their proper interests if one hasn't a clue who they really are or the slightest inclination to find out.
The piece is, I think, a plea for a little intellectual humility on the part of the stubbornly and profoundly un-humble self-identified class that is, to all appearances, quite ignorant of its own interests, namely exercising its political power. The penalty for that is what is, in the American system, only a temporary loss of that power as the election pendulum swings; in France, it was death by the guillotine. The one could become the other so very easily. This isn't simply an airy liberal ego trip, we've reached the point at which real people are being really hurt, and that is not going to be dismissed by a Twitter storm or, the author's phrase, a sick burn on The Daily Show. Group-think mockery, however, is simply too much fun to discard in the interest of better understanding; real introspection is hard work, and places the practitioner outside his or her comfortable social clatch. It won't be popular.
As usual with writers who work the real cutting edge of social issues Emmett Rensin has chosen to cover too much. Yes, he's early - yes, he's among the first 'getting it', yes, it's insightful... but this is too long and too much. Five articles would have been better... spread over a few weeks... "The Smug" are not known for long attention spans..
As usual with writers who work the real cutting edge of social issues Emmett Rensin has chosen to cover too much. Yes, he's early - yes, he's among the first 'getting it', yes, it's insightful... but this is too long and too much. Five articles would have been better... spread over a few weeks... "The Smug" are not known for long attention spans.. and our side intuitively 'gets it' because we are the victims of this elitist horror.
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