Posted on 08/10/2015 12:14:49 PM PDT by Mount Athos
Many liberals, but not conservatives, believe there is an important asymmetry in American politics. These liberals believe that people on opposite sides of the ideological spectrum are fundamentally different. Specifically, they believe that liberals are much more open to change than conservatives, more tolerant of differences, more motivated by the public good and, maybe most of all, smarter and better informed.
The evidence for these beliefs is not good. Liberals turn out to be just as prone to their own forms of intolerance, ignorance and bias. But the beliefs are comforting to many. They give their bearers a sense of intellectual and even moral superiority. And they affect behavior. They inform the condescension and self-righteousness with which liberals often treat conservatives. They explain why many liberals have greeted Tea Partiers and other grass-roots conservatives with outsize alarm.
And Mr. Stewart, who signed off from “The Daily Show” on Thursday, was more qualified than anybody to puncture this particular pretension. He trained his liberal-leaning audience to mock hypocrisy, incoherence and stupidity, and could have nudged them to see the planks in their own eyes, too. Instead, he cultivated their intellectual smugness by personifying it.
He could have made the liberals in his audience more open to dialogue across the great left/right divide by asking them to examine themselves more carefully and to admit that both ideological camps contain fools. Instead, he was a cultural entrepreneur who provided those viewers with the validation they wanted.
After all those years, the comedian turned liberal standard-bearer still didn’t really comprehend the conservatives on the other side of the divide. Worse, he didn’t help his liberal viewers better understand themselves.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
NY Times? They wrote this?
That was my first thought also. I'm guessing it was a letter to the editor that somehow slipped through the wall.
Maybe the Times got smart and decided that their own questionable survivability means to stop ignoring the 50% of the sentient population that doesn’t actually believe Deborah Wasserman Schultz.
Roger Ailes learned this a long time ago.
Maybe he sensed the “natives” weregettingrestlessandevenhis minions were tired of his shtick.
You mean the 100% of the sentient population. I have yet to find a liberal who could think much better than a parrot, mostly not as well. And that's what they do, parrot the talking poings like the good little robots that they are.
And surely you can't think they are actually self-aware??
The Talking Poings... sounds like a good name for a freeper band.
I’ve long thought the left would regret having Stewart as their lead intellectual.
Jon Stewart is a Douche Bag!
Wow - did hell just freeze over? This is the NYT, right?
I'm stunned the Times would print something that didn't mock us ... that didn't look down on us in a snarky way. This must be what it feels like for liberals when they read a newspaper and they're NOT the butt of jokes...
What a nice feeling...
That said, Stewart was the only MSM person to showcase how awful Grubber was - and to call Nancy Pelosi on the carpet for being a ditz...
As I recall, failed actor Jon Stewart started out pointing out fairly centrist, then took a hard left after 9-11. “They” got to him...bought and paid for.
Why are we talking about liebowitz?
?
Bush was too easy a target for him to pass up.
It's pretty common. Media people who were critical of Johnson, or Carter, or Clinton closed ranks once a Republican got elected.
His real last name.
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