You want smug? Watch Rachel Maddow.
Bkmrk.
This article was written 43 days ago.
Another spoiled 20-something brat with an “elite private education”
Notice how they all seem to fit the mold?
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.
IOW: The Wizard's First Rule
Probably because they found out that liberal socialism, despite centuries of attempts, simply doesn't work. Rewarding people simply because they suck oxygen from the atmosphere isn't a system that works. A system that rewards productive work does yield a better life for those who choose to be part of that system. Simply stated, people are getting wiser and are awakening to the fact that viable Socialism is a myth.
Progressives will not be smug at all when the real people tipping point is reached.
This summer may mark that point.
**It has led an American ideology hitherto responsible for a great share of the good accomplished over the past century of our political life**
lost me right there. how can I take it seriously when the author can’t even be honest with him/herself
Early in the marriage equality fight, activists advanced the theory that when people discovered a friend or relative was gay, they became far more likely to support gay rights. They were correct.
So that “study” was proven totally faked. It’s got a certain “truthiness,” so it’s okay.
“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.”
One of the more smug statements you’ll ever read.
He'll be a conservative approximately next week.
Bkmk
Just from reading those lead-in paragraphs, it appears he is 20+ years late in identifying the smug that Thomas Sowell well-documented in his excellent book,
The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy
http://www.amazon.com/Vision-Anointed-Self-Congratulation-Social-Policy/dp/046508995X
Sowell presents a devastating critique of the mind-set behind the failed social policies of the past thirty years. Sowell sees what has happened during that time not as a series of isolated mistakes but as a logical consequence of a tainted vision whose defects have led to crises in education, crime, and family dynamics, and to other social pathologies. In this book, he describes how elites—the anointed—have replaced facts and rational thinking with rhetorical assertions, thereby altering the course of our social policy.
Highly recommended reading.
This guy goes on to blame the Left’s abandonment of the working middle class for the smug, but the smug predated this, and caused it over time.
The liberal ideal is win by smug and feigned moral superiority. The communist ideal is to win by violence. This pajama boy fancies himself a communist, it appears.
And when the time comes, he and his cohorts would gladly load you in the boxcar.
"Smug" is to politics what "settled science" is to the climate debates: an attempt not to participate in serious debate on the issue, but to avoid it. It is necessarily superficial therefore, proudly so, and adhered to with an odd combination of emotional passion and intellectual laziness. It is, for example, how policies intended to help the poor become favored over policies that actually do, and where the "our intentions were sound" excuse derives when they fail.
The author's treatment leans more toward tribal insularity, which may in fact be the case, for his observation that what once was a liberal inclusion of working-class opinion is now an open disdain of it, is perfectly accurate. A refusal to communicate, if I understand his argument correctly, has become a refusal to learn. And it is perfectly true that not one single liberal acquaintance of mine has any conception of what it takes to grow the food he is eating, even in this semi-rural place I live. That wasn't the case until the great bifurcation - his term - of the 70's. It is now.
This political estrangement threatens to end in divorce, and such things can be messy - bloody - indeed, which is why I cannot understand how an individual this intellectually capable could have gotten sucked into the ridiculous "bash their heads - no, I don't mean their heads, but burn their property" tribal chant that managed to earn him the heave-ho. Perhaps consistency is too much to ask for from a 26-year-old, but it is highly disappointing to say the very least.