Definitely. But what are its roots? The knowledge there's no oversight and no one to hold them accountable for their bad behaviour, the deliberate rudeness?
Obviously. And what is the root of "the knowledge there's no oversight and no one to hold them accountable?" Here we take pride in our open sources of information - multiple radio and TV broadcasters, multiple newspapers, magazines, books . . . and yet we see the "MSM" - the journalists, as a practical matter - behaving as (let's take Mrs. Clinton's formulation) a vast left wing conspiracy.That "conspiracy" operates in plain sight, and it centers around the go-along-and-get-along principle that each will prosper best if all prosper. So each part of "objective journalism" accepts the mission of delegitimating dissent while glorifying the ersatz "dissent" which is actually conformity to the propostition that people who have responsibility are suckers. Why have responsibility when you can have a media outlet, and merely have authority? At least the authority to criticize . . .
Leftism is simply the elevation of criticism above performance; second-guessing is at its core. After all, "government ownership of the means of production" takes the products to be produced as a given. And yet the major economic opportunities lie in discerning what new products it is worthwhile to develop the ability to produce. I was browsing in the public library and stumbled across an old book which was written to promote socialism. I really enjoyed reading the musty discussions about how a planning board was going to figure out whether to switch production from steam to diesel locomotives. Because from this perspective what is plainer than the fact that they could not properly do so is the fact that they couldn't figure out what the real problem even was. Instead of worrying about locomotives - already by then a mature industry - they should have been throwing all efforts into developing integrated circuits and computers. And that planning board never was going to figure that out.
"It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.""Citizenship in a Republic,"
Theodore Roosevelt,
Speech at the Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910