Posted on 06/03/2016 12:05:44 PM PDT by Faith Presses On
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.
(Excerpt) Read more at vox.com ...
And note that he’s the Vox writer that was just suspended for calling for riots at Trump’s rallies. It’s quite curious.
“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.
“And note that he’s the Vox writer that was just suspended for calling for riots at Trump’s rallies. It’s quite curious.”
It is actually consistent. If he believes that smug will not stop Trump, and that Trump will win, other tactics are called for. He is calling for other tactics.
Or, he could be a closet conservative, or about to become one.
The “smug” essay fairly drips with contempt for those practising the smugness. The readers on the left are not capable of understanding it, because to admit its accuracy tears their whole understanding of the universe to shreds.
Emmet is bright, and a talented writer. I could see him becoming the next David Horowitz. I could see him becoming a Trump supporter.
Emmet should be Emmitt
He'll be a conservative approximately next week.
And perhaps a Christian:
“It was an odd thing to assert in the case of Christianity, a religion that until recently was taken to be another shibboleth of the uncool, not a loving faith misunderstood by bigots. But this is knowing: knowing that the new line on Jesus is that the homophobes just don’t get their own faith.”
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.
Good point!
You’re not getting, are you? “Predicated on the belief” — did you catch that part? Do you understand he is criticizing, not endorsing? No, I guess you do not.
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.
“...a hateful bigot who did not even understand her own religion”
To write that, the author is stating that he - he - knows what her religion states/believes more than SHE does...
That assertion - right there - can only come from the mind of a smug, fascistic, liberal. Amazing. And smug.
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.
A corollary to what you say is that when the system rewards productive work, almost everybody wants to participate.
bttt
I know, right? Whole article can be summed up in one word: Crimethink.
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