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The Smug Style In American Liberalism Part 1A
Mar 29, 2017 19:14:04   #
pafret Loc: Northeast
 
The Smug Style In American Liberalism
by Emmett Rensin
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.

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 Franklin Roosevelt, 66 percent of manual laborers voted for Democrats, along with 60 percent of farmers. In 1964, it was 55 percent of working-class voters. By 1980, it was 35 percent.

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 the notion 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 intellectual center of gravity. 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 Southern Strategy, 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.

The trouble is that stupid hicks don't know what's good for them. They're getting conned by right-wingers and tent revivalists until they believe all the lies that've made them so wrong. They don't know any better. That's why they're voting against their own self-interest.

As anybody who has gone through a particularly nasty breakup knows, disdain cultivated in the aftermath of a divide quickly exceeds the original grievance. You lose somebody. You blame them. Soon, the blame is reason enough to keep them at a distance, the excuse to drive them even further away.

Finding comfort in the notion that their former allies were disdainful, hapless rubes, smug liberals created a culture animated by that contempt. The result is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Financial incentive compounded this tendency — there is money, after all, in reassuring the bitter. Over 20 years, an industry arose to cater to the smug style. It began in humor, and culminated for a time in The Daily Show, a program that more than any other thing advanced the idea that liberal orthodoxy was a kind of educated savvy and that its opponents were, before anything else, stupid. The smug liberal found relief in ridiculing them.

The internet only made it worse. Today, a liberal who finds himself troubled by the currents of contemporary political life need look no further than his Facebook newsfeed to find the explanation:

· Study finds Daily Show viewers more informed than viewers of Fox News.
· They're beating CNN watchers too.
· NPR listeners are best informed of all. He likes that.
· You're better off watching nothing than watching Fox. He likes that even more.
· The good news doesn't stop.
· Liberals aren't just better informed. They're smarter.
· They've got better grammar. They know more words.
· Smart kids grow up to be liberals, while conservatives reason like drunks.
· Liberals are better able to process new information; they're less biased like that. They've got different brains. Better ones. Why? Evolution. They've got better brains, top-notch amygdalae, science finds.

The smug style created a feedback loop. If the trouble with conservatives was ignorance, then the liberal impulse was to correct it. When such corrections failed, disdain followed after it.

Of course, there is a smug style in every political movement: elitism among every ideology believing itself in possession of the solutions to society's ills. But few movements have let the smug tendency so corrupt them, or make so tenuous its case against its enemies.

"Conservatives are always at a bit of a disadvantage in the theater of mass democracy," the conservative editorialist Kevin Williamson wrote in National Review last October, "because people en masse aren't very bright or sophisticated, and they're vulnerable to cheap, hysterical emotional appeals."

The smug style thinks Williamson is wrong, of course, but not in principle. It's only that he's confused about who the hordes of stupid, hysterical people are voting for. The smug style reads Williamson and says, "No! You!"

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.

Knowing is the shibboleth into the smug style's culture, a cultural that celebrates hip commitments and valorizes hip taste, that loves nothing more than hate-reading anyone who doesn't get them. A culture that has come to replace politics itself.

The knowing know that police reform, that abortion rights, that labor unions are important, but go no further: What is important, after all, is to signal that you know these things. What is important is to launch links and mockery at those who don't. The Good Facts are enough: Anybody who fails to capitulate to them is part of the Problem, is terminally uncool. No persuasion, only retweets. Eye roll, crying emoji, forward to John Oliver for sick burns.

The smug style has always existed in American liberalism, but it wasn't always so totalizing. Lionel Trilling claimed, as far back as 1950, that liberalism "is not only the dominant, but even the sole intellectual tradition," that "the conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse ... do not express themselves in ideas, but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas."

Richard Hofstadter, the historian whose most famous work, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, this essay exists in some obvious reference to, advanced a similar line in writing not so well-remembered today. His then-influential history writing drips with disdain for rubes who regard themselves as victimized by economics and history, who have failed to maintain correct political attitudes.

But 60 years ago, American liberalism relied too much on the support of working people to let these ideas take too much hold. Even its elitists, its Schlesingers and Bells, were tempered by the power of the labor movement, by the role Marxism still played in even liberal politics — forces too powerful to allow non-elite concerns to entirely escape the liberal mental horizon. Walter Reuther, and Bayard Rustin, and A. Philip Randolph were still in the room, and they mattered.

Sixty years ago, the ugliest tendencies were still private, too. The smug style belonged to real elites, knowing in their cocktail parties, far from the ears of rubes. But today we have television, and the internet, and a liberalism worked out in universities and think tanks. Today, the better part of liberalism is Trillings — or those who'd like to be, at any rate — and everyone can hear them.

On June 26, 2015, the Supreme Court found that denying marriage licenses to same-sex couples constituted a violation of the 14th Amendment. After decades of protests, legislation, setbacks, and litigation, the 13 states still holding out against the inevitable were ordered to relent. Kim Davis, a clerk tasked with issuing marriage licenses to couples in her Kentucky county, refused.

In the days between the June decision and the July 1 announcement that the American Civil Liberties Union would represent four couples who had been denied marriage licenses by the Rowan County Clerk's office, many braced for resistance. Surely compliance would come hard in some places. Surely, some of the losers would refuse to give up. There was something giddy about it — at long last, the good guys would be the ones bearing down with the full force of the law.

It did not take long for the law to correct Davis. On August 12, a judge ordered a stay, preventing Davis from refusing any further under the protection of the law. The Sixth Circuit, and then the Supreme Court, refused to hear her appeal.

Despite further protest and Davis's ultimate jailing for contempt of court, normal service was restored in short order. The 23,000 people of Rowan Country suffered, all told, slightly less than seven weeks without a functioning civil licensure apparatus.

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Mar 30, 2017 06:14:20   #
rebob14
 
Universities have always been the holding tank for societal cancer cells, going back to FDR's first term. Whenever the conditions are favorable, they're infused into the federal government to continue the attaxk on individual liberty. This has been the state's plan published by the Fabian Socialists early in the 20th century and has worked perfectly!

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Mar 30, 2017 09:20:31   #
straightUp Loc: California
 
Smug is a word stupid people use to describe smarter people that find the stupid people SO stupid that it's funny.

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Mar 30, 2017 09:36:19   #
straightUp Loc: California
 
rebob14 wrote:
Universities have always been the holding tank for societal cancer cells, going back to FDR's first term. Whenever the conditions are favorable, they're infused into the federal government to continue the attaxk on individual liberty. This has been the state's plan published by the Fabian Socialists early in the 20th century and has worked perfectly!


The whole point of university, since Socrates, is to encourage critical thinking and the established orders that push for unquestioning conformity, from churches to fascist regimes, have always hated the result of a population that develops the ability to think for themselves. Conservatives represent that perspective. They hate free-thinking liberals because free-thinking liberals have always been able to figure things out and many times that leads to a departure from conformity. The reason why this large-scale pattern seems to be recent, going back only as far as FDR is that before FDR very few people actually went to university and their free-thinking was easy to drown out with the hymns and marches of non-thinking conformity. Republicans today are infuriated that they can't stifle the blasphemy of truth.

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Mar 30, 2017 12:36:27   #
Voice of Reason Loc: Earth
 
straightUp wrote:
Smug is a word stupid people use to describe smarter people that find the stupid people SO stupid that it's funny.


Smug is an attitude stupid people develop to ignore facts presented by smarter people.

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Mar 30, 2017 12:36:50   #
Voice of Reason Loc: Earth
 
straightUp wrote:
The whole point of university, since Socrates, is to encourage critical thinking and the established orders that push for unquestioning conformity, from churches to fascist regimes, have always hated the result of a population that develops the ability to think for themselves. Conservatives represent that perspective. They hate free-thinking liberals because free-thinking liberals have always been able to figure things out and many times that leads to a departure from conformity. The reason why this large-scale pattern seems to be recent, going back only as far as FDR is that before FDR very few people actually went to university and their free-thinking was easy to drown out with the hymns and marches of non-thinking conformity. Republicans today are infuriated that they can't stifle the blasphemy of truth.
The whole point of university, since Socrates, is ... (show quote)


Congratulations! You've reached a new level of dumb. What's next? Socrates invented 'safe spaces'?

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Mar 31, 2017 01:11:16   #
straightUp Loc: California
 
Voice of Reason wrote:
Smug is an attitude stupid people develop to ignore facts presented by smarter people.

Since when does anyone need to be smug to ignore the facts? See, this is just the kind of stupidity I'm talking about... so stupid it's funny... and I bet you would call my attitude "smug" if you weren't thinking that would prove my point.

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Mar 31, 2017 01:52:42   #
straightUp Loc: California
 
Voice of Reason wrote:
Congratulations! You've reached a new level of dumb. What's next? Socrates invented 'safe spaces'?


First of all, "dumb" means you can't talk, you ignoramus. Second of all, here's what I said... "The whole point of university, since Socrates, is to encourage critical thinking". I guess should have realized that some people reading this won't be familiar with the tradition of critical thinking or how Socrates is often seen as one of its earliest teachers, or how the tradition itself is central to the establishment of universities, which in ancient Greece were called academies.

So... just take your foot out of your mouth and put me on your ignore list before you give me any more opportunities to make you look stupid.

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Mar 31, 2017 07:43:13   #
rebob14
 
[quote=straightUp]The whole point of university, since Socrates, is to encourage critical thinking and the established orders that push for unquestioning conformity, from churches to fascist regimes, have always hated the result of a population that develops the ability to think for themselves. Conservatives represent that perspective. They hate free-thinking liberals because free-thinking liberals have always been able to figure things out and many times that leads to a departure from conformity. The reason why this large-scale pattern seems to be recent, going back only as far as FDR is that before FDR very few people actually went to university and their free-thinking was easy to drown out with the hymns and marches of non-thinking conformity. Republicans today are infuriated that they can't stifle the blasphemy of



Broaden your perspective by reading some history

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Mar 31, 2017 11:18:42   #
Voice of Reason Loc: Earth
 
straightUp wrote:
Since when does anyone need to be smug to ignore the facts? See, this is just the kind of stupidity I'm talking about... so stupid it's funny... and I bet you would call my attitude "smug" if you weren't thinking that would prove my point.


Let's see. I said, "Smug is an attitude stupid people develop to ignore facts presented by smarter people." From that, you got, "One must be smug in order to ignore facts."

Not very smart. But, in a way you're correct. Your stupidity is quite funny to the rest of us.

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Mar 31, 2017 11:18:57   #
Voice of Reason Loc: Earth
 
straightUp wrote:
First of all, "dumb" means you can't talk, you ignoramus. Second of all, here's what I said... "The whole point of university, since Socrates, is to encourage critical thinking". I guess should have realized that some people reading this won't be familiar with the tradition of critical thinking or how Socrates is often seen as one of its earliest teachers, or how the tradition itself is central to the establishment of universities, which in ancient Greece were called academies.

So... just take your foot out of your mouth and put me on your ignore list before you give me any more opportunities to make you look stupid.
First of all, "dumb" means you can't tal... (show quote)


When trying to convince people you're way smarter than they are, it's best not to make statements proving you're not. Yes, "dumb" is a synonym for "mute". However, quite often, words have more than one meaning. In the case of "dumb", it is also a synonym for "stupid". Usually the intended meaning can be ascertained through context. Apparently you missed that day (month? year?) at university. Not to mention 3rd grade.

Please explain the connection between Socrates' critical thinking and today's university safe spaces and trigger warnings.

Sorry, I don't have an ignore list to put you on, and I wouldn't want to if I did. It's too much fun exposing the pseudo in your pseudo-intellectualism.

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Mar 31, 2017 12:13:38   #
rebob14
 
straightUp wrote:
The whole point of university, since Socrates, is to encourage critical thinking and the established orders that push for unquestioning conformity, from churches to fascist regimes, have always hated the result of a population that develops the ability to think for themselves. Conservatives represent that perspective. They hate free-thinking liberals because free-thinking liberals have always been able to figure things out and many times that leads to a departure from conformity. The reason why this large-scale pattern seems to be recent, going back only as far as FDR is that before FDR very few people actually went to university and their free-thinking was easy to drown out with the hymns and marches of non-thinking conformity. Republicans today are infuriated that they can't stifle the blasphemy of truth.
The whole point of university, since Socrates, is ... (show quote)


You actually believe that these gov't indoctrination centers engender free thinking??? Promote rationality? They are the finishing school for tribal mediocrity. They are the ultimate harvest of Fabian Socialism.

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