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.
If a conservative writer had said this, it would be dog bites man. Instead, I gather that Rensin himself leans left. Hence I quoted it.
Somehow, although this smugness clearly has spawned widespread resentment, 2016 looks as though it will be a golden year for the political left, and a dismal year for conservatives and libertarians. So there is no reason for anyone to feel smug.
“That’s why they’re voting against their own self-interest.” Can anyone tell me what this means? Does it mean the purpose of politics is to vote yourself benefits?
Did you think it meant anything else?
Why would I bother voting to have the government penalize myself at the expense of others? If I am concerned about the well being of others I’ll just willingly give them money, or whatever it is that they need. In fact I do.
While caring about the interests of others is a good and moral thing to do, it does not erase the fact that we have our own interests, that we cannot expect others to bear all of our burdens, and that consequently we have a responsibility to pursue our own interests (so as not to be a burden on others) within the bounds of law, civility, and some reasonably universal code of ethics.
But, of course, if you’re just selflessly pursing the good of others, and they’re just too stupid to know what’s good for them, there is no need to be constrained by law, civility, or ethics; is there?
Why shouldn’t the progressives be smug? They’ve been winning on average and time is on their side.
That’s an understatement.
The Left has controlled all the opinion-shaping institutions of our society for so long, the supposedly anti-Left political party has just decided to nominate a lightly camouflaged corporate progressive for president. This is the result of the great uprising against the RINOs.
However much anger there may be against the establishment Left, no effective opposition to it appears on the horizon.
Don’t forget the basic critique of representative democracy: They are lying.
Sanders is lying in the sense that his ideas have any basis. Clinton is lying because she is incapable of truth- the concept has no meaning to her. Trump lies when he makes people think he has principled beliefs of any kind, he has allies and enemies, which makes him and the Clintons similar, but not in terms if ideology.
Just figuring out what Trump actually said about muslims was between way too hard and impossible between the lying media and his intentionally dissembling verbiage.
To defend Hillary for a change, I think she’s fairly honest about her agenda, other than the hokum about “fighting” the big bad banks (which she and her de jure husband have been grifting from for the last 15 years) and “helping the middle class” (Ha!). On the specific things she will do, I think she’s fairly honest, and fairly terrifying. The Obama administration has demonstrated that a Democratic administration, unconstrained by Congress or SCOTUS, will do whatever its frothing base demands. Since the GOP will likely lose at least the Senate, Hillary will be even less constrained than Obama.
Trump pretty obviously doesn’t give a hoot about policy, and so can be expected, in the unlikely event he’s elected, to default to the Establishment Left position on everything – it’s the path of least resistance. Mexico won’t pay for the wall, so it won’t get built. Sorry, Trumpkins. Well, you’ll still have the baseball caps to remind you of your night of passion.
Hillary is forthright. But only because her “agenda” changes every time the audience changes. So, she says what they want to hear with clarity. This is what makes the before and after flip-flop videos of her very clear and yet completely opposite positions so cringy. It is actually unbelievable that she can do that.
Trump just uses words like “YUGE” a lot.
They haven’t been winning on average when it comes to congress or to state governments. Most governors and state legislatures are under Republican control. Even Michigan (birthplace of the American labor movement) became a right-to-work state a couple of years ago.
Does it really matter what the states can do if those actions can be declared unconstitutional (with little or no connection to what the Constitution actually says), overridden through executive order, or undermined through withholding of federal money?
This is what I would call the centrist, can’t we all just get along, position, that has been prominent in its failure. It has been replaced by they know exactly what’s good for them, just to the exclusion of everyone else. Them is just a narrow self interest and the rest don’t vote.
Well, yeah, liberals often imagine there are a lot of ill-informed or even racist conservatives out there, and this election campaign has thrown up a bunch of Trump supporters who match that image. So many liberals feel smug.
OTOH, conservatives have their fair share of people with poor opinions of liberals and other Democratic voters. Remember Mitt Romney telling a group of wealthy supporters that 47% of the electorate wouldn’t vote for him because they were being supported by government benefits? Wasn’t that smugness?
Well, it seems a little over-precise, but he didn’t add decimal places.
Dog bites man? I guess we have never had anyone on the right tell the left who they ought to live. But then lefties aren’t “Real Americans” so why bother. (A trope totally owned by the right.)
Steve
Smugness, or probably more accurately arrogance, is an overt strategy of the left.
The author is just offering one hypothetical explanation for why it came about.
He is still too condescending by claiming that all the idiots left the party. I think the most likely explanation is that progressives have to present a front that something that doesn’t exist yet should be. It’s a confidence game which is pretty different than how conservatives promote “proven” conformity.
Then why did Trump do so well? Frankly he led the polls in the primary since August last year so the pundits didn’t look at reality. Leaving behind labels maybe a fair question is why did the bottom 50 – 70 has lower wages than 16 years ago?
People were tired of liberal smugness in the early 2010s, but electing Republican majorities to Congress accomplished nothing, even though the movement that put them there ran on a radical outsider/reformer message (tea-party).
Before that they elected Republican majorities and a Republican president (Bush). Again, what did that accomplish?
Wait wait, it got us the Chief Justice that said anything can be penalized as long as we call it a tax!
See, not a total zilch.