I found the article remarkably insightful and congruent with my own thoughts on these matters. There is very much a tendency in modern liberalism to casually dismiss conservative objections as not simply factually wrong or even immoral but stupid which in turn has led it to alienate a good portion of working-class voters by dismissing them as “rednecks” and “hicks” when any genuine political left ought to be in Lincoln’s words a politics aimed at a “government by the people, of the people, and for the people”. It also led the American left to dismiss politicians such as George W Bush as simply an ignorant hick when in reality he was scion of one of the nation’s wealthiest and politically powerful families who brilliantly rebranded himself as an everyman candidate to endear himself to lower-middle and working-class voters in the South and the Heartland to pass some of the most important conservative legislation in recent decades such as two successive rounds of tax cuts, war with Iraq, and even almost destroying Social Security. Now the same is happening with Donald TRUMP-many on this forum are simply seeing him as yet another "idiot"without any consistent political platform and who simply says anything to get elected, when in reality he is playing on long pent-up white working-class resentment by running on the same platform of nativism, protectionism, and America first foreign policy he has advocated for decades.
Liberals are no more smug than conservatives. Everyone speaks as if everything is self-evident, and any disagreement is stupid and discussion is beside the point.
Republicans don’t assume that voters are voting against their self interest, which is one of the main criticisms of the article. Liberals have resorted to assuming that working class white voters are stupid. Which has led to working class white voters turning away from Democrats more and more.
Speaking as a progressive, I don’t assume that white working class voters are stupid, but I do think a lot of them are profoundly ignorant – so much so that you can’t have an intelligent discussion with them.
A prime example is when you talk about taxation and the federal debt. A lot of people – not just working class – commit the fallacy of assuming that it’s necessary to balance the federal budget because, after all, it’s necessary for individuals to balance their own budgets (and preferably keep them in the black). In reality, financing the federal government and personal finance are nothing at all alike. But you can’t have that conversation with a conservative.
Likewise, they also assume that since the federal government’s finances have been so badly mismanaged by politicians the only guy who can fix it is someone who can make it run more like a business. Republicans have tried to the business approach at the state level and it’s been a disaster. Donald Trump, if he somehow makes it, will be the worst president in US history if he proceeds to make good on his campaign promises. But you can’t convince a republican or a conservative otherwise because they think that they know more about managing money than democrats.
Yes, I probably am smug when I talk with conservatives – because I know that I’ve based my opinions on research, not unfounded assumptions, superstitions, or gut feelings.
With all due respect, Trump is just another idiot without any consistent political platform who simply says anything to get elected. The fucking guy was a birther, for god’s sake. He filed a lawsuit because someone said his father was perhaps an orangutan. He had a stupid TV show that only idiots watched. He’s been on every side of every issue. He has no core values. He is not worth of ALLCAPS
Conservatives also accuse liberals of believing what they hear from the ‘lamestream media’, which has a certain smugness to it.
That attitude also ignores recent history. I remember seeing a blurb in my local newspaper when the federal debt went over one-trillion dollars; Reagan was president. Finally we started bringing the deficit down during the Clinton administration. Then we had Republicans in charge of Congress and the presidency; they cut taxes, went to war, and created Medicare Part D. And yet how often will you hear conservatives accuse liberal of being fiscally irresponsible?
Not to mention the policies of a third-grader. He’ll just wave his Tinker Bell wand and he and his business buddies will renegotiate all our trade agreements to our better advantage, so much so that he’ll pay off the national debt in eight years. Or get Mexico to pay for a wall. Or eradicate Islamic extremism by preventing any Muslim from moving here and bombing terrorists’ families. Yeah, that’ll work.
Btw, I think the all-caps thing is a reference to his egomaniacal tendency to put his own name (highly visibly) on anything he’s involved with.
Ha. Any discussion that presupposes liberal vs conservative dichotomy is just in denial. We are going into a post republican era. They lost the reality thread after so many deranged Obama statements and theories and demands and govt shutdowns. Now they are in a civil union with Trump, as the catcher.
Everyone knew who W was. He was an ignoramus, and pretending to be a hick. It’s only the Republicans who didn’t know it.
BTW: This whole idea which I have seen a lot of, along with the word “Elitist,” seems to me to be the epitome of smug.
Yet the Republicans have a pretty strong grip on the House as well as most state governments. You might be as smug as you want about how “stupid” the Republicans are, but that matters little when faced with the concrete reality of 246 House seats held by the GOP and the 23 states where they control both the governor’s mansion and both houses of the state legislature.
As I’ve pointed out several times read this article from 1987-the fundamental tenets of Trumpism-protectionism and “national-interest” foreign policy has been unchanged since the late Cold War. And I daresay realizing that a good portion of the Republican voter base had no desire for yet another reiteration of neoconservative garbage and becoming the leading candidate for the party’s nomination, to be pretty politically brilliant. That is incidentally why I put his name in ALLCAPS-he is a progressive force in American politics, having broken the stranglehold of the Wall Street-Beltway axis on the Republican Party. Indeed he has done something no Democrat has been able to do in that regard and for that reason he is a strategic ally of any American truly desiring of change and reform.
The all caps argument is lame. Did people speak of ROOSEVELT in the 1930s? Was it KENNEDY and JOHNSON that got the Civil Rights Act passed? Trump isn’t fit to shine their shoes, let alone merit this silly all caps obsession.
Bullshit. He’s an opportunist appealing to the base racist instincts of Republicans. He knows even less about policy than Sarah Palin, as if that was possible.
Back to the OP, I don’t think liberals are particularly smug nor do we have a monopoly on smugness. The truth is that conservatives are nearly always factually incorrect and/or morally repugnant. If insanity is defined as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, their fixation on tax rates as the cure for all economic ills is truly insane. Their eagerness to throw the poor under the bus just to stymie the one cheater in ten thousand is anathema to the religion they pretend to practice. Their true nature is reflected in Trump, and the image is not a pretty one.