Emmett Rensin The smug style in American liberalism
The smug style says to itself, Yeah. I really am one of the few thinking people in this country, aren’t I?
Ridicule is the most effective political tactic.
Ridicule is especially effective when it’s personal and about expressing open disdain for stupid, bad people.
You can’t be legitimate if you’re the butt of our jokes.
The working class left the Democrats over the last fifty years and the core of Democrat intellectual “centre of gravity” shifted to universities, media and elite enclaves. Rensin argues that the professionals can’t figure out why they couldn’t convince their old worker buddies to follow them. Rather than self analysis, or coming up with a better argument, they took the easy road, blame those who didn’t “get” their wisdom and called them stupid.
Finding comfort in the notion that their former allies were disdainful, hapless rubes, smug liberals created a culture animated by that contempt. The rubes noticed and replied in kind. 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.
Smugness is a perfect circle. Once a person has decided that all their opponents are terminally stupid, all their arguments are “therefore” wrong, no discussion needed:
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.
The smug can’t lose. If a conservative was won over, the smug was right. If a conservative was not won over, the conservative was stupid (and the smug was therefore also right about the conservative being stupid). Geddit?
– And if cheap, bullying tactics of mockery “converted” someone, it’s pure genius right?
Rensin talks about “Good Facts” — pointing out that the Smug seem to feel they are not tainted by ideology. Without saying it Rensin is describing people who think they are scientific, logical and armed with “The Science”:
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.
He has the insight to recognise the act of “knowing” the Good Facts, is a form of virtue signaling :
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