“The Smug Style in American Liberalism”

“The Smug Style in American Liberalism” April 26, 2016

There is an astonishing article in the (liberal) Vox by the (liberal) Emmett Rensin entitled “The Smug Style in American Liberalism:  How liberals came to look down on the people they once tried to help.”

It castigates liberals for their Daily-Show habit of mocking those they disagree with, particularly those of lower social class than themselves, saying how stupid and uneducated they are, compared to their cool and knowing selves.

Rensin points out that liberals used to be largely from the working class.  Today, though, the base of liberalism is in academia and the upper middle class.  Today, he says, many Democrats don’t even know a poor or blue collar person.  Their disrespect has translated into not really doing anything about the economic issues that have so ravaged the working class.

Whatever your politics, you need to read this, excerpted and linked after the jump.

From Emmett Rensin, The smug style in American liberalism – Vox:

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.

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.

[Keep reading. . .]

HT:  Jeremiah Oehlerich

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