
The smug style in American liberalism - andars
http://www.vox.com/2016/4/21/11451378/smug-american-liberalism
======
yummyfajitas
This is definitely the preference falsification election.

Those who know me on HN know that I'm an outspoken proponent of unorthodox
ideas. I'm regularly shouted down, called racist/evil/etc, downmodded and
flagged on HN. I also get a steady stream of private emails: _" I wouldn't say
this publicly cause of the bullies, but that .gov link with all the data does
seem to support you. I think you might be right, I need to rethink my views."_
These folks very rarely post here - they are afraid of social and perhaps
professional approbrium (ala Brendan Eich and Curtis Yarvin).

Those folks are engaging preference falsification.

Off HN there is a similar manufactured consensus, similar social penalties for
expressing the wrong ideas, and similar levels of preference falsification.
When pollsters call the preference falsification continues.

Apparently in the privacy of a voting booth, people are willing to express
their true beliefs.

Note: I don't support Trump - search my posting history for "open borders" \-
but I do understand why folks like him. I don't agree with him on basically
any policy, but my visceral _emotional_ reaction to his victory is positive: I
love the great big "fuck you" to the biased media sneering at him, calling him
racist based on "dog whistles" and then writing hit pieces against Ken Bone
(let alone the bullying of folks like Tim Hunt, Brendan Eich and Curtis
Yarvin).

See also Scott Aaronson who explains this in more detail:
[http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2777](http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2777)

~~~
cronjobber
> This is definitely the preference falsification election.

I agree. In fact, the point at which I started to think that Trump could win
was Hillary's "Basket of Deplorables" blunder. It was a blunder because the
way she phrased it, she put _far too many_ in that basket.

Paradoxically, because people believed what she said —that there are _many_
Deplorables— she might have initiated the very preference cascade that cost
her the election.

~~~
ScottBurson
It was a terrible blunder, that might have cost her the election, and not
because of the number of people she put in the basket.

It was a blunder because she called _people_ deplorable. Had she talked about
deplorable _attitudes_ , she would have been on firm ground. I hope it doesn't
sound like a fine distinction, because it isn't.

I voted for her; I am terrified of Trump -- rightly or wrongly, we'll now find
out; but I knew this was a bad, bad mistake when she made it, right up there
with Mitt Romney's infamous "47%" comment.

And yes, in my opinion, Trump made a lot more serious mistakes. But I am not
totally surprised that a majority of Americans don't seem to agree with me.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
I don't think the election was about mistakes. It was about loathing for both
candidates. Turns out the loathing for Hillary was higher.

I should qualify that. Trump, for all his negatives, had people who genuinely
agreed with him. He _also_ had a bunch of "not really for Trump, but I am sick
to death of Hillary and her scandals and her Machiavellian machinations"
voters. Hillary had a bunch of "good heavens, not Trump" voters, some "female
in office, therefore has to be good voters", and not all that many "really
love her positions" voters.

------
bambax
Wow. This article was published on April 21st, before the end of the
primaries.

> _Trump capturing the nomination will not dispel the smug style; if anything,
> it will redouble it. Faced with the prospect of an election between Donald
> Trump and Hillary Clinton, the smug will reach a fever pitch: six straight
> months of a sure thing, an opportunity to mock and scoff and ask, How could
> anybody vote for this guy? until a morning in November when they ask, What
> the fuck happened?_

But the § just before that one is the meat of the article:

 _But even as many have come around to the notion that Trump is the
prohibitive favorite for his party 's nomination, the smug interpretation has
been predictable: We only underestimated how hateful, how stupid, the
Republican base can be._

Krugman today:

> _We thought that the great majority of Americans valued democratic norms and
> the rule of law. It turns out that we were wrong. There turn out to be a
> huge number of people — white people, living mainly in rural areas — who
> don’t share at all our idea of what America is about._

[http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/cp/opinion/elect...](http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/cp/opinion/election-
night-2016/the-unknown-country)

Some people never learn, but they're not the ones we think don't.

~~~
aaronchall
It's not the first time he's been wrong.

Krugman has lived his life in a liberal urban academic bubble and has no idea
what the rest of the USA is like.

We would do well to remember that when we have the misfortune to come across
his writings in the future.

~~~
antisthenes
I've been talking to a few liberal friends this morning who have no frame of
reference outside of living on one of the USA's coasts all their lives.

The perceptual bubbles are very real for both sides, and to someone who has
been on both sides of the aisle - they're terrifying; because breaking through
the bubble is exceptionally hard and costly, doubly so if that person is
already an established adult.

------
jessaustin
_On November 6, 2000, during his final pre-election stump speech, Bush
explained his history of political triumph thusly: "They misunderesimated me."

What an idiot. American liberals made fun of him for that one for years.

It is worth considering that he didn't misspeak.

He did, however, deliberately cultivate the confusion. He understood the smug
style._

W's was perhaps a more subtle dominating response to the Smug, but at this
point we can't say it was _different_ than Trump's. Both of them went to
school with the Smug. They know what it represents both to itself and to the
majority of the nation. Neither of them buy into it themselves, unlike e.g.
Romney.

Democrats lose when the Republican candidate has an authentic and rhetorically
effective response to the Smug. Now that it's happened twice, at least some
Republicans will remember it the next time around. Democrats will either do
the hard work of excising this from their ideology and communication, or they
will lose in the same way again.

~~~
cafard
You aren't wrong, or not all wrong. However, you must consider a) that Nader
made a very large difference in 2000, and b) that Trump got to run against
Hillary Clinton. She is intelligent and able, but she has been a handy target
for conservative media for twenty years now, and a good deal of that stuck
with voters.

"Both of them went to school with the Smug"; well, yes, and some would find it
curious that our populists come from Yale and Penn.

~~~
jessaustin
Johnson seems to have gotten more votes than Nader; Johnson and Stein together
_definitely_ did so. In _many_ of the "battleground" states, Trump's margin is
totally swamped by third-party numbers.

The observations you've made about Clinton aren't news to anyone. The fact she
was nominated _anyway_ , with her only primary opposition coming from outside
the party, after the DNC had let it be known to all potential opponents that
the fix was well and truly in, is symptomatic of the Smug. The insiders
couldn't imagine the average voter rejecting the candidate chosen by the
insiders. Maybe they still can't imagine it, only now it has happened. They're
stuck in a loop, and for the next iteration the Republicans will know just
what to do. Hint: it won't be another Romney.

~~~
cafard
I upvoted you. However, I think that Clinton was seen as the safe candidate:
she had name recognition, she didn't scare Wall Street. That is not wholly the
same as being the candidate of Smug.

I trust that the Democratic Party will understand that it has run out of
ideas. Will the Republicans know what to do? It strikes me as quite possible
that Trump's qualities could be those of a one-term president.

~~~
jessaustin
Was that "didn't scare Wall Street" or was it "had accepted tens of millions
of dollars from Wall Street"? If Wall Street gets final vet, the Democrat
party has changed from the days of FDR. (OT: will they or any of the other
Clinton Family Foundation donors ask for refunds?) The inability to see how
conflicts of interest look from outside is a Smugness that has afflicted
Democrats and Republicans both.

Trump could definitely be a one-termer. I could see him getting bored and
letting Pence take over, or deciding to campaign for someone else in his
cabinet, or even figuring out something so terrible that it will finally make
evangelicals vote against him. Or, he could be like Reagan and W, just let his
people handle everything, and sail on to a second term.

~~~
cafard
Indeed the Democratic Party has changed since the days of FDR. It is amusing
to consider that FDR thought that a realignment of the parties might be
beneficial, with the Republicans picking up the conservative (often southern)
Democrats and the Democrats picking up the more liberal (often northeastern)
Republicans. How'd that work out?

And of course you are completely correct on the inability to perceive
conflicts of interest--where they are or where they just might be.

------
dnautics
"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."

This is an amazing observation. The 'smug style' doesn't actually contribute
to the amelioration of these issues. Even for some things the lack of
individual commitment betrays unseriousness, e.g. abortion rights - most
people protesting federal defunding of PP would NEVER imagine to actually cut
a check themselves, whereas there are principled libertarians, for example,
who would be for ending funding PP using other people's money while donating
to the organization themselves. Ms. Clinton's talks in front of Black Lives
Matter audiences was notably bereft of any reference to police accountability
(which is the one truly important thing) but instead offers feel-good
solutions like broadly 'ending racism', 'sensitivity training', 'community
policing'.

~~~
noobiemcfoob
As someone who just recently "got" the whole follow what you preach thing, I
believe there is a real gap in communicating how you follow through on high-
horse ideals in a practical way.

It took me having a comfortable enough income to donate to political parties
before it really clicked I could do a whole lot more.

------
dkrich
Bravo. Full disclosure, I voted for HRC. However, I've been saying this to my
liberal friends for the entire election cycle. The message from of all of my
liberal Facebook friends has been some derivative of:

"Hear me out. We know Hillary isn't the best candidate, but you have to vote
for Trump. If you don't you're a racist misogynist. Also, if you vote for a
third party candidate, you are basically voting for Donald Trump."

There are so many things wrong with that message, that I won't go into it, but
the last bit about a third party vote == a vote for Trump is dismissive,
condescending, wrong, and rude. The assumption is that the third party voters
are reasonable people who would otherwise vote Democrat but for the fact that
they have a few misgivings about HRC.

However that is a very poor assumption.

Not once did I hear any of those same people listen to anybody, Trump
supporter, third party voter, no voter. They shouted over everyone else and
smugly and overconfidently assumed everyone was listening to them.

I am as shocked as anyone Trump won, but I had been telling my liberal friends
for months that people just don't like HRC. I have my reasons for why I think
that's true and it has nothing to do with emails or Bill Clinton's past
indiscretions. Her primary run against Obama in '08 is proof positive of this,
and in many ways this general election is a near repeat of that process.

She and her supporters were overly confident, refused to believe that they
weren't connecting with mainstream America, and then got blindsided when the
votes were counted.

I truly hope that the democratic party learns something from this, but from
what I've seen on my Facebook feed this morning it certainly doesn't feel like
it's going in that direction.

~~~
hash-set
I'm just curious how old you are because I lived through the Bill Clinton
years and it was appalling how bad the Clintons were. Their legacy from
Arkansas all the way up the Pay to Play Clinton Foundation has been completely
consistent--to bend and break the law everywhere possible if it is to their
benefit to do so and then engage in cover ups, blackmail, and possibly murder
to get away with it. They are a modern day crime family. You probably dismiss
all this as unproven "tinfoil hat" conspiracy stuff, right? But there is such
a large body of circumstancial evidence when it comes to the Clintons that it
is impossible to ignore. Then the leaks started dropping and we got a small
window in a large world of corruption. Did none of this occur to you?

~~~
iainmerrick
_Then the leaks started dropping and we got a small window in a large world of
corruption. Did none of this occur to you?_

It seemed to me more like a very large window onto what turned out to be a
pretty small world of corruption. I don't have an axe to grind but I've never
seen a straight answer as to what her "crimes" supposedly are.

~~~
talmand
Evidence of corruption is not necessarily evidence of a crime.

------
gaius
As a Brit it has been fascinating to watch the Dems run basically exactly the
same campaign Remain ran.

~~~
CalChris
As an American Democrat, I'm not in the least bit embarrassed by our campaign.
We ran on 8 years of growth, cutting the deficit, 5% unemployment, tripled
stock market, etc. Justly proud of that.

I'm embarrassed for the country by what Republicans ran on and who they
elected.

~~~
yummyfajitas
No, "you" ran on "Trump is raaaciiist and if you support him you are too!"

(I put "you" in quotes since I'm referring to Democrats in general, not you
personally.)

It's the same thing "you" ran against Bush and Romney on. It might even be
true this time around, but you are the boy who cried wolf at this point.

~~~
cafard
"We" (an editorial we) ran on "Trump will do for the United States of America
what he did for the United States Football League; and that he will be no
better president than he was a businessman."

I don't remember anyone saying that Romney was racist. I remember many saying
that he represented the very wealthy rather than the middle and poorer
classes.

~~~
yummyfajitas
Here's people calling Romney racist:

[http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/8/27/1124649/-Romney-
Goes...](http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/8/27/1124649/-Romney-Goes-Full-
Racist-Accuses-Obama-of-Cutting-Welfare-Work-Requirment-to-Shore-Up-Base)

[http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2012/07/romney-
accused-...](http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2012/07/romney-accused-of-
racism-following-naacp-speech.html)

[https://www.buzzfeed.com/mckaycoppins/romney-faces-
challenge...](https://www.buzzfeed.com/mckaycoppins/romney-faces-challenge-on-
mormonism-and-race?utm_term=.spvew4WEA#.thWQRvzq3)

[https://thinkprogress.org/romney-dog-whistle-obamas-
philosop...](https://thinkprogress.org/romney-dog-whistle-obamas-philosophy-
is-foreign-to-the-american-experience-bbd65dcc55f#.pauwyh389)

~~~
foldr
Romney being a racist was not a major (or even minor) theme of Obama's
campaign. I don't think you can really be suggesting that alleged racism on
the part of the Republican candidate was as big an issue in the previous
election as in the present one (where the Republican candidate made widely
publicized explicitly racist statements).

~~~
yummyfajitas
I agree that the "$republican is literally hitler", "$republican is racist",
etc, is more hysterical this time around. I attribute that to Trump being
blatantly on the wrong side of the culture war [1].

I'm just saying that "XXX republican is racist" has lost it's meaning due to
overuse. The boy has cried "hitler" about Bush, Romney, etc, and the villagers
will no longer come running.

[1] I recommend reading Moldbug's article on the topic: [http://unqualified-
reservations.blogspot.com/2007/05/castes-...](http://unqualified-
reservations.blogspot.com/2007/05/castes-of-united-states.html) The tl;dr; is
that while Bush and Romney were Brahmin Republicans, Trump is very clearly a
Vaisya, leading to vastly more hysteria.

~~~
foldr
I think this is wrong in two respects. First, the statement has not lost its
meaning but only its effect. Second, the claim that Bush and Romney were
racists was not a major strand of political discourse. People talked about
Republican policies rooted in racism, but that is a very different thing from
having a presidential candidate who is himself, on a personal level, a racist.

~~~
jessaustin
Bill Maher is no genius, but even before the election he had already
identified this lack of credibility, the umpteenth time some random Republican
is deemed beyond the pale:

[http://www.salon.com/2016/11/07/bill-maher-liberals-cried-
wo...](http://www.salon.com/2016/11/07/bill-maher-liberals-cried-wolf-about-
mitt-romney-now-they-face-a-genuine-fascist/)

~~~
foldr
There are always people on each side making outrageous allegations about each
candidate. The question of whether Romney was a racist was not a major issue
in the previous campaign.

------
Lazare
I recall reading the post when it was published, and thought it was very
powerful, although I had some quibbles with the details and the tone. I mean,
the author was broadly right, sure, but...

Also interesting to recall: The amount of disagreements and personal insults
the author got for the piece.

And another: Rensin was let go from Vox shortly after writing the piece for
tweeting "If Trump comes to your town, start a riot."

In any case, in retrospect...he nailed it.

(Disclaimer: Supported Clinton, although with major qualms.)

------
Asdfbla
Pretty hard to not look down on those people when you know that the facts are
on your side, since for certain things there are established facts. I wouldn't
be ready to be patient with someone who thinks the moon is made out of cheese
or something.

But I suppose the article is still right and competent politicians should have
the empathy to relate even to those people. I couldn't do it.

~~~
DefaultUserHN
Yes, it was pretty hard for the Nazi to not look down on the Jews too. And we
all know how that turned out.

------
lamontcg
This was a bit TL;DR.

I think a better summary is that "liberal elites" (although really moderate
republicans) has conclusively failed. And it lost in 2000 and 2004 and this is
a pattern of it failing.

And the problems are that they've completely lost the blue collar male vote.
There's no labor party here in the US at all. And the problem goes all the way
back to Bill's vote for NAFTA and his center-right policies. The Democratic
party has been losing the actual working class ever since then.

The Democratic Party should really stop lecturing the working class, and start
promising the working class that they'll have jobs and won't see their kids
sent off to die in foreign wars.

------
deviate_X
I have a feeling that this explanation overly complex, more like liberal self-
beating and giving far too much credence

Simply those who voted for Trump feel like victims of "something"

And despite having won "everything" I have the feeling that they will still
feel like victims of the undefinable "other" in the up and coming loooong
years..

~~~
DefaultUserHN
I agree.

Trump supporters won everything by losing their jobs oversea.

Trump supporters won when other people call them racist for wanting to have a
job.

Trump supporters won when their kids are sent to die in the Middle East to
line up the Rich Elite's pockets with oil money.

Trump supporters won when they return from the war, with missing limbs, and
the VA won't even take care of them.

And the smug still can't figure out why Trump supporters support Trump.

------
gadders
It's not just America - see the responses after Brexit as well. The major
claim seems to be that most people are just not intelligent enough to have
voted correctly.

~~~
soft_dev_person
After Brexit, the smugness continued. Remain supporters took the campaign for
a revote that got millions of signatures as a sign people were regretting, but
obviously the signatures mostly were from people who had voted to remain.

Still, "they regret it already" was the message spreading throughout Europe
for a while. I recently saw some research stating that a very small percentage
had changed their mind about the vote, and they came more or less equally from
both sides. So no, no significant regret noticed.

Not sure why I'm writing this. It just seems that the people seeming to vote
rationally are completely irrational when it comes to judging the other side.
Did we collectively lose the skill of empathy?

We need to understand this or we'll be repeating these mistakes forever.

------
squozzer
Where I think this approach has been especially disastrous has been climate
change. When people challenged the facts - which I don't entirely believe but
the potential outcome is too serious to just blow off - they were humiliated
and discredited, sometimes viciously.

When people challenged the feasibility of solutions - ditto.

Which in my mind signaled the worst - the desire to break resistance was
stronger than the desire to persuade. Which led to a belief that maybe
something more sinister was in the cards - a la Pol Pot's killing fields.

Not a reasonable belief but when you see others dehumanized for questioning
the know-it-alls, it's understandable.

------
vacri
Yes, liberals in America are all smug and holier-than-thou, unlike their
ideological opponents, who really listen to what you have to say and never
judge you ahead of time. And, of course, they never pass comment on how a
person looks.

~~~
oldmanjay
You don't get to claim the moral high ground and use the tactics of the
opposition at the same time.

~~~
M_Grey
The only claim of a moral highground here is implicit in that shitpost of an
article.

~~~
andars
Yes, the article isn't very good. In essence, it reverses the direction of
"holier than thou".

However, it raises an excellent point. The United States is not going to get
anywhere if half the country looks down on the other half as a bunch of plebs,
and in response the "plebs" disdain the elites. (I understand that this is a
gross simplification, but I have seen this attitude often enough that it is
significant).

For me, the article was about the need for mutual respect.

~~~
M_Grey
There will be no mutual respect here; the schism that began with Reagan, and
widened with W. just ripped wide open today. The only thing coming out of this
is going to be deepening resentment, and incredible economic hardship.

Ironically, the people who are going to take it most directly in the tuckus,
are the people who voted Trump.

~~~
majormajor
If large parts of your community are already on unemployment, disability,
and/or heroin, are you focused on the downside risk or looking for anyone
willing to even pretend to have a new plan?

------
roymckenzie
Ironic. Vox exemplifies this.

~~~
c0nducktr
They ended up firing the author.

~~~
tanderson92
They suspended the author, then let him back off of suspension. It was strange
because he was leaving willingly in a few weeks to attend a graduate school
program.

------
danr4
It's been a really long time since I read an article this long. Very eye
opening.

------
fatbird
And so begins a really tiresome round of navel-gazing.

~~~
AndrewKemendo
This was published in April - not that it isn't relevant now, but this
discourse started happening a while ago.

------
hash-set
Pretty much sums up why I'm no longer involved in higher education.

I also tend to think a lot of liberals are mentally ill, but I concede that
you can't begin a dialog with that assumption. The PC movement on campuses
today is a dead end and will thus die or higher education will die. Their
choice.

------
yarou
The plebeians have spoken! Let us wait for our Gaius Marius, Gracchus
brothers, and Sulla.

~~~
gozur88
Sulla was an Optimate.

~~~
unixhero
What is that? Roman history? (Genuine question)

~~~
vondur
An Optimate was a supporter of the Senatorial class who were benefiting from
the massive wealth flowing into Rome after conquering the Mediterranean area.
This created a huge problem after 100 of thousands of slaves were brought back
to Italy and eliminated the small Roman farmers. The populares took advantage
of this, but it ended up in civil strife and war for about 80 years.

------
m_herrlich
But dumbasses do exist. And if a true dumbass senses that you think he's a
dumbass, he will obsessively counter everything you do just to be contrarian.
Teach those libtards a lesson. It's not logical but it makes total sense if
you think like a dumbass.

I guess I'm part of the problem.

------
codeonfire
Well tens of millions of "stupid hicks" are about to lose their health
insurance. How is that for a "good fact"? Sorry for being smug.

~~~
madaxe_again
Walls of flames here today. Suggest we flag political stories - HN is not the
place.

And that's coming from _me_.

~~~
andars
Perhaps flag comments. But I think that it is essential to have political
stories be visible today, so that we can try to understand why the election
results are what they are.

I posted this particular story because I have seen what it criticizes on HN
more than anywhere else. Perhaps the article is wrong, but I thought an
external opinion would be useful.

Perhaps HN is not the place for political discussion. But it has been in the
past, and will be in the future, so I think that this article is excellent to
contemplate.

~~~
ersii
I would say that this was the perfect piece to be published on that exact day.
I do fear that the tone of the article is too smug, even for "smug liberals"
and that it might have been passed by plenty of people - especially the usual
Vox readers.

I don't think it makes the article justice by trying to simply place it as
"right" or "wrong". I'd be content to just point out that I think it covers a
lot of history, divides and for lack of a better word, emotions or
perspectives.

I'm not liberal, but I too constantly need to fight the need to be smug
towards others and their choices.

Thank you for posting it. It was a worth the time to read.

~~~
madaxe_again
Says the unbelievably smug guy.

