
The smug style in American liberalism - paulpauper
http://www.vox.com/2016/4/21/11451378/smug-american-liberalism
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GrumpyYoungMan
An excellent article and summarizes why I'm drifting away from the left as
time goes on.

 _" If the smug [liberal] style can be reduced to a single sentence, it's,
'Why are they voting against their own self-interest?' But no party these past
decades has effectively represented the interests of these dispossessed. Only
one has made a point of openly disdaining them too.

Abandoned and without any party willing to champion their interests, people
cling to candidates who, at the very least, are willing to represent their
moral convictions. The smug style resents them for it, and they resent the
smug in turn.

...

The smug style, at bottom, is a failure of empathy. Further: It is a failure
to believe that empathy has any value at all. It is the notion that anybody
worthy of liberal time and attention and respect must capitulate, immediately,
to the Good Facts.

...

Make no mistake: I am not suggesting that liberals adopt a fuzzy, gentler
version of their politics. I am not suggesting they compromise their issues
for the sake of playing nice. What I am suggesting is that the battles waged
by liberalism have drifted far away from their old egalitarian intentions.

I am suggesting that open disdain for the people they say they want to help
has led them to stop helping those people, too.

...

I am suggesting that they instead wonder what it might be like to have little
left but one's values; to wake up one day to find your whole moral order
destroyed; to look around and see the representatives of a new order call you
a stupid, hypocritical hick without bothering, even, to wonder how your corner
of your poor state found itself so alienated from them in the first place. To
work with people who do not share their values or their tastes, who do not
live where they live or like what they like or know their Good Facts or their
jokes."_

~~~
Futurebot
The person who wrote this is a _member_ of the socialist Left. This is a
critique of the style among establishment Liberals (who support right-of-
center Neoliberal economics / very weak social democracy and social
liberalism), not the Left (who support the spectrum of leftist policy from
strong social democracy to socialism to communism as well as social
liberalism): Mother Jones and Slate, not Jacobin and Dissent. The distinction
is extremely important now that the rift between the two is as large as it is.

If you're disgusted with the smugness _and_ support Nordic or Euro style
taxation and proper redistribution, then it'd be toward, not away from the
Left (not to say there are no smug Actual Leftists, just that they have no
voice in our current media.)

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m0llusk
So, politics is how we decide on public policies that determine how we as a
society function and all that should be based on emotional reactions.

