The smug style in American liberalism | Hacker News Reader

The smug style in American liberalism

vox.com

14 pointsdrewrv2 comments

It's hard for me to know what to think about this article because the author doesn't make his position clear. He says liberals are wrong to think that conservatives make decisions against their own best interests because they are stupid.

Does the author think that conservative decisions are in fact in their own best interests? Or does he agree with liberals that the decisions are foolish, but thinks conservatives make such mistakes for some other reason than a lack of intelligence? Or perhaps some other position?

This matters, because what liberals should be doing differs considerably for each case.

"If the smug [liberal] style can be reduced to a single sentence, it's, Why are [conservatives] 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."

His position is that neither party represents the economic concerns of the 99%. But only one will express open disdain for people who try to hang on to traditional values -- and generate mobs cheering and (often successfully) pushing for various sanctions against them like the imprisoning of Kim Davis (cited in this article) or the forced resignation of JavaScript creator Brendan Eich as Mozilla CEO due to his personal support of California Proposition 8.

The failure of empathy in American left is staggering, and it's something I've been quite worried about for several years now. This article is very good at expressing exactly what the problem is.

"I am suggesting that [liberals] 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...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."

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