"Knowing is the shibboleth into the smug style's culture, a cultural that celebrates hip commitments and valorizes hip taste, that loves nothing more than hate-reading anyone who doesn't get them. A culture that has come to replace politics itself....
The smug style has always existed in American liberalism, but it wasn't always so totalizing. Lionel Trilling claimed, as far back as 1950, that liberalism 'is not only the dominant, but even the sole intellectual tradition,' that 'the conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse ... do not express themselves in ideas, but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.'"
This article is giving me insane cognitive dissonance. I shouldn't've read it first thing in the morning.
Ok. So there certainly is an self-assuredness in my liberal politics. And I often do wonder, exasperatedly, how the fuck all these evil-looking and evil-sounding men (and women!) got to be in positions of power.
But this author, at ten zillion words, wants me to stop and take stock of what it is I'm really doing as a liberal. Ok. I remember in my late teens having constant, overwhelming, and intruding thoughts about our planet coming to a fiery end in either a nuclear holocaust in the near-term, or from plant- and ecosystem-failure in the long-term. These thoughts were debilitating, and I only got over them when I started to realize that happiness is found only by ever focusing on what it is that you can control, whether that's when you lived without flush toilets a thousand years ago, without reasonable protection from warring tribes ten thousand years ago, or these days, when holocaust and global warming are just two of the more well-known eschatological variants.
But now that I'm not suffering from under a miasma of OCD-thoughts, I'm not all of a sudden down with someone like Trump so casually insisting that more countries have nuclear weapons. Or with a field of Republican presidential candidates who dare not speak of the scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change, for fear that they piss off a sizable contingent of voters who disbelieve any human role in planetary warming, man-made or otherwise. I'm beyond smug at how counter-productive I believe Republican elected officials to be (legislative members both federal and state, state governors, the occasional county clerk). I'm completely pissed off. Outraged. Heartbroken.
The cognitive dissonance comes from the author telling us that liberals have a huge share of the blame for the current state. I don't deny that insulting the average Republican voter with labels like rube, idiot, hypocrite, and idiot, isn't going to do anything helpful other than serve a short-term interest to inflate a feeling a superiority.
But I can't help but feel that the 7k-word castigation liberals are getting here -- when Republicans are dismantling the social safety net, subsidizing corporations at the expense of poor people, cutting taxes for the 1%, doubling down on climate change denial as things are only getting worse -- is completely demoralizing. I guess we should always strive for empathy and to avoid ad hominem in all we do, but damn... Who the fuck is holding Republicans accountable?