You're trying much to hard.

The article is a deliberate provocation that studiously ignores the deliberate attempts by the Republican Party to court the South and "values voters" and entice them to vote against their economic interests via pandering to their baser prejudices. It started with the Dixiecrats in 1948, when Strom Thurmond and the Segregationists broke away from the Democratic Party in order to forestall Civil Rights. It continued through the Southern Strategy, wherein the party of Goldwater stopped publicizing its economic platform and instead focused on God and Guns. It culminated in the wave of anti-gay-marriage amendments put forth by the Republican Party in 2000 and 2004 to convince lower-income white people to come out and vote against their economic interests and thereby defeat Gore and Kerry.

This shit is straight-up AP US History high school shit. None of it is in the article. In fact, the author takes a swipe at What's the Matter with Kansas? without observing that the entire book is a chapter-and-verse refutation of his entire hand-wavey notion.

From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don't need any more than that...but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That's where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats

- Nixon's political strategist, Kevin Philips, in the New York Times, 1970

There is no economic advantage to voting for segregation. There is no economic advantage to voting against gay marriage. The only reason to do so is to ensure that there's someone out there who has fewer freedoms than you, who is socially and economically worse off than you are.

And that's the 50-year history of the Republican Party - convincing people to scapegoat someone else so they don't notice you're stealing their livelihood. The "smugness" of American Liberalism is nothing more than a jaw-open acknowledgement of this fact and, by the way, led to the climate that allowed transgender equality, the Black Lives Matter movement, Obamacare, the whole nine yards.

Are you voting for something or voting against something else? Because since 1948, conservatives have been voting against progress because a rising tide doesn't raise all ships, it floods the sandcastles you've eked out while pretending you have something. That's not smugness, that's chapter'n'verse historical fact.