The Myth of the Smug Liberal
Last edited Fri Dec 9, 2016, 12:17 PM - Edit history (1)
In the dawn of the Trump era, there is no stereotype more lazily deployed than the condescending coastal liberal who lives in his own bubble.
The most irritating media trope to emerge in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s election is the idea that it was a rebuke to “condescending” liberals who live in our own “bubbles.” Steve Schmidt gave us a preview on MSNBC even before the race for the White House was decided. “The people who are for Trump are not embarrassed to be for Trump. This is a fiction of New York City,” the former Republican political consultant told us early on election night. “This is a fiction of the New York City, Acela Corridor imagination, who are embarrassed for these people. This is part of the condescension.”
It’s not just Republican talking heads. All fall, Michael Moore had been sounding a similar alarm, suggesting that anyone who lived in an Eastern city or had never worked an assembly line could not possibly understand the plight of his old Michigan neighbors. The environmental journalist Rob Hoffman, in a Politico piece headlined “How the Left Created Trump,” blamed the election of Trump entirely on “liberal America’s smug style of debate” and “unmitigated social activism.” He berated “liberal America’s unwillingness—still!—to bend to its Republican counterparts,” even as he conceded that Trump’s victory “could have irreversible environmental consequences.” One might consider this the environmentalist’s equivalent of asking, “Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?” But for Hoffman the bigger problem is, somehow, “liberal America’s unwillingness to compromise, or even show magnanimity in the face of all its victories on social issues.”
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The reality is that, far from being insulated, we have the same concerns and problems as everyone else. In my family, most of us pulled ourselves up by working hard, getting all the education we could, and taking full advantage of those government programs built by all of us. Most of us have, I think, paid back that debt we owe to our democracy, not least by recognizing that almost all of us have it tough sometimes, and that we must do what we can to help each other.
Is it really so condescending that we should vote for the candidate who would keep in place the footholds and safety nets that helped us? Or does the real condescension come from the likes of those who would infantilize white working class voters, making out that they cannot help but vote against their own interests if they even suspect that someone, somewhere is looking down on them?
Far from gloating over our social activism successes, my main preoccupation on election night was what my wife and I were going to do for health care. We’ve been on Obamacare since she lost her job over a year ago, one more downsizing victim to a merger of international conglomerates. She’s since applied to over a hundred job listings in different fields, but has managed to wrangle only a handful of interviews, and the unemployment ran out months ago. Since I am self-employed and have a pre-existing condition, I don’t know if we can replace our current health plan with anything at all, once the Affordable Care Act is repealed. We are a few years away from retirement—though now, thanks to Speaker Paul Ryan, who knows if the Medicare we paid into all these years will still exist when we get there?
https://newrepublic.com/article/139169/myth-smug-liberal
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