The smug style: how liberals lost touch with the working classes

The old left-wing coalition – between social liberals and the working classes – has been falling apart for decades. These days, says Emmett Rensin, American liberals seem to feel nothing but disdain for the people they once claimed to represent

There is a smug style in American liberalism. It has been growing these past decades. It is a way of conducting politics, predicated on the belief that American life is not divided by moral difference or policy divergence – not really – but by the failure of half the country to know what’s good for them. It has led an American ideology hitherto responsible for a great share of the good accomplished over the past century of our political life to a posture of reaction and disrespect: a condescending, defensive sneer toward any person or movement outside of its consensus, dressed up as a monopoly on reason.

The smug style is a psychological reaction to a profound shift in American political demography. Beginning in the middle of the 20th century, the working class began abandoning the Democratic Party. In 1948, in the immediate wake of Franklin Roosevelt, 66% of manual labourers voted for Democrats, along with 60% of farmers. In 1964, it was 55% of working-class voters. By 1980, it was 35%. The white working class in particular saw even sharper declines. Despite historic advantages with both poor and middle-class white voters, by 2012 Democrats possessed only a two-point advantage among poor white voters.

The consequence was a shift in liberalism’s intellectual centre of gravity. A movement once fleshed out in union halls and little magazines shifted into universities and major press, from the centre of the country to its cities and elite enclaves. Minority voters remained, but bereft of the material and social capital required to dominate elite decision-making, they were largely excluded from an agenda driven by the new Democratic core: the educated, the coastal, and the professional. It is not that these forces captured the party so much as that it fell to them. When the labourer left, they remained. The origins of this shift are various. Richard Nixon bears a large part of the blame, but so does Bill Clinton. I have my own sympathies, but I do not propose to adjudicate that question here. Suffice to say, by the 1990s the better part of the working class wanted nothing to do with the word liberal. What remained of the American progressive elite was left to puzzle: what happened to our coalition? Why did they abandon us? What’s the matter with Kansas?

The smug style arose to answer these questions. It provided an answer so simple and so emotionally satisfying that its success was perhaps inevitable: the theory that conservatism, and particularly the kind embraced by those out there in the country, was not a political ideology at all. The trouble is that stupid hicks

don’t know what’s good for them. They’re getting conned by right-wingers and tent revivalists until they believe all the lies that have made them so wrong. They don’t know any better. That’s why they’re voting against their own self-interest.

As anybody who has gone through a particularly nasty break-up knows, disdain cultivated in the aftermath of a divide quickly exceeds the original grievance. You lose somebody. You blame them. Soon, the blame is reason enough to keep them at a distance, the excuse to drive them even further away. Finding comfort in the notion that their former allies were disdainful, hapless yokels, smug liberals created a culture animated by that contempt. The result is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Financial incentive compounded this tendency – there is money, after all, in reassuring the bitter. Over 20 years, an industry arose to cater to the smug style. It began in humour, and culminated for a time in The Daily Show, a programme that more than any other thing advanced the idea that liberal orthodoxy was a kind of educated savvy and that its opponents were, before anything else, stupid. The internet only made it worse. The smug style created a feedback loop. If the trouble with conservatives was ignorance, then the liberal impulse was to correct it. When such corrections failed, disdain followed after it. Of course, there is a smug style in every political movement; elitism among every ideology believing itself in possession of the solutions to society’s ills. But few movements have let the smug tendency so corrupt them, or make so tenuous its case against its enemies.

Elites, real elites, might recognise one another by their superior knowledge. The smug recognise one another by their mutual knowing. Knowing, for example, that the Founding Fathers were all secular deists. Knowing that you’re actually, like, 30 times more likely to shoot yourself than an intruder. Knowing that those fools out in Kansas are voting against their own self-interest and that the trouble is Kansas doesn’t know any better. Knowing all the jokes that signal this knowledge. It is the smug style’s first premise: a politics defined by a command of the Correct Facts and signalled by an allegiance to the Correct Culture. A politics that is just the politics of smart people in command of Good Facts. The knowing know that police reform, that abortion rights, that labour unions are important, but go no further: what is important, after all, is to signal that you know these things. What is important is to launch (internet) links and mockery at those

“Nothing is more confounding to smug liberals than the fact that the average Republican has a higher IQ than the average Democrat”

who don’t. The Good Facts are enough: anybody who fails to capitulate to them is part of the Problem, is terminally uncool. No persuasion, only retweets. Eye roll, crying emoji, forward to Daily Show host John Oliver for “sick burns”. Sixty years ago, American liberalism relied too much on the support of working people to let these ideas take too much hold. Sixty years ago, too, the ugliest tendencies were still private. The smug style belonged to real elites, knowing in their cocktail parties, far from the ears of yokels. But today we have television, and the internet, and a liberalism worked out in universities and think tanks.

On 26 June 2015, the Supreme Court found that denying marriage licences to same-sex couples constituted a violation of the 14th Amendment. After decades of protests, legislation, setbacks and litigation, the 13 states still holding out against the inevitable were ordered to relent. Kim Davis, a clerk tasked with issuing marriage licences to couples in her Kentucky county, refused. It did not take long for the law to correct Davis. On 12 August, a judge ordered a stay, preventing Davis from refusing any longer under the protection of the law. The Sixth Circuit, and then the Supreme Court, refused to hear her appeal. Despite further protest and Davis’s ultimate jailing for contempt of court, normal service was restored in short order. The 23,000 people of Rowan County suffered, all told, just under seven weeks without a functioning civil licensure apparatus.

Davis remained a fixation. Dour, rural, thrice divorced but born again – Twitter could not have invented a better parody of the uncool. She was ridiculed for her politics but also for her looks – that she had been married so many times was inexplicable! That she thought she had the slightest grasp of the constitution, doubly so. When Davis was jailed for five days following her refusal to comply with the court order, many who pride themselves on having a vastly more compassionate moral foundation than Davis cheered the imprisonment of a political foe. The ridicule of Davis became so pronounced that even smug circles, always on the precipice of self-reproach, began eventually to rein in the excess. Mocking her appearance, openly celebrating the incarceration of an ideological opponent – these were not “good looks”.

But a more fundamental element of smug disdain for Kim Davis went unchallenged: the contention, at bottom, that Davis was not merely wrong in her convictions, but that her convictions were, in themselves, an error and a fraud. That is: Kim Davis was not only on the wrong side of the law. She was a hateful bigot who did not even understand her own religion. Christianity, as many hastened to point out, is about love. Christ commands us to render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s. If the Bible took any position on the issue at all, it was that divorce, beloved by Davis, was a sin; she was a hypocrite masquerading among the faithful.

This, more than anything I can recall in recent American life, is an example of the smug style. Many liberals do not believe that evangelical Christianity ought to guide public life; many believe, moreover, that the moral conceits of that Christianity are wrong, even harmful to society. But to the smug liberal, it isn’t that Kim Davis is wrong. How can she be? She’s only mistaken. She just doesn’t know the Good Facts, even about her own religion. She’s angry and confused, another hick who’s not with it. This is knowing: knowing that the new line on Jesus is that the homophobes just don’t get their own faith. Google makes every man a theologian.

In November of last year, during the week when it became temporarily fashionable for American governors to declare that Syrian refugees would not be welcome in their state, Hamilton Nolan wrote an essay for Gawker, called “Dumb hicks are America’s greatest threat”. If there has ever been a tirade so dedicated to the smug style, to the proposition that it is the backward stupidity of poor people that has ruined the state of American policy, then it is hidden beyond our view. “Many of America’s political leaders are warning of the dangers posed by Syrian refugees. They are underestimating, though, the much greater danger: dumbass hicks, in charge of things,” Nolan wrote. “You, our elected officials, are embarrassing us. All of us, except your fellow dumb hicks, who voted for you in large numbers. You – our racist, xenophobic, knuckle-dragging ignorant leaders – are making us look bad in front of the guests (the whole world). You are the bad cousin in the family who always ruins Thanksgiving. Go in the back room and drink a can of beer alone please.”

Nothing is more confounding to the smug style than the fact that the average Republican is better educated and has a higher IQ than the average Democrat. Most damning, perhaps, to the fancy liberal self-conception: Republicans score higher in susceptibility to persuasion. They are willing to change their minds more often. Yet, as Hamilton Nolan writes: “To the dumb hick leaders of America, I say: (nothing). You wouldn’t listen anyhow. My words would go in one ear and right out the other. Like talking to an old block of wood.”

If the smug style can be reduced to a single sentence, it is: why are these poor people voting against their own self-interest? But no party these past decades has effectively represented the interests of America’s 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, at bottom, is a failure of empathy. It is the notion that anybody worthy of liberal time and respect must capitulate, immediately, to the Good Facts. If they don’t (and they won’t), you’re free to write them off and mock them. When they suffer, it’s their just deserts. 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. I am suggesting that they think about 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.

So long as liberals cannot find common cause with the larger section of the American working class, they will search for reasons to justify that failure. They will choose the smug style. Unable to countenance the real causes of their collapse, they will comfort themselves by shouting “idiots!”, again and again, angrier and angrier, the handmaidens of their own destruction. It is this attitude that has driven the dispossessed into the arms of a candidate who shares their fury. It is this attitude that delivered him the White House. The wages of smug is Trump.

A longer version of this article first appeared on Vox.com at www.vox.com/2016/4/21/11451378/smug-american-liberalism. © Emmett Rensin/vox.com/vox Media Inc.

“To the dumb hick leaders of America, I say nothing. You wouldn’t listen anyhow. Like talking to an old block of wood”