A twit came across my timeline from a lovely woman who had a blue check next to her name and more than 100,000 followers, so she must be an important voice according the the twitter gods:
If you vote Trump you are the scum of the earth, a colluder in racism and ‘deplorable’ is too good for you. This means everyone.
I struggled to figure out what purpose was served by such a twit. Preaching to the choir? Rallying the troops? Virtue signalling? The only thing that was abundantly clear about the twit was that it would not cause any Trump supporters to change their positions. So why bother?
Then Charles Blow did the same thing, except on the pages of the New York Times:
Trump is in fact the logical extension of toxic masculinity and ambient misogyny. He is the logical extension of rampant racism. He is the logical extension of wealth worship. He is the logical extension of pervasive anti-intellectualism.
Trump is the logical extension of the worst of America.
Putting aside the confused use of “in fact” when what he meant to say was “in my opinion,” and it’s irrelevant whether you share his opinion or not, the question remains why a columnist would squander valuable real estate for such an insipid rant.
There are people in America who do not worship the changes demanded by social justice. They’re ordinary people. They may not have Ph.D.s in gender studies or an appreciation of critical race theory. They may like football and beer. They may respect a man’s business success and accumulation of wealth. And they may not be overly impressed with the “best and the brightest,” who haven’t done nearly as much of a bang up job of fixing America as they think they have.
This doesn’t make them right, but it doesn’t make them wrong either. The unemployed former coal miner in Kentucky, or factory worker in Scranton, doesn’t want to hear that he should be willing to forfeit his white male cis privilege of living in abject poverty for the benefit of a marginalized intersectional feminist of color outraged at the mascot of an Ivy League university.
He’s not as smart as a guy like Blow. But he knows his children are hungry. He may not know that Blow’s son went to Yale and daughter to Penn State, but he knows that his kids won’t be going to college and may not be able to find work. They don’t know what will fix their miserable situation, but they know it sucks. And they know that people telling them how much better the economy is doing after eight years of President Obama hasn’t managed to find them any solace.
They know that the government that’s the best ever isn’t doing squat for them. They know that the supporters of Hillary Clinton don’t see their poverty and utter lack of any hope of future expectations of a better life. Instead, they hear about what they should sacrifice for the sake of women who suffer horrific catcalls and men trying to talk to them while they wear earphones.
They look for an alternative because more of the same holds little hope that it will change their misery. Maybe the alternative involves a guy who’s a pig. Maybe the guy is a fool, not that the guy with the starving kids may be able to tell the difference, because his father sent him to work, to help feed the family, as early as possible, so he missed that day in school when they taught self-actualization because his family wanted to eat again that night.
And the guy is coarse, vulgar and quite disgusting. No self-respecting intellectual would have him to dinner. Except they ironically did before everyone decided he was a pig. And they went to dinner at his house, and enjoyed his parties, and sought his support and donations, even though he was a terrible person. He must have been much better then because he’s so awful now.
When a person runs for high office, he subjects his life to scrutiny. That’s part of the deal, and he knew going in that anything he ever did would be put under the harshest of lights. Feel no sympathy for what the microscope showed, even if it was no different than what was there before, when he was still embraced by the very people trying to rip him apart.
But to vilify and demonize his supporters merely for not choosing your values over theirs?
“But they are deplorable,” I’ve been told. Some surely are, but then again, both sides have their nutjobs, their self-serving idiots, their “deplorables.” What part of intellectualism entitles you to hate the supporters of a candidate you despise by wrapping your hatred in a pretty pink bow of tolerance? If Trump supporters are the worst of America, you are the most hypocritical.
Blow is right, that Trump is the logical extension of the push by the right sort of people to achieve their vision of social justice in America. But Blow, as intellectual as he may be, doesn’t seem capable of getting the message. There are millions of Americans who don’t have degrees from Yale, who don’t have wealth, who don’t seem to get any benefit from that privilege they’re being told they must give away because of the trivial aches and pains of those people who Blow believes are entitled.
For a lot of people, America sucks. And still, they love it, enough so that they are willing to give their lives for it, fighting in foreign countries in wars that the intellectuals tell them they must fight. Yet, you extol the virtue of your flagrant self-interest, the recreation of America to give the current flavor of the people we’re supposed to feel sad for, your preferred marginalized victims, while screaming epithets at them for their unwillingness to put your self-interest ahead of theirs?
Who are you to tell them they are deplorable? The intellectually honest recognize that there are reasons to swing one way or another that have nothing to do with being deplorable. The intellectually honest realize that their value system is nothing more than their choice, and that anyone who doesn’t share their choice isn’t inherently evil.
When this election is over, and it will be, there will still be starving children whose father can’t get a job. But as long as the intellectuals like Blow get what they want out of the deal, they can take comfort in knowing the good guys prevailed over the deplorables. There will be no sadness in the millions of Americans who are failed by the intellectuals, whose kids are still hungry, because they have been dehumanized by pundits like Blow, because they’re just racists, misogynists, deplorables.
If they are the worst of America, maybe the intellectuals should hunt them down, rid America of this blight of humanity that stands in the way of the best of America. Like Blow. And it’s just Trump and his supporters who are ruining everything that’s good about this nation.
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I have often observed two surprising things about many well-educated individuals, regardless of political stripe: one, that they are often incapable of acknowledging the existence of points-of-view that differ from their own, let alone understanding them; and two, that they believe that calling people “stupid” is an effective tool of persuasion.
This is not to say that others do not behave the same way, but that those who trade on their academic credentials to establish public credibility should seemingly know better.
The first irony is that if, as the intellectuals assert, those who disagree with them are stupid, then why vilify them for being something they can’t help but be, and why castigate them rather than enlighten them. If the intellectuals are so much smarter than the stupid people, they ought to be capable of bringing the stupid over to their side.
But the second irony, is that the self-actualized, who are so much smarter than the poor, stupid, hungry, angry stiffs who don’t grasp higher order concerns, aren’t smart enough to grasp why these stupid people don’t share their self-actualized values. The greatest strength of these self-anointed intellectuals is their ability to lie to themselves so they don’t have to face their hypocrisy. If the stupid people are haters, at least they have the excuse of being stupid. The intellectuals, just as much haters, have no excuse.
There is research on this stuff, and it offers some hope. See, e.g., Dunning-Kruger effect. It started with a paper they wrote called “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments”. There were some follow-on studies too. Of course, given the title, most people focus on the part of the results that shows that the uneducated have a hard time recognizing their inability to understand something. However, their work also showed that the well-educated and highly-skilled were on average likely to underrate themselves both in their own areas of expertise and outside their areas of expertise.
So, those well-educated incapable of understanding points of view other than their own could well be in the minority among the well educated. It is just that most people keep their mouths shut if they aren’t confident in their knowledge, so the falsely-confident make the most noise.
Yes, I know about Dunning-Kruger, but thank you for explaining it under the assumption that everyone else is a moron and needs you to tell them about something pretty much everyone already knows. You’re special.
No, it doesn’t apply here. No, I don’t want to discuss why you think it applies here. Just because it popped into your head doesn’t make it a subject for discussion here.
I suspect you didn’t even read to the end of my comment. You seem to have missed the part about the highly-skilled being prone to underestimate their relative competence. Sorry about the intro, I wasn’t reading your blog in 2008, otherwise I am totally certain I would have remembered that you commented on it.
Regardless of whether you read SJ in 2008, you could have raised D-K rather than felt it your duty to give a lecture about its meaning as well. But no, you choose to explain it, because without you explaining it, the dopes would never know what D-K is. I read your comment to the end. Does it make you fee better to rationalize that I must have missed something or I would have appreciated your brilliance? That’s nice.
As I’ve explained a few thousand times now, you’re free to think anything you like. Just not here. If I don’t appreciate your genius, start your own blog and gain the adoration of millions. Just not here. And if my dismissive attitude toward your brilliance is wrong, then go elsewhere. I’m sure someone will appreciate your lecture on D-K to save them from their ignorance. But not here.
Charles Blow defines the Republican Party’s mission as “to prevent government from working instead of to make government work.” It could never occur to him that a person of good will could conceivably disagree with the mission of the Democratic Left.
And besides, I haven’t seen much obstructionism from the Republican Congress. They’re too cowed to exercise their constitutional role as the controller of the government purse. What led to the rise of Trump anyway?
Blow has always been a team player, but he used to be capable of enough nuance to accept the premise that disagreement didn’t make the other team evil. That’s now gone.
I happened to live in London for the three year up to and including the Brexit vote. As an American with no official dog in the hunt is was very enlightening to watch the “Right Thinking” people become so shocked at the outcome of the vote by the people. Overnight, polite public school boys became xenophobic against their own countrymen (i.e. non-London based British people).
In my three years in Europe, it also became very evident that any all almost all views that Europeans have on America and American culture comes exclusively from New York and L.A. They are truly shocked that even one American would consider voting for the real estate mogul from NYC.
I guess my point is, whats going on in American politics right now has a very deja vu like similarity to what I witnessed in London.
All the smart people somehow fail to see the disaffection of others with their values because, well, they’re right. Brexit is a perfect example of the failure of the intelligentsia to be nearly as smart as they think they are.
Well, if the attack on the NC GOP office is any indication, someone may be trying to hunt the deplorables down.
When I hear most people talk about the election, I feel more and more like the one of the last sane people in the room because I refuse to reduce voters into cartoon stereotypes.
I considered using the NC GOP firebombing in the post, but until we know who did it and why, it might be premature. We assume, based on the message, that it was nutjob Democrats/Clinton supporters, but given the tenor of our national “conversation,” I’m disinclined to assume anything.
Let’s take it as given that every one of their premises is true, that Trump voters are “the scum of the earth”, beyond “deplorable”, the “worst of America.”
They’re also currently somewhere above 40% of the voting population. In fact they’re a majority in several states. So what’s your next move? Call them names and call it a day?
Obviously we have to build a wall to keep them away from the rest of us. Right?
Define “us”. Are you sure you are “us?”
(Who knew that SJ would become the site for quoting song lyrics?)
*goo-goo g’joob.
Pedantic, of course, but correcting a quote seems as useful as calling out the “anti-name-calling Party” on how they call the opposition names. NewSpeak is very flexible, you see. Hypocrisy is a word that doesn’t exist in it, and standards can be shifted to suit any given situation.
Bill Clinton allegedly did worse things to women than whatever it was that Trump did, but “that was different”. Perhaps now the mantra is “drag a billionaire through a trailer park, and low-lifes come out of the woodwork”.
The Left can’t seem to see any suffering save for their own pet causes and victims. The Right may be no better, but the Left has been heavily stylizing themselves as having the ethical high ground for the last 8 years, and eschewing any blame for the bad things that have happened on their watch.
So what it boils down to is that they care not one whit about the permanently unemployed coal miners. In fact, they want to create more of them, because it’s “saving the planet” to put these people out of work. Finding “shovel-ready jobs” for them is someone else’s problem.
See? correcting the quote really was more useful.
While I like your article and the points you made. I also found it amusing in that you were just as condescending as the people you were taking to task. I guess the word would be ironic but growing up in the most economically depressed part of America would prevent me from understanding. I personally was a republican for years until I realized that they didn’t even try to help people in low population areas of the country something like 75% of the land mass and they weren’t fiscally responsible either.
Glad you found it amusing that I was condescending. Lots of children say that when they aren’t capable of using grown-up words to express substantive thoughts. But I’m here to amuse you, because you are important to me.
Had you read the New York Times article about why the Kentucky coal miners were voting for Trump, you would have realized why they were used as an example. But it’s all about you, so that makes SHG condescending. Sorry you’re illiterate and narcissistic, but don’t blame anyone else for being the only person who didn’t get it.
Without doubt, she is a Mensch. Who wouldn’t want to know what a mensch thinks?
I like her. This twit, not so much, but otherwise I do.
As a Kentucky coal miner I can say that this years election is best summed up as a choice between a giant douche and a turd sandwich (South Park). My only choices are between one who has stated that a lot of coal miners will be put out of work vs one who has stated coal miners will be put back to work. All other issues be damned. Life is about money. The people that don’t think so must have enough, I don’t.
We just want to work and its people like Charles Blow, who thinks we’re following the pied piper to our death and can’t be trusted to make a choice, that really grinds my gears. I couldn’t care less about the names I get called by the Charles Blows of the world as long as I get to work.
In the end Kentucky doesn’t matter much as we only have eight electoral votes. There are simply too few of us.
Wait. Are you trying to say you won’t give up your kids’ meals to make a Harvard coed happy? You are such a shitlord.
They’re not getting my “Kids Meals ” or my “Big Mac”.
Shitlord is an acceptable title, though considering the amount of cow and horse excrement I have shoveled in my life, I think I qualify for Shitgod.
Tom Wolfe has been writing for the last fifty years about how the self-anointed American elites actively despise and feel betrayed by the common people of America, those benighted souls who…refuse to do what the elites KNOW is best!!! My one remaining hope for this election is that maybe Wolfe will see fit to give the whole thing the complete shellacking it deserves.
FYI, I grew up in the rural south-central US; I can pass the test in Charles Murray’s “Coming Apart.” But at least by profession, location, and income, I now qualify as a coastal elite, as long as I keep my mouth artfully shut at the right times. The level of arrogance by so-called people like Blow both infuriates me and makes me want to weep.
When I was a young lawyer, Tom was a regular visitor to my suite because he was good friends with Eddie Hayes, another criminal defense lawyer who shared the offices. Tom was no regular guy, but he was heavily influenced by the criminal defense lawyer ethos.
The article you cite, in my view, does draw attention to a troubling trend in political analysis by the media. What follows, I believe, is helpful advice from a trusted authority. “Lying is universal—we all do it. Therefore, the wise thing is for us diligently to train ourselves to lie thoughtfully, judiciously; to lie with a good object, and not an evil one; to lie for others’ advantage, and not our own; to lie healingly, charitably, humanely, not cruelly, hurtfully, maliciously; to lie gracefully and graciously, not awkwardly and clumsily; to lie firmly, frankly, squarely, with head erect, not haltingly, tortuously, with pusillanimous mien, as being ashamed of our high calling. Then shall we be rid of the rank and pestilent truth that is rotting the land; then shall we be great and good and beautiful, and worthy dwellers in a world where even benign Nature habitually lies, except when she promises execrable weather.” Mark Twain, On the Decay of the Art of Lying.
So anyway, in-between this curse that newspaper you read everyday has over you, are you going to go there or not with the current EXPECTED shenanigans!!??
Might have something to do with the future you have been ignoring for precedent.
Who needs a judgeship when if the “bucket” floats an impossible balancing act over a bed of nails?
If you had a tractor, three thirty second videos would do….
Setting the load, lifting, and delivery!
Oh yeah!
I miss the law shit and all…. Mostly the “art” in “it” you don’t talk too much about it.
Love ya!
Don’t get trapped!
‘Bout time you buckled the belt behind your back before you sit down every morning and go manic with the hydraulics in your nature that you own!
I would be very impressed if it was third branch centric approaching the load…
Get ‘Er Done! BAR BITCH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
You know you want to!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YiR-kwL3PMI
P.S. No disrespect to the “well” or “bench” but might be past time you fools get shit together!
Of everything I’ve read attempting to explain to those of us who cannot imagine any circumstance under which we’d find ourselves able even to vote for Trump, let alone do so enthusiastically, this is by far the best. I know you don’t give a damn what I think of it, but I wanted to thank you for making it public.
You misunderstand me. I give a damn that you think, regardless of where you end up. Whether you prefer vanilla to chocolate doesn’t matter, but why might be valuable. Even though you find one flavor overwhelmingly more delicious, so much more delicious that you can’t conceive of anyone wanting the other flavor, it’s critical to realize that’s just your taste, nothing more. That’s the message I strive to convey.