Calling Republicans “weird”, and demanding “Joy”, is about as substantive a policy discusion as you’re going to get from a 2024 Democrat.\u00a0<\/p>\n
As Richard Fernandez reminded us in 2016, it’s largely Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert’s fault:<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\nThe process went something like this: Someone said something on Fox News that mainstream liberalism didn\u2019t like; Stewart and\/or Colbert aired a sustained critique of the idea and the thinking behind it; liberal internet publications hailed it as the greatest rhetorical victory since Darrow argued for Scopes; liberals\u2019 Facebook feeds full of liberal friends filled up with clips of the takedown. No one learned anything, no one engaged with an idea, and nothing outside of a very specific set of ideas was given any real credence. As Emmet Rensin so perfectly put it<\/a>:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\nFinding comfort in the notion that their former allies were disdainful, hapless rubes, smug liberals created a culture animated by that contempt. The result is a self-fulfilling prophecy. \u2026 Over 20 years, an industry arose to cater to the smug style \u2026 and culminated for a time in\u00a0The Daily Show<\/em>, a program that more than any other thing advanced the idea that liberal orthodoxy was a kind of educated savvy and that is opponents were, before anything else, stupid.<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n\nAs Rensin deftly discerns, this sort of intellectual elitism is probably part of the reason that the Democratic Party went from getting 66 percent of the manual laborer vote in 1948 to outpolling the GOP by just 2 points in 2012. It\u2019s the inevitable consequence of eight years of reducing George W. Bush and all of his supporters to dumbass hicks, and choosing to denigrate the poor and uneducated (if only they read\u00a0The Atlantic<\/em>!), rather than doing real outreach to them. But as Christopher Hitchens learned on Bill Maher\u2019s show, people don\u2019t want to consider that possibility:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
I – and many smarter than I – have been observing for well over a decade that the Democrat party’s messaging seems to be aimed exclusively at people who might have an MA or PhD, but left their critical thinking skills at graduation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Calling Republicans “weird”, and demanding “Joy”, is about as substantive a policy discusion as you’re going to get from a 2024 Democrat.\u00a0 As Richard Fernandez reminded us in 2016, it’s largely Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert’s fault: \u00a0 The process went something like this: Someone said something on Fox News that mainstream liberalism didn\u2019t like; […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[425,20,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-88092","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-campaign-24","category-democrats","category-republicans"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88092","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=88092"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88092\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":88140,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88092\/revisions\/88140"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=88092"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=88092"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=88092"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}