The Retort

At Slate Jamelle Bouie responds to Emmett Rensin’s post to which I linked last week:

This is blinkered. And the result is an essay that doesn’t criticize “liberalism” so much as it positions Rensin against other members of his cultural cohort. It’s what you might write if you’ve mistaken the consumption habits and shibboleths of your tribe for a politics that drives one of two major political parties in a democracy of over 300 million people, if you’re convinced of your own centrality to the currents in American history.

It’s a thought-provoking post but I have reservations about it. Among the reservations are that I think that Mr. Bouie is too quick to dismiss the vanguardism to which I referred in my post and he conflates “liberals” with the Democratic Party. Those aren’t scare quotes—it’s the term he uses. Today’s progressives are not liberals and they constitute less than half of the Democratic Party.

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  • michael reynolds Link

    Neither piece was entirely convincing, but having run repeatedly into the Great Wall of Smug I’m absolutely sure it’s real, and in fact was ranting about it long before the piece appeared. (Although in fairness the South Park boys were there before everyone.) But the original piece was unfair in that it carefully avoided several inflammatory issues in an attempt to prove not just that the Left was smug, but that they were wrong.

    The thing is, they aren’t wrong. Their smugness is well-earned. They’ve been right and the Right has been wrong. And when it comes to smug, the entire campus left combined has not equalled the smug pumped out just by Rush Limbaugh alone. And he’s smug despite never, ever being right about anything. Bill Kristol, ditto.

    The smugness of the Left is at least grounded in being correct. Mostly. It’s still a bad thing to see because it means people have stopped testing their ideas. It’s bad mental hygiene. It also signals I think a misreading of what’s happening. I think the Left thinks they’re on the march. I think the march is over for now and we should be building a fort. Consolidation time. Particularly since the truth is we are almost as clueless about what to do next as the Right.

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