This past Monday in The New Republic, Eric Kleefeld had a message for self-satisfied liberals: Don’t apologize for your smugness. Own it. Why not? You’ve “been right all along” about Donald Trump’s candidacy.
Kleefeld’s item took aim at the argument that Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert deserve part of the blame for Trump’s rise, since, as Tablet’s Jesse Bernstein put it, they’ve promoted a “culture of ridicule” which “cordoned off a section for those who flattered themselves by being ‘in the know’ [and] helped position enormous swaths of the country against each other…When ridicule replaces reasoned discourse, there’s no longer a place for persuasion.” According to Bernstein, Stewart and Colbert “helped to create the very specific type of internet-era liberal smugness (and, consequently, ignorance).”
On that last point, Kleefeld gave Bernstein a big Dana Carvey-as-John McLaughlin “Wrong!” (bolding added):
Far from contributing to cultural “ignorance,” the likes of Stewart and Colbert actually expanded people’s collective knowledge of the situation that was developing: Republican voters this year behaved exactly as the smuggest liberal would’ve predicted, supporting a race-baiting pseudo-strongman who is basically an outgrowth of the conservative infotainment complex. If this election had been written as a novel or a screenplay, it would’ve been ridiculed as the product of a smug, over-educated liberal who didn’t know anything about conservatives. Except of course, it really has happened—and the smug cultural liberals, who have warned that the GOP is full of maladjusted voters, have been proven correct.
Later in the week, TNR’s Brian Beutler, apropos of the tumult in the Trump campaign, sniped, “Karma is a glorious thing…This election looks more and more like divine retribution for decades of conservative bad faith.”
