kurtadb

Over at The Corner, here is conservative #NeverTrumper Jim Geraghty:

One of the most common, and least-easily-ignored questions from Trump fans to #NeverTrump conservatives was, “But what about judges? Don’t you care about the Supreme Court?” Hillary Clinton’s judicial nominees would be awful, but there was little guarantee that Trump, who clearly doesn’t spend much time thinking about judicial philosophy, strict constructionism, or the role of the courts in setting policy, would consistently pick better judges.

I totally get why conservatives don't trust Trump to be a true conservative, but if there's one area where I figured Trump was trustworthy, this was it. Why? Because he obviously knows nothing about this stuff and cares even less. He would just ask the Federalist Society for a list and pick someone from it. Really, conservatives had nothing to worry about on this score.

And sure enough, that's how it played out. Trump released a list of eleven "potential" replacements for Anton Scalia this morning, and Geraghty is pleased: "At first glance, these are all names that conservatives would want to see and no names they wouldn't want to see." And that's not all. John Yoo is happy too:

[Trump] may be starting to unify the party with the right moves — if his list of potential appointments to the Supreme Court is any sign. Everyone on the list is an outstanding legal conservative. All are young, smart, and committed....These names are a Federalist Society all-star list of conservative jurisprudence....Trump clearly turned to the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation for advice.

Dan McLaughlin agrees:

The list is mostly cribbed from a prior Heritage Foundation list and from names fed to Trump by Hugh Hewitt in a radio interview, and is heavy on state supreme court judges. It obviously is not the product of much due diligence, as it includes Twitter-savvy Texas supreme court justice Don Willett, who has repeatedly and hilariously mocked Trump on Twitter for months.

Ilya Shapiro calls it "Donald Trump's terrific list of fabulous judges." Paul Mirengoff says the list is "impressive....Trump is talking to the right conservatives when it comes to the Supreme Court. Fellow Power Liner John Hinderaker is also on board: "My sense is that the party is coalescing behind Donald Trump. No doubt this list of excellent judges will accelerate that process."

So there you have it. Trump pretty obviously fobbed off this list to a couple of think tanks and released whatever names they told him to. He was too busy lying about past interviews and tweeting new insults to worry about trivia like this.

Is this the future of English pronouns? Ada Palmer's Too Like the Lightning takes place in a world where he/she is as quaintly obsolete as thee/thou. From the book's opening:

You will criticize me, reader, for writing in a style six hundred years removed from the events I describe, but you came to me for explanation of those days of transformation which left your world the world it is, and since it was the philosophy of the Eighteenth Century, heavy with optimism and ambition, whose abrupt revival birthed the recent revolution, so it is only in the language of the Enlightenment, rich with opinion and sentiment, that those days can be described. You must forgive me my ‘thee’s and ‘thou’s and ‘he’s and ‘she’s, my lack of modern words and modern objectivity. It will be hard at first, but whether you are my contemporary still awed by the new order, or an historian gazing back at my Twenty-Fifth Century as remotely as I gaze back on the Eighteenth, you will find yourself more fluent in the language of the past than you imagined; we all are.

A bit later, constrained by that narrative device to use they in dialogue and quotation, but he/she in narrative description, the narrator faux-apologizes again:

Does it distress you, reader, how I remind you of their sexes in each sentence? ‘Hers’ and ‘his’? Does it make you see them naked in each other’s arms, and fill even this plain scene with wanton sensuality? Linguists will tell you the ancients were less sensitive to gendered language than we are, that we react to it because it’s rare, but that in ages that heard ‘he’ and ‘she’ in every sentence they grew stale, as the glimpse of an ankle holds no sensuality when skirts grow short. I don’t believe it. I think gendered language was every bit as sensual to our predecessors as it is to us, but they admitted the place of sex in every thought and gesture, while our prudish era, hiding behind the neutered ‘they,’ pretends that we do not assume any two people who lock eyes may have fornicated in their minds if not their flesh. You protest: My mind is not as dirty as thine, Mycroft. My distress is at the strangeness of applying ‘he’ and ‘she’ to thy 2450s, where they have no place. Would that you were right, good reader. Would that ‘he’ and ‘she’ and their electric power were unknown in my day. Alas, it is from these very words that the transformation came which I am commanded to describe, so I must use them to describe it. I am sorry, reader. I cannot offer wine without the poison of the alcohol within.

Third-person singular animate pronouns are not the only vocabulary items for which the narrator apologizes:

Danaë came to her husband’s side. Do not chide me, reader, for using the gendered ‘husband’ when she stands so close, sheltering against him as she gazes up into his face with her brilliant, pleading blue eyes edged by maternal fear. Our age’s neutral ‘partner’ rings false when her every touch and gesture makes such intentional display of ‘wife.’

And gendered clothing is also an issue:

I cursed myself inside, although, looking back, I forgive myself now. She was irresistible. Remember, reader, though I use archaic words, I am not from those barbaric centuries when men and women wore their gender like a cockerel’s plumes, advertising sex with every suit and skirt. Growing up, I saw gendered costume on the stage, in art, pornography, but to see it in real life is unbearably different: her shallow breaths within constricted ribs, her round French breasts threatening to overflow the low Japanese silks. Here, as Andō wraps his arm around her waist, the costume makes me see them in my mind: the husband wrenching the kimono back to bare the honey-wet vagina. You see now, reader, why, to tell this history, I must say ‘he’ and ‘she.’ Danaë is a thing long thought extinct, reviving out of time ancient venoms perfected by a hundred generations of gendered culture. We around her— from my weak self to the gaping guards— grew up with no inoculation against this pox we thought our ancestors had vanquished. Movies and histories gave us just enough exposure to learn these ancient cues, weakness without resistance, and we can no more unlearn them than you could unlearn your alphabet when facing an unwelcome word.

There's more, of course — in particular, the narrator apologizes again for not using he/she to express affective interpersonal reactions rather than biological sex:

I realize, reader, that I should apologize for my confusing language, since if my ‘he’ and ‘she’ mean anything then certainly this sweet and gentle Cousin in her flowing wrap should be ‘she.’ In this case, alas, I am commanded by an outside power to give Carlyle the masculine, to remind you that this long-lost scion is a prince, not princess, a fact which matters in the eyes of some, and of the law. But I shall do my best to remind you often that a Cousin’s maternal heart beats beneath Carlyle’s broad chest, and I promise, reader, to be consistent in making other Cousins ‘she.’

Or the opposite:

Innocent reader, I take comfort in your confusion, for it is a sign of healthy days if you are illiterate in the signal-flags of segregation humanity has worked so hard to leave behind. In certain centuries these high, tight boots, these pleats and ponytail might indeed have coded female, but I warned you, reader, that it was the Eighteenth Century which forced this change upon us, and here it stands before you. You saw already Princesse Danaë, with the costume of Edo period Japan, and its comportment, too:  modest, coquettish, fragile, and proficient at making the stronger sex risk death for her. Can you not recognize the male of that species? Though French this time, rather than Japanese. Perhaps you argue that a gentle‘man’ of that enlightened age is effeminate, his curls and silks, his poetry and dances, and you are right if we apply the standards of a Goth or other proud barbarian. But would you then oblige me to call all such gentlemen ‘she’? The Patriarch? George Washington? Rousseau? De Sade? Shall I call the Divine Marquis ‘she’? No, good master. To understand what follows, you must anchor yourself in this truth, that, by the standards of the era which sculpted him from childhood, the woman Dominic Seneschal is the boldest and most masculine of men.

But you should read it for yourself — there's also theology, politics, crime,  and flying cars…

 

 

 

The post The Evidence Is Piling Up That Higher Minimum Wages Kill Jobs appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

A Colorado Springs woman claims she was moving a shotgun out of reach during an argument to avoid a violent confrontation when she accidently squeezed the trigger, sending buckshot through

Debra Bergquist rushed to her neighbor's home Monday night to find Jessica Swift, shaken and screaming, her husband lying on the porch bleeding from several stab wounds.

The two CONCACAF nations are looking to host together

The United States and Mexico are bitter rivals on the soccer field but off of it they could be working together to bring the world's biggest tournament to North America.

ESPNFC reports that not only have the two countries openly discussed joining forces and bidding for the 2026 World Cup but that new FIFA president, Gianni Infantino, has already expressed his support for it.

During the FIFA Congress held earlier this week in Mexico City, officials from both countries were reportedly engaged in talks about the details of such a bid. One board member of the USSF, John Motta, says that Mexico are very open to the idea.

"We have spoken to our Mexican counterparts and are very open to the idea of a joint bid."

"It could be a positive move for the game in both countries and it's also a very exciting proposition for FIFA. We will now go away and formulate a timetable for further discussions."

"But whatever happens, we will bid for the 2026 World Cup -- either jointly or we will go it alone."

-USSF Board Member John Motta; Source: ESPNFC

Mexico's president, Decio de Maria, seems optimistic about the possibility of the joint bid's success and has even met with Infantino personally to discuss the idea.

"Mr Infantino was very enthusiastic about my idea for a joint bid and wants me to pursue this further," De Maria said.

"We are committed to becoming the first country to have staged a World Cup three times and we will do all we can to make this happen, either with the United States or independently."

There hasn't been a jointly hosted World Cup since South Korea and Japan hosted the 2002 tournament. Both Mexico and the United States are emerging as huge markets for the world of soccer and this would be the perfect opportunity to showcase each nation on the world's stage.

Final decision on who will host the 2026 World Cup will come in May 2020.

Deviled eggs with olive oil. I tried a new way to boil eggs from The Good Egg, an egg-only cookbook by Marie Simmons: Bring them nearly to a boil, but not quite, then take them off the stove, cover the pan, and leave for about 11-12 minutes to cook to a firm yolk. The rain continued and a dampness was conveyed through the walls.

(Photo: Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.)

>> May 6

<< May 4

A woman allegedly stabbed a man in the shoulder after he refused to have sex with her early Wednesday morning, according to a Colorado Springs police report.

Legislation to allow liquor, wine and full-strength beer in grocery stores passed from the state Senate on Monday with bipartisan support and a mix of support and skepticism from liquor stores and major retailers.

A couple of days ago I read a post at New York magazine about a new kind of apartment:

This weekend, residents will begin moving into New York’s newest experiment in communal living: a blocky red-and-white building in Williamsburg, nestled snugly against the BQE. It’s run by the company Common, which sells “co-living," a relatively new product that’s a start-up version of rental roommate shares.

Click the link for the full story, but it brought to mind a random thought that's been on my mind for a long time. I've never mentioned it since it's light years outside my wheelhouse of knowledge, but it's Monday, so why not?

As near as I can tell, the Common approach is a building full of bedrooms of various sizes and prices. There are common bathrooms and dining areas in various places, and the rent ranges from $2,250 to $3,190. But if you're going to go the dorm route, why not do it better? Take a look at the floor plan below:

I chose the bedroom size because it's the size of my master bedroom. It's plenty large and comfy, with room for two, lots of closet space, and a nice private bathroom. Five of these bedrooms enclose a 1,100 square foot common area, which is about the size of the entire downstairs of my house. In real life it would be divided into various areas, either via walls or potted plants or what have you. There's plenty of space for a large kitchen in the center and various dining, seating, and TV rooms around it. The entire thing is 3,162 square feet, and every bedroom has two doors: one into the common area and a private door to the outside. The building would presumably have the usual amenities depending on how upscale it is: fitness center, laundry facilities, storage areas, etc.

So I'm curious: why doesn't anyone do this? Are there regulatory issues? Has it been tried and failed? It seems like a decent idea that provides a lot of space for the money, and plenty of privacy too if you build the bedrooms right (i.e., good soundproofing). If five roommates are just too many, you could do the same thing with three bedrooms at a somewhat higher cost.

Obviously this isn't ideal for everyone, but especially in high-cost urban areas it seems like a decent compromise between commune and private apartment that could be rented out for a reasonable price. Has this been done? If so, is there something I'm not thinking of that kept it from catching on?

15-year-old Canadian William Gadoury has translated his interest in the Mayan civilization into two remarkable discoveries. Gadoury noticed that the locations of the biggest Mayan cities matched the locations of the stars in Mayan constellations. Furthermore, the star charts pointed to the existence of a previously unknown city, the ruins of which have since been uncovered by satellite photography.

"I did not understand why the Maya built their cities away from rivers, on marginal lands and in the mountains," said Gadoury. "They had to have another reason, and as they worshiped the stars, the idea came to me to verify my hypothesis. I was really surprised and excited when I realized that the most brilliant stars of the constellations matched the largest Maya cities."

Someone start a Kickstarter campaign so that he can visit those ruins! (via @delfuego)

Update: Due to a mislabeled file on Wikipedia, I used a photo of an Aztec compass instead of a Mayan image. I have replaced with an image of the Mayan zodiac.

Also, per my post about media coverage of science yesterday, I'll point out quickly that there's much to be skeptical about re: this story (see this post from a Mesoamerican archaeologist). More likely than not, there's a Mayan scholar mailing list going bananas right now...I'll let you know if I hear anything specific.

In the meantime, this story in the Independent contains some satellite photos of the location in question. (via @gunnihinn)

Update: Vice: That 15-Year-Old Kid Probably Didn't Discover a Hidden Mayan City.

The rectangular feature seen on satellite is likely an old corn field (it's not the right shape to be a pyramid). There are indeed ancient Maya sites all over the place, and satellite imagery and LiDAR are being used to discover them, but this doesn't seem to be one of those cases...

On the bright side, the "if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is" study has been successfully replicated again. Science rolls on...

Tags: archaeology   astronomy   Maya civilization   science   William Gadoury

"A dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people than under the forbidden appearance of zeal for the firmness and efficiency of government. History will teach us that the former has been found a much more certain road to the introduction of despotism than the latter, and that of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants."

From Donald Trump, on his plans to run up the deficit in order to rebuild infrastructure:

I’ve borrowed knowing that you can pay back with discounts. I’ve done very well with debt....Now we’re in a different situation with the country, but I would borrow knowing that if the economy crashed, you could make a deal. And if the economy was good it was good, so therefore, you can’t lose.

There you have it. If Trump crashes the economy, he'll just default on our sovereign debt. Easy peasy. Why is everyone so worried?

POSTSCRIPT: This is a pretty good example of the Trump Dilemma™. Do you ignore this kind of desperate plea for attention? Or do you write a long, earnest piece about just why it's a very bad idea indeed? You can hardly ignore it since it's now coming from the Republican Party's presidential nominee. But giving it oxygen just gives Trump the free media he was angling for in the first place. In this case, I'm semi-ignoring it. Josh Marshall takes the opposite tack here. Decisions, decisions.

How desperate is Big Beer to regain its stranglehold on U.S. beer drinkers? So desperate that it’s not enough to mock craft beer; now, even chardonnay is seen as a threat, and that has never been the case in the history of the United States. Beer consumption has outpaced wine since before we were a country.

Nevertheless, Miller Lite came up with this commercial, which says that women should take its product to a chardonnay event. My guess is that wine is seen as a Millennial drink, and someone found a study that said Millennials are forgoing Big Beer for wine. Perhaps one of our visitors with ad agency experience can explain why chardonnay is a target, given that old white guys drink Miller Lite.

For all of my ranting about Big Wine, it has never done anything this stupid. The commercial is below — what were they thinking?

The post How desperate is Big Beer? appeared first on Wine Curmudgeon.

The CFPB has proposed a new rule that would prevent big companies from forcing their customers to accept mandatory arbitration in place of an actual trial in an actual court. Iain Murray is unhappy:

Like most of the CFPB’s rules, this may sound good at first hearing. In fact, it will be a disaster for the average consumer who enters into contracts like credit-card or mobile-phone service agreements....The inefficiency of the legal system has to be budgeted for, and so without arbitration, fees will go up and some people just won’t be offered a service at all.

....Those won’t be the only ways the consumer will suffer — those who are currently “denied their day in court” will as well. Because arbitration services are much cheaper, companies that use them generally pay all the fees for the consumer as well as their own. That’s not the case in court, where the consumer bears a considerable cost. If you are lucky enough to get a contract after this rule goes into effect, you’d better budget something for your day in court, because you’re going to have to lawyer up. Of course, there’s always the chance that you’ll be asked to participate in a class action lawsuit, which this rule is primarily designed to facilitate.

Fair enough. As it turns out, corporations all offered their services quite widely back in the dark ages before arbitration clauses, but it's true that arbitration does indeed have some benefits. Still, we're all free marketeers around here who believe in contracts freely arrived at without undue coercion. Right? So here's what I propose: my bank and my cell phone company should offer me the choice of accepting arbitration or not when I first sign up. If I accept, they offer me a discount. The CFPB's only role will be to ensure that the discount is reasonably in line with the actual cost savings from arbitration. Deal?

No? I guess there must be something else going on. I wonder what?

To beat the fuck out of a Republican, so they aren’t even waiting until she has the nomination.

"President Trump" is a dangerous proposition.

Mitt Romney, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio agree.https://t.co/fUkISvgaXC

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) May 4, 2016

People keep saying that Hillary isn’t going to know what hit her when Trump unloads. I think she does. She’s been dealing with it for decades.

I don’t think Trump knows what it is going to feel like to be bludgeoned by Clintonites who have had negative ad blue balls for a couple decades. They didn’t unload on Bernie and they got warned off Obama in 2008, so Trump is going to get the full treatment. It’s going to be fucking beautimous.

If you find yourself in Pueblo, it's probably because:1. You have friends or family that live in Pueblo.

They say that his proposals are more likely to deepen the United States’ economic pains, particularly if China or other targeted nations retaliate.

At the White House Correspondents Dinner, Wilmore called Obama the N-word. I don’t allow it in my home, but I know it has its place in black culture

Even though I have never liked the sound of the N-word, and have only ever personally experienced it in a negative context, I could not have been more moved by Larry Wilmore’s use of the word in his closing remarks as host of the White House Correspondents Dinner on Saturday night.

Wilmore said to Barack Obama: “Yo Barry, you did it, my n---a,” pounding his chest and going in for the brother-love embrace. Doing so, he broke comedic character to tell the president, to a large extent on behalf of black America, how meaningful it has been for us to have seen him in office for the past eight years. Whether viewers agree or disagree with his policies, as Wilmore noted earlier in his bit – “I agree with the policy that he’s black” – the embrace represented a moment filled with the vulnerability, truth and power of two black men seeing each other in an America that devalues, profiles, incarcerates and kills them at a startling rate.

Continue reading...

The planned renaming of a law school after Justice Antonin Scalia is creating worries among faculty and students that the public university is becoming an ideological outpost.

By this measure, the metropolitan area that looks most like the U.S. is New Haven, Connecticut, followed by Tampa, Florida, and Hartford, Connecticut. All of the 10 large metros that are demographically most similar to the U.S. overall are in the Northeast, Midwest or center of the country, with the exception of Tampa. Two of them — New Haven and Philadelphia — are even on Amtrak’s Acela (that’s “uh-SELL-ah”) line. None is in the West, though Sacramento, California, comes close at No. 12.

This is brutal. And fair.

This is basically the internet and Jeff Weaver the last two months.

(via)

Idris Elba is having a moment. He voices the ferocious “Shere Khan” in “The Jungle Book,” which came out last weekend and is the second of several films featuring the British actor scheduled for 2016. He voiced a supporting character in “Zootopia,” a bona fide hit this year. And he stars in the forthcoming film “Bastille Day”; takes another voice acting turn in “Finding Dory,” out this June; and plays the baddie in the hotly anticipated “Star Trek: Beyond,” which will be released in July. Meanwhile, the “should Elba be the next James Bond?” question has become the background radiation of the pop culture universe. So it’s about time we took a more in-depth look at Elba’s career using our Hollywood Taxonomy methodology, with box office data from OpusData and critic scores from Rotten Tomatoes, and checked out where Elba is going next.¹

Is liberalism “smug”? In an essay for Vox, Emmett Rensin says yes. “There is a smug style in American liberalism,” he writes. “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 … but by the failure of half the country to know what’s good for them.”

This “smug style” is informed by programs like The Daily Show With Jon Stewart and its offshoots, The Colbert Report and Last Week Tonight With John Oliver. It manifests on Twitter and Facebook, in tweets and status updates and displays of liberal arrogance. It’s present in how liberals talked about figures like Kim Davis, how they relate to people who disagree with them, in public and private.

Where does it come from? Rensin ties it to a demographic shift. Where once the Democrats were a working-class party, they’re now dominated by the professional and academic classes. “A movement once fleshed out in union halls and little magazines shifted into universities and major press, from the center of the country to its cities and elite enclaves,” writes Rensin. And he suggests that the smug style is one reason the working class, and the white one in particular, has kept its distance from the Democratic Party: “Finding comfort in the notion that their former allies were disdainful, hapless rubes, smug liberals created a culture animated by that contempt. The rubes noticed and replied in kind.”

It’s a comprehensive case. It’s a full-throated case. And it’s informed by a tradition of intra-left criticism of liberal elites, much of it fair and often needed. But it’s wrong. Or at least, it has three fatal flaws that make it far from persuasive.

The first is just history. That liberal smugness might deter the white working class from the Democratic Party seems reasonable, if unfalsifiable. But to suggest that it is a prime mover in their alienation from the party is to ignore the actual dynamics at work. The driving reason working-class whites abandoned the Democratic Party is race. The New Deal coalition Rensin describes was devoured by its own contradictions, chiefly, the racism needed to secure white allegiance even as the party tried to appeal to blacks.

Pressed by those blacks, Democrats tried to make good on their commitments, and when they did, whites bolted. The Democratic Party’s alliance with nonwhites is what drove those whites away, not the sniffing of comedians on cable television. And, looking at the politics of the last seven years, it’s still keeping them away. (It’s worth noting that, up until left-leaning whites and minorities elected Barack Obama president, Democrats suffered little loss with working-class whites outside of the South.)

That said, there’s no question that smug liberals exist. It’s incontestable. (I’ve complained about them myself.) But Rensin doesn’t argue for the mere existence of liberals who are smug about their beliefs and ideology. He argues that smugness is key to contemporary liberalism. That it’s all but a plank of today’s Democratic Party.

But his evidence is lacking. “The smug style in American liberalism” is defined entirely through media and social media. It is The Daily Show, it is liberal Twitter, it is Gawker. (Rensin devotes a portion of the essay to excoriating an essay by writer Hamilton Nolan.) But these are small portions—fractions—of the Democratic Party. And they’re far from representative of American liberals.

Take The Daily Show. Under Jon Stewart, the show hit its ratings peak in 2012 during the presidential election. Its viewership in the last quarter of the year? Roughly 1.7 million viewers per episode. By the time Stewart left, The Daily Show pulled daily numbers of 1.15 to 3 million viewers. As Harry Enten notes for FiveThirtyEight, even if you include online viewers, you have a modest total of 1.5 million viewers daily. By contrast, Jimmy Fallon’s The Tonight Show was seen by an average of 3.7 million people in the last quarter of 2014.

Who are The Daily Show’s viewers? According to a 2012 study, 40 percent held college degrees, compared with 25 percent of all news consumers. Similarly, 40 percent made more than $75,000 a year, compared with 26 percent of all news consumers.

Maybe this represents an important liberal constituency—an integral part of the Democratic Party. Or maybe it’s a minor and unrepresentative group of affluent people, likely clustered in a few major cities like New York City and Los Angeles. You can say the same for liberal users on Twitter (just a small minority of people use Twitter to talk about politics) and Gawker readers and perhaps even people who write for websites like Vox and Slate.

Rensin seems to know this. He even tries to address it. “The Daily Show, as it happens, is not the private entertainment of elites blowing off some steam. It is broadcast on national television,” he writes. “Twitter isn’t private. Not that anybody with the sickest burn to accompany the smartest chart would want it to be.”

This isn’t persuasive. The Daily Show might punch above its weight but it’s still at base a late-night comedy and talk show. It influences “the conversation” but doesn’t constitute it. And while The Daily Show and its peers are indeed smug, Rensin has mistaken this segment of national political dialogue for something that actually drives political activity. To posit that a show made by (and largely for) affluent, college-educated liberals somehow drives liberalism as a whole betrays an achingly parochial view of national politics.

That is the second fatal flaw. The final one is related. Affluent, college-educated liberals are just part of the Democratic Party. A substantial plurality of the party comprises nonwhites, spread throughout the country, and integral to its national and regional political victories (those liberals can’t win without them). Even if you limit this to the nonwhites who voted for Barack Obama in 2012, it dwarfs the number of people who could possibly participate in the smug liberal culture Rensin describes. Many of them—middle-aged and working-class—likely aren’t even aware it exists.

Rensin tries to deal with this fact. At the beginning of the essay, he acknowledges minority voters as part of the Democratic coalition but asserts that “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.”

Later, he writes, “The Democratic coalition in the 21^st century is bifurcated: It has the postgraduates, but it has the disenfranchised urban poor as well, a group better defined by race and immigration status than by class.” This is supposed to be a rejoinder—“Elite liberalism, and the Democratic Party by extension cannot hate poor people, they say!” he writes—but it’s not.

Rensin doesn’t seem aware, for instance, of the partnerships between black and white Democrats in the South that delivered a measure of investment in public goods through the 1970s, ’80s, and early ’90s—until racial resentment helped kill the white Southern Democrat as a political figure. He seems blind to the ways in which Hispanics of all classes became a powerful force in California, shaping the state’s politics in profound ways. Somehow, he’s missed the extent to which nonwhite voters in the Obama era have become premier coalition members, moving Obama on everything from criminal justice reform to immigration. It is too much to say that nonwhite Democrats fully shape the party’s agenda. But a quick survey of recent history shows, clearly, that they’re prime partners in power.

Missing from his description of the supposedly “bifurcated” Democratic coalition are the millions of blacks, Latinos, and Asian Americans—the large majority of each group, in fact—that aren’t the “disenfranchised urban poor.” Somehow, Latino military families in Hampton Roads, Virginia, black suburbanites in Atlanta, and Asian American entrepreneurs in Seattle have vanished, subsumed instead in a single, teeming, and undifferentiated mass.

All of this gets to the central irony of the essay: Rensin wants to condemn “elite liberalism” and the Democratic Party as an institution. But he misses the huge degree to which his vantage point on American liberalism isn’t the vantage point. Depending on where and who you are, liberalism looks different, both as politics and culture.

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. I can think of a word for that.

Read more Slate coverage of the 2016 campaign.

Are liberals too smug? Sure. That's what Emmett Rensin says at Vox, anyway. Unfortunately, his essay runs to a Voxtastic 7,000 words, so there probably aren't too many people willing to read it all the way through. These days, I'm tempted to say that the real problem with liberalism is that we've forgotten how to make a good, crisp point in a couple thousand words. We've fallen victim to the idea that longer essays signal greater importance. Maybe I'll write a 2000-word piece about that someday.

But anyway—smugness. Are liberals too smug? I'd say so, except I'm not sure smug is really the right word. Here is Rensin explaining it:

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?

....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 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've made them so wrong. They don't know any better. That's why they're voting against their own self-interest.

....It began in humor, and culminated for a time in The Daily Show, a program that more than any other thing advanced the idea that liberal orthodoxy was a kind of educated savvy....The internet only made it worse. Today, a liberal who finds himself troubled by the currents of contemporary political life need look no further than his Facebook newsfeed to find the explanation:

....NPR listeners are best informed of all. He likes that.

....Liberals aren't just better informed. They're smarter.

....They've got better grammar. They know more words.

....Liberals are better able to process new information; they're less biased like that. They've got different brains. Better ones. Why? Evolution. They've got better brains, top-notch amygdalae, science finds.

Etc.

Fair enough. But what would you call that? There's some smugness in there, sure, but I'd call it plain old condescension. We're convinced that conservatives, especially working class conservatives, are just dumb. Smug suggests only a supreme confidence that we're right—but conservative elites also believe they're right, and they believe it as much as we do. The difference is that, generally speaking, they're less condescending about it.

(Except for libertarians. Damn, but those guys are condescending.)

In any case, to boil things down a bit, Rensin accuses liberals of several faults:

• Making fun of all those working-class rubes who vote for Republicans.
• Spending too much time citing research studies and insisting that simple facts back up everything we believe.
• Adopting a pose of knowing things that are faintly arcane. "The studies, about Daily Show viewers and better-sized amygdalae, are knowing....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 John Oliver for sick burns."
• Abandoning the working class because we just can't stand their dull, troglodyte social views.

I agree with some of this. I've long since gotten tired of the endless reposting of John Oliver's "amazing," "perfect," "mic drop" destruction of whatever topic he takes on this week. I'm exasperated that the authors of papers showing that liberals are better than conservatives seem unable to write them in value-neutral ways that acknowledge the value of conservative ways of thinking. I don't like the endless mockery of flyover country rubes. We should punch up, not down.

As it happens, I think Rensin could have constructed a much better case with 7,000 words to work with. His essay didn't feel very well researched or persuasive to me, even though I agree with much of it. Still, the pushback has mostly been of the "Republicans are smug too!" variety:

I don’t care enough to read it, so I’ll ask: Does that “smug liberalism” piece address smug conservatism? (“Real America”; “lazy poor”)

— Jamison Foser (@jamisonfoser) April 23, 2016

Anyone ever been told by a liberal that you’ll burn in hell, simply because you disagree with him? Didn’t think so. But *liberals* are smug!

— Jamison Foser (@jamisonfoser) April 23, 2016

Declaring Paul Ryan a serious thinker, then refusing to entertain requests to square that with his constant falsehoods: Pretty smug!

— Jamison Foser (@jamisonfoser) April 23, 2016

But this isn't smugness. It's outrage, or hypocrisy, or standard issue partisanship. And as plenty of people have pointed out, outrage sells on the right, but for some reason, not on the left. We prefer mockery. So they get Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly, while we get Rachel Maddow and Jon Stewart.

You can find a good example in conservative criticism of political correctness on college campuses: trigger warnings, safe spaces, shouting down speakers, etc. They're infuriated by this. They think college kids are cosseted by their administrations; can't stand to be disagreed with; and have no respect for the First Amendment. But they're not usually smug or condescending about it. Most of the time they're scornful and outraged.

Generally speaking, elite conservatives think liberals are ignorant of basic truths: Econ 101; the work-sapping impact of welfare dependence; the value of traditional culture; the obvious dangers of the world that surrounds us. For working-class conservatives it's worse: they're just baffled by it all. They're made to feel guilty about everything that's any fun: college football for exploiting kids; pro football for maiming its players; SUVs for destroying the climate; living in the suburbs for being implicitly racist. If they try to argue, they're accused of mansplaining or straightsplaining or whitesplaining. If they put a wrong word out of place, they're slut shaming or fat shaming. Who the hell talks like that? They think it's just crazy. Why do they have to put up with all this condescending gibberish from twenty-something liberals? What's wrong with the values they grew up with?

So liberals and conservatives have different styles. No surprise there. The question is, do these styles work? Here, I think the answer is the same on both sides: they work on their own side, but not on the other. Outrage doesn't persuade liberals and mockery doesn't persuade conservatives. If you're writing something for your own side, as I am here most of the time, there's no harm done. The problem is that mass media—and the internet in particular—makes it very hard to tailor our messages. Conservative outrage and liberal snark are heard by everyone, including the persuadable centrist types that we might actually want to persuade. In the end, I think this is probably the real point to take away from Rensin's essay. The first law of marketing, after all, is to know your audience. Handily, that's also the first law of journalism.

The citizen pioneers who rode Colorado's first commuter rail line on its first public run to the airport Friday proclaimed their trip smooth, on time and timely.