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When Arrogant, Out-Of-Touch Liberal Bigots Attack

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Paul Krugman went on a snippy little Twitter rant the other day. (In case you forgot, Paul Krugman is the NY Times columnist and Nobel-prize-winning economist who predicted the stock market would crash on Trump’s election and never recover. Within a week, it hit record highs.) He was just gob-smacked that some people are saying elite New York Times columnists are out of touch with the rest of America.

A lot of people seem to be settling on the narrative that Trumpism reflects a backlash against the arrogance of liberal elites. Really?

Yes, in no way should Trump’s victory over the favored candidate of the political and media class be seen as a case of millions of Americans turning on the political and media class who have been running the country.

Also, how can you say that liberals, who worried about wage stagnation etc. don’t care about workers? IN terms of policy, liberals have been on white working class’s side, much more than the election victors.

Why, we’re the ones who brought you Obamacare, the $15 minimum wage, the War on Coal, and all those third world migrants crowding your schools. (Not a lot of Somalian refugees at Sidwell Friends.)

The answer seems in part to be that liberals haven’t been willing to promise to bring the coal etc. jobs back because they cannot, in fact, be brought back — but insisting on being realistic is perceived as elitist, arrogant, and uncaring

Actually, the answer lies in liberal policies of over-regulation, cronyist central planning, and massive third-world immigration have been killing jobs in the first place; including coal jobs.  “Hey, we killed your manufacturing job, but we will retrain you to wait tables at Buffalo Wild Wings. Because we care.”

Plus there’s the sense that liberals don’t respect the culture of the WWC. What’s odd is that I don’t see anything like the blatant way conservatives denounce “New York values”, or declare that large parts of the country aren’t the “real America”. Sure you can find some dismissive remarks about flyover country or something — but never in political discourse, from actual politicians. So what is it?

You don’t see it? Well, I’m pretty sure fish don’t see water, either.  As far as not hearing it from “actual politicians,” refer to… “And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” Or, does that not count?

One answer is anti-intellectualism — the very act of trying to figure out how to solve problems makes some see you as arrogant.Another answer — which you know is partly true — is anger that liberal elites don’t respect ordinary folks’ prejudice.

In other words, “At the end of the day, people who don’t agree with liberals are stupid bigots.”

Yeah, Trump’s election will forever be a mystery to Paul Krugman and his ilk.

Comments

  2. I like the part about “anti-intellectualism — the very act of trying to figure out how to solve problems…”

    What problems have the elites solved these last few decades? Can Krugman, et. al, point to a problem they’ve solved? A problem they’ve made less severe?

    It may be true that the jobs aren’t coming back and so on but what a lot of people, me included, would like to see is government policy not designed to screw us.

    When gov’t policy is designed to, say, make it lucrative to import cheap workers to replace Americans (forced to train their replacements), that’s due to policies designed to screw Americans that aren’t able to make 6 and 7-figure donations to politicians.

  3. I love how idiots — who have demonstrated their idiocy over and over — claim to be “intellectuals”.

    We don’t need “intellectuals”. We need competence. We need people who really know things, rather than just credentialed idiots.

  4. What’s odd is that I don’t see anything like the blatant way conservatives denounce “New York values”, or declare that large parts of the country aren’t the “real America”.

    Um….Trump supporters were not the first to refer to themselves as the “basket of deplorables”, honey.

  7. You nailed that one. Also it is not just the WWC ( white working class ) that he cannot understand, there IS a black working class as well. A lot of them worked in my office and they did not all follow the Dem talking points.

  8. When people like Krugman, Friedman, Dowd and the others on the NYT Opinion pages have their columns replaced by “Patel”, “Ramanan”, and “Khan”; and the NYT announces the HUGE savings by hiring these H1-B intellectuals, I’d love to see how happy they are that they have Obamacare instead of paycheck.