In Praise of Arrogance

Walter Jones
Jul 22, 2017 · 8 min read

But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.

Jesus Christ

I fear no man, no beast or evil, brother.

Hulk Hogan

South Park, Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s deathless animated series, once featured a character named Captain Hindsight, a superhero with the “power” of — you guessed it — perfect hindsight. Whenever there was an emergency, the Captain would promptly appear on the scene, assess the situation, and advise the assembled masses as to what should have been done to avoid the ongoing calamity. This belated information would come much to the relief of everyone present, who then considered the matter closed, even as the disaster continued to unfold around them.

In the months following Donald Trump’s stupefying rise to the presidency, it seems every human being with a pulse and access to a keyboard has taken a page from Captain Hindsight’s playbook, all in an attempt to explain what, on November 7th, seemed impossible. Seconds spent typing “Why Trump Won” into Google will reward you with hour upon head-slapping hour of pundits weighing in on just why the American electorate crowned a jester king, why Republicans are in the ascendant, why the Democrats are ruined, why Michael Dukakis sneezing into a sandwich in 1988 paved the way for the Alt Right, etc. And this is to say nothing of the talking heads who are even now ceaselessly gobbling circuitous nothings to dozing octogenarians on MSNBC, CNN, and FOX News.

This isn’t surprising, of course. Political commentators have always made hay by constructing narratives to retroactively explain almost anything, and now the reasons for Trump’s win — always presented as if they should have been patently obvious all along — are crystal clear: It’s old racist white guys. Or it’s rural voters. Or it’s because Americans have a fatalistic love of celebrity. Or maybe it’s simply because a large swath of the population is just plain dumb. And that’s to say nothing of all the helpful assists from shady apparatchiks in Mother Russia. Cassandras certainly existed (most notably the easily ignored Michael Moore) but they were few and far between.

Having embarrassed themselves at the art of prediction, and finding little new to say postmortem, many of our failed augurs now switch to the safer path of prescription. Their proposals, addressed to Liberals and usually presented in the guise of helpful advice or tough love, vary according to the whim of the writer, but the subtext is always the same: You, Madame Liberal/Democratic Party/Media/Sane person, share in the blame for Donald Trump. You failed to read the tea leaves. You’re out of touch with the “real” America. You were arrogant. You were foolish. You were pretentious. You deserved this. So listen closely, and I’ll tell you where you went wrong — and how to set the world right again.

Not all of these rebukes are without merit, of course. Examining the origins of a disaster (what better descriptor for the 2016 election?) is certainly one way of avoiding it in the future, so long as the investigator begins by looking in the right places, and ends by drawing the right conclusions.

The problem is that so many Trump explainers don’t. In a crowded media landscape that favors novelty over substance, and where the only real crime is too few ad impressions, many click-hungry pontificators have taken to serving up scraps and calling it supper. These increasingly desperate attempts at finger-wagging are ostensibly meant to satisfy the endless appetites of Liberal audiences who, it must be presumed, still shuffle through their days lost in a miserable throb of confusion and anger, desperate for someone — anyone — to make sense of a world they no longer understand.

An example of this trend can be found in a recent Paste article by Emmet Penney, entitled Lectureporn: The Vulgar Art of Liberal Narcissism. In it, Penney trots out the well-worn argument that Liberal hubris is largely to blame for the recent annihilating wave of Republican victories, and — in what I can only assume is an attempt to coin a hot new political term — singles out something he calls “lectureporn” as the culprit:

So what is lectureporn? It is the media spectacle of a lecture whose audience is the opponent of the lecture’s intended target.

Penney then reels off a list of the darlings of liberal commentary — Jon Stewart, Trevor Noah, Samantha Bee, Aaron Sorkin, et al. — and presents them as purveyors of this insidious trend, which “breeds confirmation bias and a lack of empathy.”

Penney never makes it clear just how exposure to lectureporn results in a lack of empathy, beyond supposedly keeping those with liberal leanings trapped in their proverbial ivory towers, laughing at yokels from on high and forever inhabiting a hermetically sealed world informed only by The Daily Show and reruns of Sports Night.

This is essentially a repackaged version of the “echo chamber” argument that liberals have long delighted in laying at the feet of FOX News loving conservatives: that you can’t possibly have a nuanced, complete worldview when your existing worldview is never challenged and your beliefs are constantly reinforced by the right-wing media bubble you choose to inhabit.

That’s true enough, no matter what your political affiliation. But Penney’s apparent belief — that mainlining partisan talking points all the live long day leads, if not to perdition, then certainly to political ruin — evaporates once you consider that Republicans have soared from victory to victory for much of the last two decades by doing just that, a point Penney himself concedes early on. Propaganda may not create good citizens, but it certainly creates automatons hyper-loyal to the party line, a fact that the Right has proven with frightening efficacy. This leaves Penney in the unenviable position of arguing for the very thing he appears to despise. When he says:

…the fact that the Republicans are something like five state legislatures away from being able to rewrite the U.S. Constitution, highlight the danger of lectureporn and the narcissistic pathology it encourages.

He’s essentially making an argument for lectureporn, since maintaining airtight message control has long been the lifeblood of the Right (With the advent of Fox News and Right-wing talk radio, conservatives essentially invented the “safe spaces” they now ridicule Liberals for). Few would argue that a lack of empathy or a poverty of understanding have harmed Republicans — indeed it’s practically the bedrock on which the Party now stands.

And while Democrats should certainly hold themselves to a higher standard, the fact is that they really have no other choice. It isn’t Liberal groupthink that loses elections — if anything, it’s the exact opposite: The great difficulty in marshaling a much more diverse base and reigning in a multitude of competing ideas and criticisms (witness the still simmering wrath of the pro-Bernie crowd). The simple fact that the Democratic tent does not consist almost entirely of moneyed white men means lectureporn can’t, in principle, work its supposed black magic. If it did, Democrats would be winning elections — not losing them.

But perhaps I’m mistaken, and only Liberals are capable of engaging in lectureporn (this is one advantage to inventing your own terms). The universe of Penney’s essay follows strange rules, after all — such as when he makes the claim that Liberals have a monopoly on arrogance:

This belies an important distinction between liberals and conservatives, lectureporn and the ubiquitous tirade in conservative media. It’s the Nietszchean distinction between contempt and hate. You can hate an equal or someone with power over you. So conservatives hate liberals (hence their paranoiac victim narrative), whereas liberals have contempt for conservatives, which means they’re arrogant. Arrogant people are lazy in general and inept when it comes to empathy. If you can’t empathize with people, you can’t understand them. And if you can’t understand their worldview, you can’t hope to either win them over or defeat them.

These statements, so riddled with unprovable assumptions that they have all the rhetorical power of a wet fart, are virtually impossible to accept or deny. I quote them at length only to demonstrate how Penney, whether he means to or not, has essentially swallowed whole one of the Right’s most beloved talking points about Liberals, rephrasing it as the world-weary admonition of a fellow traveler: namely, that the Left is composed largely of effete intellectuals and smug media personalities who just can’t possibly comprehend the “common man” gulping down domestic beer at a Larry the Cable Guy show somewhere out there in the flyover states, or something. (Again, why one should inevitably follow from the other is not made clear). So powerful is this perception that some observers were daft enough to regard the election of a corrupt millionaire real estate developer from New York City as a boon for the common man.

In many ways this attitude represents the decadent phase of an enduring tradition of American anti-intellectualism, which has mutated from a healthy skepticism of authority into a cancer of paranoia that is rapidly spreading from the heart of the body politic to its head, eating it alive as it goes. Now any sphere of human endeavor with the potential to negatively impact the profits of wealthy elites (i.e., the Republican leadership or their owners) is subject to being politicized, and thereby effectively neutered. Simply attach the scare word “Liberal” (or even better, “Socialist”) and voila: decades of scientific consensus on climate change become liberal sleight of hand, universal healthcare a socialist plot, sensible gun control the first step toward one-world government.

It’s disturbing enough that the Republican leadership has now adopted all these ideas, birthed within its lunatic fringe, as standard party line, but it’s even more disturbing to see writers like Penney take up this bloody sword and run charging into his own camp. The idea that Liberals are “impotent losers” because they allegedly haven’t spent enough time attempting to understand people in red states is, to put it generously, an oversimplification, and insulting to those on both sides of the aisle.

What we face in the Trump era is not a paucity of empathy towards poor, misunderstood conservatives, but a real struggle against the darkest impulses of the American psyche, given new lease thanks to their embodiment in the hollow vessel that is our current President. These impulses — racism, sexism, greed, cruelty — propelled Trump to power as surely as the slow death of rural America did. If you’re a Democrat who believes that your party lost in November because everyone on the Left is somehow incapable of understanding the peculiar needs of their rust-belt countrymen (thanks in part to too much Samantha Bee) then you are engaged in an act of deception — either of yourself or of others.

The sad, simple fact is that there are people who are worthy of contempt. They deserve the opprobrium heaped upon them not because of who they are but because of the beliefs that they hold. Beliefs which are dangerous, stupid, or just flat out wrong. Such people deserve to be shamed not because of their affiliation with any one political party, but because the ideas that they trumpet are, in fact, shameful.

To admit arrogance in the face of such people isn’t a sin, it’s a virtue, and one that should be practiced more often than it is.

Walter Jones

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Word Picker. Occasional Drawist. Reluctant Human. @saladofdespair

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