Sarandon has a new Casper napmobile for relaxing on her busy schedule promoting Bernie

Is Liberalism 'Smug'? by James Boule Slate

Boule's response to the VOX article posted next argues that VOX's Rensin makes a good case, but he's wrong for three key reasons.

"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."

The Smug Style in American Liberalism VOX

"There is a smug style in American liberalism. 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 — not really — but by the failure of half the country to know what's good for them.

In 2016, the smug style has found expression in media and in policy, in the attitudes of liberals both visible and private, providing a foundational set of assumptions above which a great number of liberals comport their understanding of the world.

It has led an American ideology hitherto responsible for a great share of the good accomplished over the past century of our political life to a posture of reaction and disrespect: a condescending, defensive sneer toward any person or movement outside of its consensus, dressed up as a monopoly on reason.

The smug style is a psychological reaction to a profound shift in American political demography."

Testosterone Overload

Virtual Manspreading: When Men Take Up Extra Space Online Vice Motherboard

I'm in a secret pro-Hillary FB group meant to be a refuge from mansplaining. It's an energetic, positive, very smart space. Today -- for the third time -- a Bernie Bros came out of the darkness (men are very active in the group), mounted his soapbox and proceeded to tell us everything that is wrong about the FB group we love to death. In honor of another Bernie Bros, mansplainer masquerading in a Hillary bunker, we share Vice's discussion of 'Manspreading', meaning men who take up way more than their share of digital space, on subjects where no one cares to hear their thoughts. Like women's periods, for example. ~ Anne