Liberals, You’re Not as Smart as You Think You Are
NY Times, here
I
know many liberals, and two of them really are my best friends.
Liberals make good movies and television shows. Their idealism has been
an inspiration for me and many others. Many liberals are very smart. But
they are not as smart, or as persuasive, as they think.
And
a backlash against liberals — a backlash that most liberals don’t seem
to realize they’re causing — is going to get President Trump re-elected.
People
often vote against things instead of voting for them: against ideas,
candidates and parties. Democrats, like Republicans, appreciate this
whenever they portray their opponents as negatively as possible. But
members of political tribes seem to have trouble recognizing that they,
too, can push people away and energize them to vote for the other side.
Nowhere is this more on display today than in liberal control of the
commanding heights of American culture.
Take
the past few weeks. At the White House Correspondents’ Association
dinner in Washington, the comedian Michelle Wolf landed some punch lines
that were funny and some that weren’t. But people reacted less to her
talent and more to the liberal politics that she personified. For every
viewer who loved her Trump bashing, there seemed to be at least one
other put off by the one-sidedness of her routine. Then, when Kanye West
publicly rethought his ideological commitments, prominent liberals
criticized him for speaking on the topic at all. Maxine Waters, a
Democratic congresswoman from California, remarked that “sometimes Kanye West talks out of turn” and should “maybe not have so much to say.”
. . . . liberals may be more effective at causing resentment than in getting
people to come their way. I’m not talking about the possibility that
jokes at the 2011 correspondents’ association dinner may have pushed Mr.
Trump to run for president to begin with. I mean that the “army of comedy” that Michael Moore thought would bring Mr. Trump down will instead be what builds him up in the minds of millions of voters.
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