BETTER LATE THAN NEVER, AS SOMEONE AT VOX GETS A CLUE: The Smug Style in American Liberalism. “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. . . . 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. Minority voters remained, but 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. . . . The wages of smug is Trump.”

Indeed.