There is a smug kind of person whom I know well, having been trained in the economics of control; having worked for more than thirty years with economists, engineers, mathematicians, statisticians, and others whose penchant it was to find the “best” solution to every problem; and having known (too many) “right thinking” persons whose first reaction to every disaster, sob story, and inconvenience is that government experts should make it stop (liberty, unintended consequences, and costs are of no importance).

A small sample of the smuggies’ certainties: “Efficient” means of transportation (e.g., fast intercity trains, urban light rail) should be provide by government (i.e., taxpayers) because they’re obviously the “best” way to move people, the revealed preferences of consumers (and voters) to the contrary notwithstanding. Cities should be zoned to encourage density (because, you know, cities are “cool”, “climate change”, yadayadyada), the preference of actual people (and evidence against “climate change”) to the contrary notwithstanding.

The list goes on and on. You can easily add to it even if you haven’t had your morning coffee.

The kind of smug person who holds such views holds them for many reasons: peer influence, virtue-signaling, educated incapacity, public-school and university indoctrination, and good old-fashioned snobbery (the “deplorables” must be made to do what’s in their own interest). Most such persons are also financially comfortable — too comfortable, obviously, because they seem to have nothing better to do with their money than to pay the higher taxes that inevitably result from their electoral choices: candidates who believe that government is the answer; bond issues and other ballot measures that enable politicians to spend more money to “fix” things. The less-comfortable contingent (e.g., school teachers and low-level government employees) go along to get along and because they must believe that government is good, just as a young child must believe in Santa Claus.

The agenda and constituency of the “liberal order” parallel those of the so-called liberal international order, which Sumantra Maitra addresses in a review article, “The End Times of the Liberal Order“? (Spectator USA, October 26, 2018):

A liberal order is not natural. Robert Kagan admits as much in his new book, The Jungle Grows Back, when he writes that the ‘the creation of the liberal order has been an act of defiance against both history and human nature’. Nor is a liberal order an ‘order’, or liberal in nature. It is a sort of hegemonic or imperial peace.

Nothing wrong with that, of course; peace, any peace, is important. Unfortunately, it is the liberal part, which causes the problem. An internationalist, utopian worldview, liberalism is full of crusaderly zeal, constantly ‘going abroad in search of monsters to destroy’. Liberal internationalists badly want to shape the world. When given the chance, they do manage to shape the world, very badly indeed….

[John] Mearsheimer’s The Great Delusion claims that liberalism itself is paradoxical. It supports tolerance, but it is a universalist paradigm, deeply committed to borderless values. There cannot be any compromise or cooperation, because everything, everywhere is an existential battle. This causes conflict both at home and abroad. Domestically, liberalism divides a nation into good and bad people, and leads to a clash of cultures. Internationally, it leads to never-ending wars.

Encore: Domestically, liberalism divides a nation into good and bad people, and leads to a clash of cultures.

The clash of cultures was started and sustained by so-called liberals, the smug people described above. It is they who — firmly believing themselves to be smarter, on the the side of science, and on the side of history — have chosen to be the aggressors in the culture war.

Hillary Clinton’s remark about Trump’s “deplorables” ripped the mask from the “liberal” pretension to tolerance and reason. Clinton’s remark was tantamount to a declaration of war against the self-appointed champion of the “deplorables”: Donald Trump. And war it has been. much of it waged by deep-state “liberals” who cannot entertain the possibility that they are on the wrong side of history, and who will do anything — anything — to make history conform to their smug expectations of it.

Related reading:

Joel Kotkin, “Elites Against Western Civilization“, City Journal, October 3, 2019 (examples of the smug worldview, from a non-smug academic)

Victor Davis Hanson, “The Globalist Mindset: They Hate You“, American Greatness, December 16, 2018 (more, from another non-smug academic)

Victor Davis Hanson, “The Military-Intellegence Complex“, American Greatness, November 3, 2019 (even more)

Lyle H. Rossiter Jr., M.D. “The Liberal Mind: The Psychological Causes of Political Madness“, Townhall, December 4, 2006 (a psychiatrist’s diagnosis confirms mine)

Related pages and posts (focusing on various aspects of delusional “liberalism”):

Abortion Q & A
Climate Change
Economic Growth Since World War II (see especially The Rahn Curve in Action)
Leftism
Modeling and Science
Political Ideologies
Spygate (a.k.a. Russiagate)

Hurricane Hysteria
“Tribalists”, “Haters”, and Psychological Projection
“Science is Real”
“Liberalism”: Trying to Have It Both Ways
Understanding the Resistance: The Enemies Within
Intellectuals and Authoritarianism
More Unsettled Science
Homelessness
Leninthink and Left-Think
More Unsettled Science
Not-So-Random Thoughts (XXIV) (especially The Transgender Trap: A Political Nightmare Becomes Reality and Assortative Mating, Income Inequality, and the Crocodile Tears of “Progressives”)
Climate Hysteria
Rawls vs. Reality