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Former President Barack Obama and former Vice President Joe Biden walk through the the Capitol for Donald Trump's inauguration ceremony.

On Monday in this space, our columnist and colleague Paul Waldman addressed the subject of why liberals are upset about Barack Obama taking a $400,000 speaking fee from a Wall Street firm, Cantor-Fitzgerald, for a speech scheduled for September.

Waldman opined, You'd almost think Obama had begun lobbying for the repeal of Dodd-Frank, or maybe gone on a seal-clubbing expedition. He continued, in an affectionate reminiscence about the Obama presidency, that a lot of the liberal disappointment or anger reflected upset at the contrast between Obama and Trump.

I cant speak for other liberals or progressives, but here are some thoughts about my own disappointment.

As the contrast with Trump vividly reinforces, Barack Obama was one of the most principled, thoughtful, and honorable people ever to serve as president. He was a model of dignity and probity.

His biggest mistakeand in my view anyway, a mistake that undermined his presidencywas to turn to the very people who had deregulated Wall Street as his senior economic team. These were the protgs of former Citibank and Goldman chieftain and top Clinton economic official Robert Rubin, many of whom had led the parade to let Wall Street run wild.

These included Lawrence Summers, Timothy Geithner and Ben Bernanke (a carryover Bush appointee reappointed by Obama), but also other denizens of the Wall Street-Washington revolving door who not only supported deregulation but also austerity, and deregulation disguised as trade, such as Peter Orszag and Michael Froman.

When Obama took office, Paul Volcker was sidelined by this crowd, as too radical on the subject of regulation. That noted Bolshevik, Paul Volcker!

This team was basically in place before the November election, when the banking system collapsed in September 2008. Obamas program was so closely associated with a politics of propping the financial system up rather than cleaning it out, that when a CNBC agitator, Rick Santelli, ranting from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (!), called for a Tea Party revolt, Santelli had more credibility as a populist than Obama did. This prefigured Donald Trump.

And when the Obama austerity team prematurely projected a recovery summer for 2010, killed legislation for a second stimulus, and warmly supported the Wall Street-inspired Bowles-Simpson Commission, Obama helped set himself up for the epic Democratic congressional defeat in the 2010 midterm elections.

Thus Wall Streets gift to Obama and the Democrats: a team of Rubins, austerity economics, and a Democratic Party that looked to Middle America like it represented somebody else.

So when Obama accepts a $400,000 Wall Street gig, this produces not just disappointment but a deep concern about a tactical tin ear and a continuing association that is politically toxic for a progressive reconnection with working people who turned to Trump. It reminds us of another leading Democratic figure with an even tinnier ear, one Hillary Clinton.

Obama, of course, has a perfect right to take the money. Thats not the question. The question is whether this is a good idea, both for Obama and for the Democrats.

Obama is now a wealthy man. His net worth is estimated around $13 million and rapidly rising. He will become much wealthier, from his books and from plenty of speaking engagements that will produce an annual income well into seven figures.

I dont object to the occasional high dollar speech, but lets see more speeches to groups seeking racial reconciliation, or to groups pursuing better job opportunities for working America, or to any venue other than Wall Street.

Obama taking that kind of money from Wall Street reinforces the impression that the very rich really do control it all; that maybe there is not so much difference between a thug billionaire former developer president and a polished former law professor ex-presidentthey are both too comfortable with the moneyed class.

One could understand and even condone Obamas walking on eggshells on the fraught subjects of race and class while he was president. But now he is free at lastfree to exercise constructive influence on the public debate. Free to personify a salutary contrast with Donald Trumpand with Wall Street.

So thats why this particular liberal thought it sadand sadly emblematicthat Obama takes a sum from Wall Street for one speech that is about ten times what the average American makes in a year. It had nothing to do with nostalgia, except maybe for FDR.

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Liberals, Obama, and that Wall Street Speaking Fee - The American Prospect

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"Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil."

Like many generalizations, this "fundamental law" of American politics, as outlined by conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer some 15 years ago, is overly broad. But it nonetheless captures something important and true about our world. Let's focus on the latter half of this maxim. It's true that liberal writers, journalists, and policy intellectuals have long expressed a level of moral outrage and even disgust about their ideological opponents that rivals and often surpasses what one typically encounters on the other side. (At the grassroots, the reverse has tended to be true, with conservatives often directing greater animosity at their ideological opponents.)

As President Trump has moved the Republican Party away from conservatism and in the direction of right-wing populism, nationalism, and anti-globalism, the liberal tendency toward moral denunciation hasn't diminished. On the contrary, it's only intensified, leading progressives to double down on their longstanding habit of seeking wherever possible to excommunicate the right from the realm of democratic argument and debate.

If liberals hope to regain the ground they've lost in recent years, they really need to change these tactics, which as often as not are self-defeating.

As I've argued on previous occasions, declaring opponents unacceptable, illegitimate, and out of bounds is a perennial temptation. That's because politics always takes place on two distinct levels. On one level is the back and forth of partisan conflict, involving persuasion, argument, electoral battles, triumphs, and defeats. On this level, pretty much anything goes as long as it abides by the rules of the political game. But there's also a second, more fundamental level of politics that involves a competition over who gets to set those rules, the boundaries of what is publicly acceptable and precisely where those boundaries will be positioned.

Far more than conservatives, liberals love to rule certain positions out of bounds in this second-order sense. They do this by appealing to the courts the branch of government that reviews, alters, and overturns the rules of the political game. They also do it in the important institutions they control within civil society such as mainstream media outlets, universities, corporations, movie studios, and other arms of the entertainment industry. When these institutions informally decide that an issue, or a specific position on an issue, is simply unacceptable because it crosses a moral line that leading members of these institutions consider inviolable, they render it beyond the pale. As I wrote in a previous column on the subject, "Over the past several decades, a range of positions on immigration, crime, gender, and the costs and benefits of some forms of diversity have been relegated to the categories of 'racism,' 'sexism,' 'homophobia,' 'white supremacy,' or 'white nationalism,' and therefore excluded from first-order political debate."

Trump's presidential campaign succeeded in part because the candidate challenged these second-order taboos (especially as they show themselves in the phenomenon of political correctness) and liberals have responded in part by attempting to reinforce the taboos, mostly through name-calling that boils down to the assertion, "You can't say that!"

Sometimes this assertion is merely rhetorical. But at other times, in the statements of various courts that have blocked Trump's policies on immigration and sanctuary cities, it's backed up by the force of the judiciary. (In France, Marine Le Pen faces a similar dynamic, with nearly the entirety of the French political establishment closing ranks against her to convey the message to the electorate that voting for the National Front is simply unacceptable.)

The problem with telling people that they're not allowed to get their way on certain issues is two-fold. First, as we've seen with the Trump phenomenon, controversial opinions don't just disappear when members of the establishment rule them out of bounds. They often reassert themselves later, more powerful and more radicalized than before. And second, the excommunicators may become fond of the tactic and apply it to an ever-expanding range of issues.

For a vivid recent example of what can happen to political thinking and debate when one side becomes wedded to upholding rigid and exceedingly narrow strictures on permissible opinion, take a look at the blistering (and bizarrely disproportionate) reaction of liberals to Bret Stephens' debut column in The New York Times. Now, I was no fan of Stephens' writing in The Wall Street Journal, where he recently resigned, especially when it came to foreign policy. Neither did I appreciate his stance on environmental issues, which struck me as overly dismissive of evidence for climate change.

But in his first Times column, Stephens came right out and described global warming, along with evidence of "human influence on that warming," as "indisputable." That sounded unobjectionable to me as did his overarching point, which was that those who favor policies to combat climate change would convince more people to go along if they sounded somewhat less absolutely, positively, unwaveringly, indisputably certain in their predictions about what is always, after all, an all-too-uncertain future.

Stephens himself predicted in the column that his humble case for humility would cause heads to explode, and sure enough they did. Liberals on Twitter sputtered in indignation, as did several center-left news sites. The Times had hired an apologist for climate change "denialism," proclaimed Slate. According to Vox, he was a "climate change bullsh--ter." (The Week, too, was not immune.) No wonder climate scientists and many others lined up to cancel their subscriptions to the newspaper in protest.

Except that none of it was true. Stephens didn't deny the reality of climate change. He merely dared to advocate a slight rhetorical adjustment to the way environmental activists and their cheering sections at websites like Slate and Vox, and newspapers like the Times, go about making their case to the wider public. What followed was not a reasoned debate about the rhetorical effectiveness of claims to modesty and certainty, dispassionate concern and outright alarmism. Instead, there was simple, pure, satisfying, but politically impotent condemnation: "You can't say that!"

But of course he can. And he will.

Which means the all-important question for liberals remains: What then?

Here is the original post:
Liberalism's self-defeating howl - The Week - The Week Magazine

The only people who cant recognize that our nation has a smug liberal problem are smug liberals. Case in point, smug liberal (and television comedienne) Samantha Bee. On Sunday, CNNs Jake Tapper asked Bee to react to a pre-election Ross Douthat column that called out Bee and other late-night comics in part for creating a comedy world of hectoring monologues, full of comedians who are less comics than propagandists liberal explanatory journalists with laugh lines.

Were all familiar with the style. It features the generous use of selective clips from Fox News, copious amounts of mockery, and a quick Wikipedia- and Google-search level of factual understanding. The basic theme is always the same: Look at how corrupt, evil, and stupid our opponents are, look how obviously correct we are, and laugh at my marvelous and clever explanatory talent. Its like sitting through an especially ignorant and heavy-handed Ivy League lecture, complete with the sycophantic crowd lapping up every word.

Bee, the host of TBSs Full Frontal, of course, couldnt see the problem and not only told Tapper that she didnt think there was a smug-liberal problem, she also howlingly added that in her own show, We always err on the side of comedy.

Yep, they sure are hilarious (language warning):

The irony is that at the exact moment when Bee was denying Americas smug-liberal problem, smug liberals were in full meltdown mode over Bret Stephenss first column for New York Times. Stephens is a Pulitzer Prizewinning journalist, anti-Trump conservative, and a former columnist for the Wall Street Journal. In his essay for the Times, Stephens had the audacity to gasp address the possibility of scientific uncertainty in the climate-change debate.

Lets be clear about what Stephens actually said. Heres his summary of the current state of climate science:

While the modest (0.85 degrees Celsius, or about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit) warming of the Northern Hemisphere since 1880 is indisputable, as is the human influence on that warming, much else that passes as accepted fact is really a matter of probabilities. Thats especially true of the sophisticated but fallible models and simulations by which scientists attempt to peer into the climate future.

Heres the translation: Science teaches us that humans have helped cause global warming, but when we try to forecast the extent of the warming and its effects on our lives, the certainty starts to recede. In addition, the activism has gotten ahead of the science. Indeed, Stephens even quotes the New York Times own environmental reporter, Andrew Revkin, who has observed that he saw a widening gap between what scientists had been learning about global warming and what advocates were claiming as they pushed ever harder to pass climate legislation.

Not only did the hyperbole not fit the science at the time, but Stephens writes censoriously asserting ones moral superiority and treating skeptics as imbeciles and deplorables wins few converts.

As if on cue, parts of liberal Twitter melted down. Stephens was instantly treated as, yes, an imbecile and a deplorable. Not only did the vast majority of commentators ignore his argument, they treated it as beneath contempt. But can anyone actually doubt that climate predictions are uncertain? Does anyone doubt that climate activists rhetoric has far outstripped not just the scientific consensus but even the bounds of good sense? This 2008 Good Morning America report is just too funny not to repost:

Note that GMAs dystopian future with Manhattan sinking under the waves is set in 2015.

Bizarrely, even the commentary calling for Stephenss head inadvertently make his point. For example, David Roberts writes in Vox that the New York Times should not have hired climate change bullshitter Bret Stephens, but buried in the middle of Robertss harangue is this to be sure paragraph:

Of course we are never certain about anything. Of course scientists have been wrong before. And of course climate science especially when it tries to project damages at smaller temporal and geographic scales, like the next several decades is filled with probabilities and uncertainties.

Umm, yes, and thats exactly why we need to ask hard questions about proposed solutions rather than simply accepting environmentalist propaganda at face value.

Liberal dogma is rapidly becoming a secular religion, a faith that conspicuously omits any requirement that one love his enemies. Christians have long struggled to keep one of Christs most difficult commands, but many leftists dont even try. To many, its not even a virtue. Indeed, the same kind of vitriol is a hallmark of the post-religious Right and is part of the explanation for extreme polarization. Post-Christian countries eschew Christian values, including the very values that can and should prevent even the most ardent activists from becoming arrogant...and intolerant.

Yes, there is a smug-liberal problem in America, one that smart liberals recognize. Stephens is right. You dont win converts with mockery. You can sometimes win grudging compliance, but you mainly make enemies especially when your mockery reveals your own ignorance and inconsistency. But as we know, the smug liberal doesnt care. They want to make enemies. After all, how do they measure their own virtue? When the Right rages, they rejoice. The unbelievers deserve their pain.

David French is a senior writer for National Review, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, and an attorney.

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America's 'Smug-Liberal Problem' - National Review

Politics: We've been arguing for some time that if you want to find intolerance, extremism, hate and bigotry in this country, it's thriving on the left. The past week provides several bits of fresh evidence of this.

First, there's the ABC News/Washington Postpoll published last week that found just 28% think the Democratic Party is "in touch with the concerns of most people in the United States today." Even among Democrats, only slightly more than half (52%) think the party is in touch with people in the country.

It's not as if President Trump or the Republicans do that much better. The poll found that 38% say Trump is in touch, and 32% say Republicans are in touch with the people.

Nevertheless, it's a shocking finding, given that Democrats have spent decades portraying Republicans as out-of-touch extremists who only care about the rich. Or, as newly appointed DNC chairman Tom Perez put it, Republicans "don't give a sh-- about people."

The New York Times fretted in an editorial that "for the first time in memory, Democrats are seen as more out of touch with ordinary Americans than the party's political opponents."

Tim Ryan, D-Ohio, called it a huge wake-up call. "Having two-thirds of the country think that your party is in la-la-land, that's a bombshell."

In fact, IBD has for years been pointing out the Democrats' drift to the fringe, using data from the IBD/TIPP poll and voting records in Congress.

As for the ABC poll being a wake-up call, the party's leadership has given no indication that it's even heard the phone ringing. Last we checked, the same people who drove the party to the fringes are still in charge.

Next we have a lengthy article in the left-of-center Daily Beast on Sunday by respected demographer Joel Kotkin, titled "The Arrogance of Blue America," in which he details how liberals have grown increasingly isolated from and intolerant of those who don't live in deep blue urban centers." Many in the deepest blue cores" are, he writes, "developing oikophobia an irrational fear of their fellow citizens" and are "abandoning the toiling masses."

"The argument made by the blue bourgeoisie is simple," he says, "Dense core cities, and what goes on there, is infinitely more important, and consequential, than the activities centered in the dumber suburbs and small towns."

Kotkin concludes his biting article by saying that progressives need to "leave their bastions and bubbles, and understand the country that they are determined to rule."

Despite such entreaties, the left appears to be retreating deeper into its bubble.

When CNN's Jake Tapper asked smug liberal comedian/political commentator Samantha Bee this weekend whether there is a "smug liberal problem," her response was: "I don't think there is."

Meanwhile, a survey of Dartmouth students published last week found that not only are liberals smug, they are far less tolerant of other viewpoints than Republicans on campus.

More than two-thirds of Republican students at Dartmouth (69%) say they'd be comfortable with a roommate who had opposing political views. But only 39% of Democrats said that. Nearly half of Democrats said they'd be uncomfortable with a roommate of a different political persuasion; just 12% of Republicans said that.

"It's unfortunate I wish we had more political diversity," Dartmouth College Democrats President Charlie Blatt said. "I think the dialogue is good." Even if Blatt believes this, many of her fellow liberals on campuses around the country clearly would rather shout down and assault people who'd provide that diversity.

This intolerance is not just limited to "free thinking" college campuses, it shows up everywhere these days on the supposedly tolerant left. When The New York Times hired Pulitzer Prize-winning commentator Bret Stephens as a columnist, liberals went ballistic.

After Stephen's first column ran, which focused on global warming and in which he argued that "treating skeptics as imbeciles and deplorables wins few converts," liberals started canceling subscriptions and the Times was forced to defend itself for publishing such environmental blasphemy.

Times' executive editor Dean Baquet said on Sunday: "Didn't we learn from this past election that our goal should be to understand different views?"

Apparently not.

RELATED:

Disagreeing With Democrats Is Now Considered Un-American

Left-Wing Bigotry And Hatred Is On Full Display After Trump Win

Your Tax Dollars At Work: Subsidizing Elite Colleges That Produce Intolerant Bigots

Read more:
Now We Know: It's Liberals Who Are Out-Of-Touch, Arrogant, Smug ... - Investor's Business Daily

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau sent out a lot of emails last week, each one sounding more needy than the last.

Now we know why: The latest Elections Canada fundraising reports reveal that the first three months of this year were grim for the governing Liberals especially in comparison to their Conservative rivals.

Even without a permanent leader, the Conservatives hauled in nearly double the dollars that the Liberals did from January to the end of March, from an impressive 10,000 more contributors. And thats not even counting the money and the donors being amassed in the Conservative leadership race.

Whoever the Conservative party chooses, their new leader will have access to the millions of dollars their party has been raising, Trudeau (or more likely a Liberal staffer) wrote in one fundraising email pitch last week.

Thats not an exaggeration. The Conservatives raised $5.3 million from about 42,000 contributors in the first quarter of 2017; the Liberals gathered up $2.8 million from roughly 32,000 donors over the same time period.

The entire field of Conservative leadership contenders, meanwhile, managed to wring another $4 million out of Canadians in the first three months of this year. Thats right. Conservative leadership contenders have out-fundraised the entire, governing Liberal Party of Canada so far in 2017.

Liberals might be tempted to write this off as the usual flurry of cash and excitement that surrounds leadership contests. But that wasnt the case four years ago, when the tables were turned and the Liberals were choosing a leader with the Conservatives still in power.

In the first three months of 2013, leading up to the Liberal leadership convention in early April that elected Trudeau, the party raised about $1.7 million. Conservatives raised $4.4 million during that same quarter.Since then, the Conservatives have lost power without, apparently, losing their knack for out-fundraising the Liberals.

One of Trudeaus email appeals last week also made reference to those heady days in 2013 when he assumed the leadership of the party (it seems like yesterday and, also, a long time ago).

Today we find ourselves on that same timeline 30 months before another election campaign in 2019, the email said, urging would-be supporters to deposit their dollars into a new 30-Month Fund.

The fundraising gap with the Conservatives is no doubt the subject of many heateddiscussions in the corridors of federal power. Is this just a temporary blip, the doldrums of power or an early warning about that power in peril?

We also learned this week that the Liberal government is planning to introduce legislation soon to govern fundraising by political parties and leadership contestants another sign that this business of pulling in cash is much on the minds of the Trudeau crewthese days.

We will be bringing forward legislation to give Canadians information about fundraisers involving cabinet ministers, party leaders, and leadership contestants. Canadians will know about the events in advance, where they are being held, the cost to attend, and they will know who attended them, Democratic Institutions Minister Karina Gould told the Commons on Monday. Goulds office wasnt offering any more information beyond promising that details would be coming soon.

The legislation is obviously a response, at least in part, to the controversy over so-called cash-for-access Liberal events that dominated the Commons for much of last fall.

If youre wondering whether thats a possible explanation for the dip in Liberal fundraising fortunes well, do the math. In the last three months of 2016, the Liberals raised $5.8 million from about 46,000 contributors, compared to $4.6 million for the Conservatives and their 36,000 donors.

Its quite possible that the drip-drip-drip of news stories about the Liberals fundraising events late last year left people with the impression that the party was rolling in dough, and thus not in dire need of citizens contributions. Or potential donors may have decided not to reward what they saw as bad behaviour.

We probably shouldnt ignore the Donald Trump effect either. Trumps surprise election victory last November may have helped Liberals in the immediate term late in 2016, with shell-shocked progressives keen to contribute to any cause seen as anti-Trump.

But theres also no doubt that, over the longer term, Trumps victory has given a jolt of adrenaline to conservative-leaning folks a sign that progressive parties can be defeated.

Trudeaus Liberals, well remember, have been working closely for years with Democrats in the United States, trading tips on raising funds and building support. That alliance doesnt look half as clever in 2017 as it did before the U.S. election; the plummet in Liberals contributions may be a sign that theyre in need of new inspiration and new tactics.

And what was Trudeau doing for much of the first three months of this year? He was paying attention to Trump, trying to stay on the presidents good side and preserve Canadas special relationship with the United States. Perhaps this single-minded focus on the United States was off-putting to potential Liberal donors and the support that Trudeau had cultivated on the progressive left.

There are a variety of other, more domestic reasons for the fundraising decline, too. Between the last quarterly report and the latest one, Trudeaus expensive vacations were in the news. It might be hard to argue now that the leader needs money when hes jetting off to private islands.

One also cant rule out the possibility that Trudeau probably cost himself some support by breaking his electoral-reform promise in early 2017 (Ive heard from Liberal voters who cut their contributions for that reason alone).

Whatever the reason, this latest fundraising report will be casting a shadow over sunny-ways politics. Somehow, I suspect well be seeing a lot more emails from Justin Trudeau in the next fundraising quarter.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the authors alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.

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The Liberals are losing the money war. Should they panic? - iPolitics.ca (subscription)