Everyone I Disagree With Is Stupid
It is genuinely easy—pleasurable, even, in a self-congratulatory way—to dismiss everyone on the other side of the political spectrum as cowardly, dim, and provincial. You barely have to engage with anything. You assign the label and move on, your worldview intact. And what has this particular brand of left-liberal condescension produced? Brexit. Trump. The steady rise of nationalist parties across Europe. The pattern is global, it is accelerating, and it shows no sign of reversing.
Are all those votes coming from intelligence-free racists who want to burn the world down—people who hate foreigners and women and gay people, who nurse open nostalgia for historical atrocities? Some of them, yes. That element is real and it shouldn’t be minimized. But the bulk of those votes—and this is what the comfortable urban professional class seems constitutionally incapable of absorbing—come from working people whose quality of life has been declining for decades, who feel not just ignored but actively mocked by the political establishment that claims to speak for them.
A comment appeared on Reddit after Trump’s win that put this more plainly than most professional commentary managed. The argument: the liberal media has simply decided that working-class voters are idiots and racists, and that’s the end of the analysis. The possibility that these men and women are making choices rooted in lived experience—in specific economic anxieties, in fears about neighborhoods and jobs and services—doesn’t seem to occur to the people writing the hot takes. The lived reality of the working class is treated as either invisible or as evidence of backwardness.
These people are exhausted by being sneered at by middle-class liberals who have never personally experienced the friction they’re being told doesn’t exist. Tired of being told what’s best for them by people who bear none of the costs of the policies they advocate. Tired of being called racist for raising questions about borders or integration, tired of having friends block them on social media for holding political opinions that come not from ideology but from fear. Fear about rent. Fear about jobs being automated or outsourced. Fear about social services straining under pressure that nobody asked them about before applying it.
The media class—disproportionately left-leaning, disproportionately upper-middle-class, living in expensive cities surrounded by people who think identically—doesn’t experience any of this directly. They don’t live in communities where integration has failed in ways the multicultural brochure didn’t account for. They don’t compete for jobs at the bottom of an economy that has been restructuring against working people for thirty years. They don’t rely on public services that are overwhelmed. Their daily lives are insulated from every consequence they’re dismissing as manufactured grievance, so it costs them nothing to be ideologically pure about it.
It’s straightforward to celebrate open borders and globalization when you’re positioned to benefit from them and none of the friction lands on you personally. When the costs fall on someone with fewer options and less mobility, and your response to their distress is to call them a bigot, you should not be surprised when they stop listening to you. You should not be surprised when they vote for whoever is willing to acknowledge that the system isn’t working for everyone equally, however ugly that alternative might be.
None of this is a defense of Trump, of Brexit, of the AfD, or of the genuinely poisonous things that travel alongside these movements. The racists are in those coalitions—real ones, not imagined—and pretending otherwise is its own dishonesty. But flattening every anxious working-class voter into the worst actor in the tent is precisely the thinking that built this situation. You cannot accurately diagnose a problem you won’t describe honestly.
The media establishment ran an exhaustive war across every screen and device, mocking and publicly shaming anyone who raised even a modest objection to the prevailing consensus, and it failed. Visibly. Measurably. It will keep failing. Because ridicule isn’t an argument, and the people being ridiculed know it. They may not articulate a counter-argument—they may not even want to—but they have a vote and they know how to use it.
Until the professional class can extract itself from its sealed world and actually talk to—not at—the people it has been dismissing for years, the votes will keep migrating toward whoever is willing to sit down with working people and acknowledge that something has genuinely gone wrong for a large portion of the population, and that the people responsible for explaining the world share almost none of their circumstances. That’s not a prediction. It’s just what keeps happening, everywhere, all at once.