John Oliver is (Still) Part of the Problem
...at some point, when you see liberals share the same videos week after week of an annoying British man sneering down a camera lens to tell you how stupid everyone else is, you do have to ask if the American left-of-center has any sense at all of how much their project has been damaged by their reputation for patronizing self-righteousness. If the Trump era has proven anything, it’s just how wildly sensitive voters are to the perception that someone somewhere is judging them. That level of sensitivity to vague slights is stupid and the grievance usually disingenuous, but that’s politics, baby. And Oliver is such a pitch-perfect caricature of progressive self-regard - snarky, aloof, judgmental, incurious - that I sometimes wonder if his show is a brilliant op pulled off by the Heritage Foundation.
Core to the liberal ethos has always been the embrace of being reasonable, in a perfectly vague but committed sense, and for a long time that included dismissing concerns for the rights of genuinely small gender identity minorities as “going too far.” Now, thanks to the way post-Obama era left-of-center politics played out, conventional liberal Democrats are generally strong supporters of trans rights, which represents real progress. Unfortunately, as part of this embrace they’ve sucked trans rights discourse into their usual shtick: acting as though all decent people already agree with them and thus disdaining the notion that they need to convince anyone of anything.
...I think Donald Trump’s incredible success, despite his obvious mental enfeeblement, proves that “You think you’re better than me?!” is the single most powerful force in contemporary American political life. Given that this is true, I simply see zero positive utility in the public persona of someone like John Oliver, whose popularity is built on the degree to which he telegraphs the lazy superiority and righteous contempt that so many voters see in liberals. At some point, we have to acknowledge that there’s a reason it’s so hard to fight the perception that liberals are incurious and arrogant scolds, looking down their noses at the rest of us: because so often, that perception is true.