IT'S JUST EASIER TO PREEN.

Two columns out of New York illustrate.

First, Salena Zito suggests that there might have been something good in Roseanne Barr's recently terminated with extreme prejudice situation comedy.

Her two-episode premiere earned an astonishing 18.2 million viewers, overperforming in the media markets located in middle of America, with Tulsa, Okla., Cincinnati and Pittsburgh leading the numbers.

Cities like New York and Los Angeles, which almost always drive the No. 1 slot, didn’t even crack the top 20.

In a twist of irony, she — of all people — delivered.

What those numbers showed was a craving for simple respect, a genuine look at a family that had a Trump supporter as one of their own who was not the butt of all the jokes or incessantly mocked.

Critics, meanwhile, were unable to separate Roseanne the person from “Roseanne” the show.

But on TV, Roseanne is a mouthy, loving working-class mom.

Perhaps on the screen, but I can't help but suspect that the Gentry Class were rooting for Roseanne Barr to be ... Roseanne Barr and thus have yet more reason to sneer at Normals.  That's just the pattern.  Years ago, All In The Family was just a big virtue signal, an opportunity for The Best and The Brightest to cringe at Archie's treatment of Edith and whoop whenever Michael zinged a talking point Archie's way.  Fifty years on, nothing has changed.

To them, Roseanne’s demise offered proof once again that they are superior and correct while those voters were exactly who they thought they were.

If the lesson the left takes away from this is that all Trump voters are racist, they will be making the same mistake the Republican party made, the Democratic Party made, the national news media made and the NFL has made in misunderstanding this coalition of people. But if wisdom prevails, they will step back and realize there was a void in the market that even Roseanne Barr could fill — a person who conservatives have reviled for years.

If there was a hole that big in Hollywood, then we should take an honest look at our programing and how our entertainment industry treats Middle America. Plenty of lessons are coming out of this chapter of Roseanne Barr’s life. Most of them are obvious: Words matter and there are consequences for hateful behavior.

But people will miss two other very important lessons. The first is we have to stop leaping to the assumption that every person who voted for Donald Trump is a racist and everything they like has tinges of racism — from guns to how the NFL has handled their national-anthem controversy.

The second is that Hollywood hasn’t been serving a great big chunk of this country for a long time. As a result, a show no one predicted would be popular broke all the records.

Two observations.

First, offering programming that, oh, entertains Normals and respects bourgeois convention takes work.  As an aside, will somebody tell me why the incidence of school shootings has increased while the incidence of Westerns on television has vanished, except on obscure cable channels?

Second, the consequences for hateful behavior are very much dependent on who is being hated on.  We probably don't have much research on the effect of television Westerns on adolescent behavior because the rewards for doing research that makes the gentry comfortable with their prejudices sometimes include ... getting to condescend and deplorable-shame in the Newspaper of Record.  I'm looking at you, Annie Kelly.  You profess to be surprised that the personal can become political in surprising ways, such as the emergence of militant traditional wives?

A frustrated yearning for a mythic past of material abundance, at a time when it is becoming increasingly difficult for young people to build careers and achieve financial security, is not gender-specific. Young people face ever more obstacles, higher demands and continually dwindling returns in the form of work benefits, job security and pay. We shouldn’t underestimate how some young white women, when faced with this bleak economic landscape and then presented with a rosy image of 1950s domestic bliss, may look back to 1960s Friedan-era feminism as having cheated them out of a family and a luxurious lifestyle, all supported by a single income. The men on the alt-right might point to diversity initiatives and mass immigration as having dismantled their career prospects; the women are furious that they have to consider career prospects at all.

Tradwives also point to the ways that the half-finished work of the sexual revolution has brought about not just male but also female discontents. The likes of pickup artists and incels claim that the sexual revolution has brought about a consequence-free life of pleasure for young women, while socially awkward or unattractive men are left behind. But the existence of tradwives points to a more nuanced reality. Female fears of objectification and sexual violence remain as potent as ever; the tradwife subculture exploits them by blaming modernity for such phenomena, and then offers chastity, marriage and motherhood as an escape.

There's enough material in those paragraphs for several essays in political economy, should anyone be interested.  Now, if traditional motherhood and largish families are a variant on demography is destiny, and if the traditionalists are having kids while the gender-fluid and the careerists are not ...

When I began studying digital anti-feminist and far-right networks for my doctorate in 2015, the number of women in these spaces seemed small enough to be insignificant. There has since been such a surfeit of women beginning careers off such networks, many infusing their particular brand of far-right ideology with “trad” rhetoric, that it now seems irresponsible not to think about them, their roles and what they reveal. The material conditions that allow far-right movements to thrive seem unlikely to change, and feminism’s work is far from done in countering the kind of sexual anxieties that the alt-right exploits. Tradwives may seem like a lunatic fringe at present, but they may not stay one for long.

Emergence is messy, and perhaps rediscovering evolutionary stable strategies, even if by people whose politics the gentry deplore, is not bad per se.

Robert S. "The Other" McCain also read Ms Kelly's essay, and he brings the smack.

The defeat of Hillary Clinton in 2016, and the subsequent policy successes of the Trump administration, have caused a panic in the degenerate intelligentsia. Leftists in academia and the media have taken off the mask, revealing themselves as totalitarians, who do not recognize the legitimacy of any opposition to the “progressive” agenda.

What the Left would like to do is to delegitimize every possible source of opposition to their cultural hegemony. One way to do this, of course, is to attach a stigma of Nazism or “white supremacy” to anyone who rejects what Thomas Sowell has called The Vision of the Anointed. Conservatives must resist this effort, by refusing to play by the rules that the Left wants to impose on political discourse. If the Left is able to dictate the rules, they guarantee that they will win the game. They know that there actually are neo-Nazis over there in the shadows, but we know this, too.

You'd think that the Smart People would figure this out. Call George W. Bush "Hitler" and what do you have to distinguish Donald Trump from George W. Bush, particularly when Donald Trump pushes back against the hectoring and the sneering.  But it's apparently easier for the likes of Annie Kelly and the people who run the Times to just toss everybody they disagree with into the basket of deplorables.  I'll give Mr McCain the final word.  "You haven’t lost your mind. The world has gone crazy, and sanity is now a hate crime."