AN ACT OF CONTRITION.

Too many supposedly smart people never learned how not to be stupid about being smart.

Sometimes, though, experience teaches them.

[T]here’s [New York] Times’ resident “conservative,” Bret Stephens. He says he was wrong about Trump supporters. Not Trump himself, mind you, but his supporters, and that some of the things Stephens wrote – such as this one, in his first column about Trump – were counterproductive: “If by now you don’t find Donald Trump appalling, you’re appalling.”

You can summarize Stephens’ July 21st column this way: he says he shouldn’t have called Trump supporters stupid losers even though they are stupid losers. But they’re losers who have been wronged by the Democrats and Obama and so there was a reason they were willing to support an insurrectionist bigot like Trump and didn’t realize – unlike Stephens, who realized and still realizes – how absolutely terrible Trump was and is. But by putting them down, he alienated them and thereby lost his chance to persuade them to change their minds about Trump and see as Stephens does. He should have empathized with them more.

The Neo-Neocon post includes numerous excerpts from Mr Stephens's act of contrition. She includes a meditation on the ways in which Mr Stephens might have checked his privilege, to use a locution.

So these angry losers – losers compared to people like Bret Stephens, society’s winners – were also stupid to back Trump, but because of their anger it was understandable. That’s what Stephens failed to understand.

It’s really quite something, isn’t it? How condescending someone can be while thinking he or she is being understanding, all the while understanding very little about the actual Trump versus the Trump monster the left created and someone like Stephens agreed with because Trump was obviously so very “appalling”?

The appeal of populist politicians such as Mr Trump is probably strengthened, in a negative way, in proportion to the way that the Front Row Kids, or the Protected, hector, condescend, and deplorable-shame.  She quotes Mr Stephens.

I could have thought a little harder about the fact that, in my dripping condescension toward his supporters, I was also confirming their suspicions about people like me — people who talked a good game about the virtues of empathy but practice it only selectively; people unscathed by the country’s problems yet unembarrassed to propound solutions.

Yes, exactly, and spokesmen for the Jarrett regency encouraging people to purchase electric cars or take the bus bespeaks a similar cluelessness.  But I've come to expect that from Democrat court intellectuals.  Apparently, so does Neo.

I’m here to tell Stephens – not that he’s listening to me – that he has no hope of persuading a single Trump supporter of anything whatsoever excerpt his own cluelessness and arrogance. And I doubt he convinces anyone on the left of anything, either.

Even though Stephens considers himself to be in the persuasion business, he doesn’t even seem to realize that he’s basically in the “preaching to the choir” business as well as the “token conservative in a leftist outfit” business. Of course, in his failure to persuade he is hardly alone.

Unfortunately, that's depressingly common: does anyone else remember Mrs Carter suggesting Ronald Reagan's appeal was making what we now understand as Normals "comfortable with their prejudices," no doubt to the Earnest Nodding of Heads everywhere in the Official Region.