WE'RE BETTER PEOPLE. WE CARE MORE.

Rush Limbaugh had at least one opportunity a week to call out the Smug Intellectuals who took that stance.

Collectivists (those who stand for government control of the means of production and how people live their lives) promise heaven but deliver hell. For them, the promised end justifies the means.”

Meaning, it doesn’t matter how many times our programs don’t work. It doesn’t matter how many times our programs fail. It doesn’t matter how much misery our programs cost and cause, it is our intentions that you must examine, our good intentions. We are good people. We are better people than you. We care more. We love more. We are more tolerant and we know what’s better for you than you do, and we want, and we demand, and we will make. And whenever it fails we’re not allowed to examine the details of the failure. We’re always supposed to focus on their good intentions. The promised end, that carrot dangling way out there in the future, all this utopia that they claim to be able to bring, it never happens.

Arnold Kling runs with a variation on that argument.  Are you ready for a throw-down?

My sense is that the central dogma of partisan Democrats is that they are the best political party because they are morally and intellectually superior to other Americans.  Contemplating otherwise is as difficult for the moderate wing of Klein and Yglesias as it is for the wokest of the woke.

The classic analysis of this core belief is Thomas Sowell’s The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy.  Sowell argues that people on the left who are politically engaged behave as if they were anointed with wisdom that others lack.  This belief is so strongly held that nothing counts as evidence against it.  It is an axiom, not an empirically falsifiable proposition.

The anointed see opposition not in terms of a mere difference of opinion.  It is illegitimate.  Their yard signs that say “We believe” in science, justice, and so on are nothing less than an accusation that you don’t believe in such things unless you are on their team.

Voltaire supposedly said something like “I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”  The anointed will instead condemn what you say as hate speech or misinformation.

Strong stuff.  It's possible that the people who consider themselves "anointed" proffer what they consider "sophisticated" or "nuanced" arguments in support of their positions, and they understand just enough of their own position to be able to brush off most objections as "simplistic."  That "intellectual superiority?"  Credentials, carefully burnished.  Think of the institutions that top the U.S. News league tables as tack rooms where graduates are issued their boots and spurs and turned loose to saddle and ride the "benighted."  Never mind that those people are, to borrow from Salena Zito, "highly educated scolds" who cling to their "ideologies and abstractions."  Which is to say, simplistic thinking dressed up in wordnoise.

It's all too much for Mr Kling.

For the anointed, losing the confidence of the public is like falling off a horse. The “abundance movement” is, like the ill-fated Robert F. Kennedy candidacy, a campaign to get the anointed back on to the horse.

The blind spot of the anointed is their inability to see that they do not belong on the horse to begin with. There is no class of Americans that is morally and intellectually superior to everyone else. Instead, each of us should be modest about what we claim to be the best way to approach political problems.

You can stir up resentment in America by talking about inequality. You can rail against “oligarchs,” landlords, and grocery stores. Or you can champion “abundance,” meaning the ability of government to build things without its own regulations getting in the way. But if you do so from the standpoint of assuming your own moral and intellectual superiority, you will find your popularity is limited, and deservedly so.

To which I can only add, "sophisticated" and "nuanced" are highfalutin' ways of describing "complicated" and "wrong" and "dressed up in wordnoise," which I refer to as "inclusive euphemism" and Pajamas Media's Jamie Wilson calls the euphemism treadmill.  "The fight for language is the fight for reality itself. If we lose our words, we lose our world."

Now, it appears, there are voices among the Anointed figuring out that the wordnoise is the jangling spurs of the deludedly credentialed bringing saddle and blanket to Militant Normals who have seen the nuance and how it failed.

Third Way is circulating a list of 45 words and phrases they want Democrats to avoid using, alleging the terms put “a wall between us and everyday people of all races, religions, and ethnicities.” It’s a set of words that Third Way suggests “people simply do not say, yet they hear them from Democrats.”

They span six categories — from “therapy speak” to “explaining away crime” — and put in sharp relief a party that authors say makes Democrats “sound like the extreme, divisive, elitist, and obfuscatory, enforcers of wokeness.” In the document, titled “Was It Something I Said?” Third Way argues that to “please the few, we have alienated the many — especially on culture issues, where our language sounds superior, haughty and arrogant,” according to the memo.

Well, yeah, what's the point of being a Better Person who Cares More if you're being stupid about being smart, and maybe not that smart anyway.  "Nuance is no substitute for effective or popular policy, and if Democrats aren’t careful they will nuance themselves into irrelevancy."  It's not that changing the vocabulary hasn't occurred to politicians of all stripes before, whether it's renaming taxing and spending as "contributions" and "investments" or the Rockridge Institute offering all sorts of advice on how not to think of an elephant.  Moreover, there's no reason an opposition can't mock whatever new language the composers of talking points come up with.  Outside the Beltway's Steven Taylor, for instance, notes that the words on the Index went from the faculty lounge to Republican talking points but generally are not standard Democrat language.  That might be true, and yet, isn't it the consequences of the therapy-speak (the open borders, the urban crime, the entering collegians reading at junior high level) that matter more than whatever Inclusive Euphemism or Caring Construction is being mocked by Republicans?

And while we're taking on pretentious political language, can we take on pretentious business communications?

So this new remake – new signage, new floor layout, new menu – is just the overflowing spillage from the rancid cesspool of corporate wokeness in which Cracker Barrel has been festering for years now.

The company is planning to flush $770 million down the drain in this project, which they dubbed “All The More,” which is about as thoughtless and unexciting as you could possibly name a remarketing campaign. The campaign itself is thought to be the brainchild of CEO Julie Felss Masino, whose legacy to date is the loss of $587 million, or 34%, in Cracker Barrel stock since taking the reins.

As expected, their media mouthpieces have been parroting the same bland, lifeless, group-tested responses that AI would reject as too robotic. They want to “freshen up the experience.” They “constantly pulsed various guest segments.” Their “updated visuals will appear across menus and marketing collateral.” They are a “a destination for comfort and community.” They are “reinvigorating the dinner menu.” They’re enthusiastic about the refreshed dining and shopping experience.”

Nobody talks like that, indeed.

Lose the smug, you might like what comes next.