The smarmy, patronizing way liberal elites talk down to the rest of us

Back in May 2024, a black studies professor — an academic of the type who writes dissertations about the semiotics of Beyonce — “clapped back” at one of her peers, a white man who had dared complain that all the jobs in his corner of academia had been given to minorities. Their grating exchange went viral, and the poor schmuck certainly won’t be finding work now.

Setting aside the content of the argument, I was struck by how these people spoke to one another:

“I mean, I’m sorry –”

“Let’s be *very* clear here”

“This is an *extremely* bad look for you”

“Umm, frankly . . .”

These are middle-aged PhDs with prestigious careers, talking like snotty teenagers or sassy drag queens. Note the overuse of sarcasm, emphasizing asterisks, exclamation points, and pregnant pause ellipses to denote how “over it” they are. They all speak in the dramatic tone of the mean girl.

“History PhD here, and uh, this thread is . . . a lot!”

You see this language, and these people, everywhere today. You know them by the “fluent in sarcasm” in bio.

The PhDs, the columnists, the policy wonks and Wonkettes, the assorted professional quippers and clappers back — public intellectuals did not talk this way twenty years ago. Lionel Trilling did not call things “brat.” This is new. Yet this bumptious patois is how our ascendant elites talk now.

I call it “Millennial Snot.”

What is Millennial Snot? Where did it come from? How did it become the prevailing liberal voice? What exactly is the matter with these people? And are we going to have to suffer this obnoxious style forever?

Liberals who have time to goof around on social media all day are probably nerds with more-or-less fake laptop jobs. They aren’t working class, otherwise they’d be working all day, but they aren’t terribly successful either, otherwise they’d have better things to do.

The Bluesky-American sits awkwardly in the middle, and this feeds his resentment. He got good grades. He’s credentialed, and believes he’s smarter than his boss. He should be running things. If only society weren’t so dumb. If only society were fair, like when he was in school, when a kind teacher rewarded his intelligence and punished ne’er-do-wells.

Pity the “front row kid,” the wordcel who grinds his youth away for straight A’s only to find that the spoils of the market go to the back row goober who inherits his dad’s used car lot.

If only there was some way to turn society upside down, so the front row kid could be on top. If only society could be more like grade school . . .

That would be a start, but the nerd doesn’t just want to be recognized for his intelligence. He also desperately wants to be cool. He wants to prove to the world that he won’t be shoved into a locker any more. He’s with it now, he uses the latest teen slang, he “understands the assignment.”

This is how you get balding hetero professors saying stuff like “she ate and left no crumbs,” and “big mad” and other phrases that will sound embarrassingly dated in a few weeks.

They hate the straight, successful white man, and love everything else — want to be everything else. So they talk like everything and anything else.

Their speech and writing is characterized by diction, syntax, and tone that reflects their resentment, and their writing has evolved into a nauseating melange of underdog-speak. They’re LARPing as snotty teenage girls, sassy black ladies, tongue-rolling drag queens, blue-collar whites (paging hicklib Tim Walz), or potty-mouthed children. Underdogs, all.

How else to explain Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) once posting this request for donations: “VP Harris’s fundraising is bussin fr. she understands the assignment — she’ll protect fundamental freedoms and defend democracy. no cap.”

Ted graduated magna cum laude from Georgetown Law. He was born in Taipei. It’s impossible to overstate how thoroughly African-American Vernacular English and gay slang have penetrated the chattering classes, even if they’re saying it with a wink.

When a tweedy white professor tweets an epic “clapback,” it’s as if he imagines an audience of marginalized folx nodding their heads along with him. “Mm-hmm. Tell ’em!”

Jon Stewart didn’t invent the smug liberal voice — Rush Limbaugh joked about latte-sipping liberals a decade earlier, and Tom Wolfe critiqued self-satisfied elite libs decades before that.

But after Stewart took the reins of “The Daily Show,” the sort of condescending chatter that was once confined to Upper West Side cocktail parties went mainstream. The nihilistic ’90s were coming to a close, and the world seemed ready for a newsman who’d openly express how stupid everything is.

More than any other figure, Stewart shaped the liberal attitude toward conservative voters as contemptible, hapless rubes who deserve relentless mockery. His “Daily Show” run normalized bitchy snark as the default mode of liberal discourse. Watching Stewart get big “clapter” for this stuff every weeknight trained a whole generation to “dunk” as praxis.

Jon Stewart’s subsequent imitators — the execrable Colbert, Oliver, Bee — aren’t his true successors. The artisans of the dunk went online, where they could do it at scale.

First, the blogosphere spawned an ecosystem of snarky commentators, many of them millennials raised on the “Daily Show.” Some of the best went pro, writing for sites like Gawker, a blog dedicated to media commentary with a snarky sensibility inspired by trenchant satire mag Spy.

But the people who read Gawker are not nearly as smart as the people who once wrote it, and the snark we see daily on Twitter pales in comparison to the brilliant takedowns that bloggers executed in the ‘00s.

Nor are they so consistent. Today’s lib is just as likely to say “How dare you sir” while simultaneously deploying a limp clapback. Millennial Snot is now so totalizing that it’s hard to imagine what a liberal even is without this voice. It’s simultaneously smug and sanctimonious, with sneering barbs and pearl-clutching deployed by the same individual, often in the same conversation.

It’s juvenile and snotty like Bart Simpson, while also impressed by its own knowingness like Lisa. It’s lazily quippy, like Sorkin or Whedon dialogue, bolting a facsimile of wit onto otherwise unimpressive, self-flattering platitudes.

It’s an establishment shill who thinks she’s a rebel. It’s the teacher’s pet who thinks she’s the class clown. It is the voice of a person whose morality can be reduced to whether or not something is a “good look.”

Millennial Snot is the apotheosis of resentment, the terminus of liberalism: A sadistic, juvenile sneer that serves to belittle and patronize the other — no longer as a means to some higher ideal, but as an end in itself.

It’s going to take a few more years, but Snot will pass away. It has to.

The Dems, and more broadly the political Left, aren’t going to survive another decade of talking down to a majority of the country. Two decades of pervasive Snot resulted in the rise of MAGA and potentially two presidential terms for Trump.

Millennial Snot rests upon a foundation of shared understanding that there is nothing less cool than being a conservative, and for a long time libs had the institutional power to perpetuate this belief. This dominance felt increasingly unshakeable throughout the Obama years and into the pandemic.

But now it feels like this hegemony is crumbling. The left-liberal coalition isn’t what it used to be, and the Dems are scrambling to pander to “White Dudes” and other moderates with ads that try to pretend the libs haven’t spent the last 20 years exclusively trying to shame them into submission.

Whether this works or not, the age of Jon Stewart liberalism is coming to a close.

One day, we will speak to one another like adults. We will yank the theater kids off the stage and stuff them back into the lockers where they belong. We’ll make it illegal to say “my dude” or “my guy.” A new age of sincerity and clarity is nigh. We’re going to make discourse great again.

Adapted with permission from Dudley Newright’s weekly digest newsletter, newrightpoast.substack.com.