Samatha Bee, self-consolation, and the smug liberal problem.

CNN's "State of the Union" today began with a clip from Trump's Harrisburg rally (which took place last night, the same night as the White House Correspondents Dinner):

TRUMP: As you may know, there's another big gathering taking place tonight in Washington, D.C. Did you hear about it? A large group of Hollywood actors and Washington media are consoling each other in a hotel ballroom in our nation's capital right now.

Consoling each other. Very funny.

And then the first guest on the show is Samantha Bee, who had an alternative event last night, called "Not the White House Correspondents Association Dinner," which was... what?

JAKE TAPPER: The not -- not the -- not -- your dinner, not the other on... Not the White House Correspondents Dinner. And, more largely, what do you see as the role of comedy in the Trump era?

SAMANTHA BEE: Well, you know, I mean, listen, we -- we mostly do the show for ourselves. We just need catharsis. We need catharsis. We need a place to kind of analyze things in a different way. We need to see -- we see things through a different filter. We just need to break it down for ourselves in a way that we can understand.

Ah! In other words, you were consoling each other. Trump got it right.

Then, Tapper brought up a Ross Douthat column from last September, "Hillary Clinton's Samantha Bee Problem":

TAPPER: But let me read part of it to you: "The Democratic's Party problem in the age of Trump isn't really Jimmy Fallon," who you had criticized and others had criticized for being too soft on Trump. "Its problem is Samantha Bee, not Bee alone, of course, but the entire phenomenon that she embodies, the rapid colonization of new cultural territory by an ascendant social liberalism."... Does he have a point about smug liberals? I'm not talking about you. But... is there a smug liberal problem?...

BEE: I guess I'm -- I guess -- you know, I don't think there is. Like, I do the show for me and for people like me. And I don't really care how the rest of the world sees it, quite frankly. That's great. We make a show for ourselves. We put it out in the world. We birth it, and then the world receives it however they want to receive it.

Meade and I ended up in a long conversation about whether what Bee said amounted to a manifestation of the smug liberal problem.

Here's the Ross Douthat column for reference. His point was hard to pick up from the quote shown today. We paused and got sidetracked by Douthat's writing style — the breathless adjectives (entire... rapid... new... ascendant) and the clunky dead metaphors (one colonizes territory by expanding across a landscape horizontally, not by ascension). I had to look up the column and read it to understand what Douthat was nattering about, but it was easy to understand Tapper's "is there a smug liberal problem?" The answer is so obviously yes that you should just say "yes," and move on from there. To answer "I don't think there is" is — ironically — to talk like Trump.

Anyway, here's a bit more of Douthat's column:

The culture industry has always tilted leftward, but the swing toward social liberalism among younger Americans and the simultaneous surge of activist energy on the left have created a new dynamic, in which areas once considered relatively apolitical now have (or are being pushed to have) an overtly left-wing party line....

Among millennials, especially, there’s a growing constituency for whom right-wing ideas are so alien or triggering, left-wing orthodoxy so pervasive and unquestioned, that supporting a candidate like Hillary Clinton looks like a needless form of compromise....

At the same time, outside the liberal tent, the feeling of being suffocated by the left’s cultural dominance is turning voting Republican into an act of cultural rebellion....

This spirit of political-cultural rebellion is obviously crucial to Trump’s act. As James Parker wrote in The Atlantic, he’s occupying “a space in American politics that is uniquely transgressive, volatile, carnivalesque, and (from a certain angle) punk rock.”... Like the Sex Pistols, Parker suggests, Trump is out to “upend the culture” — but in this case it’s the culture of institutionalized political correctness and John Oliver explaining the news to you, forever.

Trump’s extremism also limits his appeal, of course.

Of course!!

But if liberals are fortunate to be facing a Johnny Rotten figure in this presidential campaign, they are still having real trouble putting him away… and if he were somewhat less volatile and bigoted and gross, liberalism would be poised to close its era of cultural ascendance by watching all three branches of government pass back into conservative hands.

Ha ha ha. That's a very funny sentence now. If Trump if he were somewhat less volatile and bigoted and gross, just think: He might be President now.