As Max Read notes in New York’s issue on reactionaries, “There is power in transgression—power that liberals lost when they won the culture war and began to set the boundaries of social and cultural acceptability. The new new right may never swallow the American cultural mainstream, especially so long as social-justice and socialist movements on the left challenge its rise, but that doesn’t mean the country isn’t going to be wrestling with its influence, and its bomb-throwers, for a generation.”

There is a lot of truth to those articles; to Scott Alexander’s recent observations about “neutral” and conservative institutions; to Caitlin Flanagan’s argument that sneering TV comedians have contributed to liberal smugness and a backlash from alienated conservatives; and to David French’s concurrence this week in National Review, where he pans shows like John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight and Full Frontal with Samantha Bee.

As he put it, “we are all familiar with the style.”

Disagreeing is difficult given his description. “The basic theme is always the same,” he wrote. “Look at how corrupt, evil, and stupid our opponents are, look how obviously correct we are, and laugh at my marvelous and clever explanatory talent.”

But wait a minute. There is something missing in these critiques, something I would expect many liberals to miss, but that attentive conservatives ought to notice. Yes, there is a smug style in liberalism. Yes, it is wrongheaded and politically counterproductive. But this is not just a liberal trait, or even mostly a liberal trait.

This trait is everywhere in U.S. politics and culture. And it is ubiquitous in conservatism.

French comes closest to acknowledging this:

Liberal dogma is rapidly becoming a secular religion, a “faith” that conspicuously omits any requirement that one love his enemies. Christians have long struggled to keep one of Christ’s most difficult commands, but many leftists don’t even try. To many, it’s not even a virtue. Indeed, the same kind of vitriol is a hallmark of the post-religious Right and is part of the explanation for extreme polarization. Post-Christian countries eschew Christian values, including the very values that can and should prevent even the most ardent activists from becoming arrogant . . . and intolerant.

But note that smug vitriol and contempt for political and ideological opponents is not a new development that just started manifesting on a post-Christian right, after George W. Bush and Mitt Romney gave way to Donald J. Trump. Smug vitriol is in fact an old standby that has been part of movement conservatism’s core for decades.

To grow up in Orange County, California, as I did in the 1980s and 1990s, was to encounter many conservatives who resented the idea that somewhere, there might be smug liberals sneering at them––yet where one constantly heard liberals disparaged as malign idiots in a milieu where similar language about an ethnic minority was unthinkable. Many of these otherwise lovely conservatives sat in disdainful judgment of liberals far more often than the typical liberal even thought about anyone like them. But they truly felt they were the objects of the condescending vitriol. In a weird way, they had internalized a view of themselves as cultural inferiors.