This again. “It’s all the fault of you libbruls for thinking you’re so smart and being such smartybootses and making everyone else feel dumm. It’s nothing to do with money or power or hacking or bribery or lies or celebrity or misogyny or disenfranchisement or gerrymandering or the disproportionate clout of barely-populated states like Montana and Wyoming, NO, it’s all you liberals poncing around thinking you’re so so clever.”

I know many liberals, and two of them really are my best friends. Liberals make good movies and television shows. Their idealism has been an inspiration for me and many others. Many liberals are very smart. But they are not as smart, or as persuasive, as they think.

And a backlash against liberals — a backlash that most liberals don’t seem to realize they’re causing — is going to get President Trump re-elected.

Definitely. It won’t be because of all those laws making it difficult for poor people to vote, it won’t be because of the immoral Republican hacks in Congress, it won’t be because of Fox News, it will be because of a backlash against “liberals” – by which political scientist Gerard Alexander seems to mean intellectuals on the left (but not workers or people of color or teachers or students or nurses).

People often vote against things instead of voting for them: against ideas, candidates and parties. Democrats, like Republicans, appreciate this whenever they portray their opponents as negatively as possible. But members of political tribes seem to have trouble recognizing that they, too, can push people away and energize them to vote for the other side. Nowhere is this more on display today than in liberal control of the commanding heights of American culture.

Take the past few weeks. At the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in Washington, the comedian Michelle Wolf landed some punch lines that were funny and some that weren’t. But people reacted less to her talent and more to the liberal politics that she personified. For every viewer who loved her Trump bashing, there seemed to be at least one other put off by the one-sidedness of her routine.

Wait. Is the subject liberals, or is it people who can’t stand Trump? Maybe Gerard Alexander hasn’t noticed, but the category of people who can’t stand Trump is much larger than the category “liberals.” You really don’t have to be a “liberal” to despise a relentless liar and bully who seems to lack any detectable conscience or empathy or minimal decency at all. It’s actually quite insulting to conservatives to talk as if they all approve of Trump and would defend him against jokes.

To be blunt, this piece is so banal and so flimsy I find it surprising the Times published it.