SMUG PROGRESSIVE TRANSPLANTS HELP TO EXPLAIN TRUMP’S VICTORY IN RURAL WISCONSIN:

The piece opens with the dismay of Andrea Myklebust, a left-leaning sculptor who moved to Pepin county from the twin cities because she liked the look of it:

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Here, the urban elite isn’t a faceless, distant other: It’s the enclave of liberal, mostly Twin Cities newcomers who have moved here over the past few decades—not just an abstract political imposition, but an actual physical presence. It has spawned anger and bitterness, a simmering undercurrent of alienation among many people locally born and raised. It has made “Democrat” mean something it didn’t mean a generation ago. And it was made manifest on November 8…

“We have found a whole community here,” said Pat Carlson, Wally Zick’s wife, “of very like-minded—it’s going to sound elite—but bookish, artsy, I’d say compassionate … organic foodies, the whole nine yards. It’s all transplants. It’s mostly liberals.” As for this election, and the locals, she continued, “I think they thought the liberal elite was looking down on them, and I guess, in some ways, we were. Because we couldn’t believe anybody would vote for Trump.”

Bless her heart – she went full Pauline Kael. Actually, Myklebust went far beyond Kael — the New Yorker’s film critic became infamous for simply saying that she didn’t know anyone in her elite urban circles who voted for Nixon. Myklebust is apparently terrified of the crimethink that would occur if she ever pondered why her fellow residents of Pepin County Wisconsin would vote for Trump over Hillary.

Perhaps, unlike the clay she works with, she was worried that the icky red state values might not ever wash off of her. As Fred Siegel wrote three years ago in The Revolt Against the Masses: How Liberalism Has Undermined the Middle Class, “The best short credo of liberalism came from the pen of the once canonical left-wing literary historian Vernon Parrington in the late 1920s. ‘Rid society of the dictatorship of the middle class,’ Parrington insisted, referring to both democracy and capitalism, ‘and the artist and the scientist will erect in America a civilization that may become, what civilization was in earlier days, a thing to be respected.’”

Even if she didn’t know how old that credo is, Myklebust and her “Progressive” enclave in Pepin County  appear to have taken it to heart; but missionary work generally starts with a certain amount of sympathy for those whose territory you’ve descended upon, rather than a sense of smug superiority and oikophobia. Myklebust calls her fellow leftists “compassionate,” but that’s a rather abstract idea to them, apparently.