On the web page of a decent article about the state of [a certain segment of] white Christians in the New Yorker, this related article box bubbled up:

My reasons for latching onto it are pretty predictable and obvious – smug, douchenozzles insult and ‘splain till they’re as red in the face as the Pinot they’re drinking and then wonder why they aren’t getting more votes.

A friend went a little deeper and ticked it off neatly:

1. Gossip, but on our side, so it’s cool
2. Ego-self-stroking
3. Mockery
4. Because this article might prove it once and for all (or, let’s keep talking to ourselves)
5. Mockery

The best part of this whole experience, though, was actually clicking into the Rousseau article, wherein you’ll find the best self-parodying New Yorker-ese ever seen and which can not be topped:

No Enlightenment thinker observing our current predicament from the afterlife would be able to say “I told you so” as confidently as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, an awkward and prickly autodidact from Geneva, who was memorably described by Isaiah Berlin as the “greatest militant lowbrow in history.”

It’s like this writer actually hangs out with us!  How often have we had this very argument?  “Which Enlightenment thinker is most entitled to say I told you so?”  “Which of the pre-Socratics can claim, if heeded, to be the most likely anti-dote of Trump?” “Which of Aquinas’s followers opened the door for modern-day evangelicals to claim the mantle of Christianity?”