Anthony Bourdain: Blame Smug Liberals for Trump Election

It's time liberals stop looking down on conservatives, he says
By Evann Gastaldo,  Newser Staff
Posted Jan 1, 2017 5:13 PM CST
Updated Jan 2, 2017 12:41 AM CST
Anthony Bourdain: Blame Smug Liberals for Trump Election
Anthony Bourdain participates in the BUILD Speaker Series to discuss the online film series "Raw Craft" at AOL Studios on Wednesday, Nov. 2, 2016, in New York.   (Photo by Andy Kropa/Invision/AP)

Celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain has an idea of who to blame for Donald Trump's presidential victory: people like him. "The utter contempt with which privileged Eastern liberals such as myself discuss red-state, gun-country, working-class America as ridiculous and morons and rubes is largely responsible for the upswell of rage and contempt and desire to pull down the temple that we're seeing now," he says in a new interview with Reason. He's met a "hell of a lot of nice people ... in gun-country, God-fearing America," and found that they're on the same path as everyone else: doing "the best they can to get by, and take care of themselves and the people they love." And so when we brand their views as illegitimate, "when we mock them at every turn, and treat them with contempt, we do no one any good."

"The self-congratulatory tone of the privileged left—just repeating and repeating and repeating the outrages of the opposition—this does not win hearts and minds. It doesn't change anyone's opinions. It only solidifies them, and makes things worse for all of us," he continues. "We should be breaking bread with each other, and finding common ground whenever possible. I fear that is not at all what we've done." Click for the full interview, in which Bourdain reveals the celebrity he thinks is a "classic example of the smirking, contemptuous, privileged guy who lives in a bubble." (More Anthony Bourdain stories.)

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