Political engagement and economic stratification came together in an almost official attitude known as snark, a sort of snobbery about other opinions that dismissed them as low-class without going to the trouble of refuting them. Why offer an argument when an eye roll would do? Snark existed before Reagan—it is visible in the mockery that intellectuals in Woody Allen’s Manhattan (1979) aimed at their imaginary “Academy of the Overrated” (Gustav Mahler, Isak Dinesen, F. Scott Fitzgerald). And it existed after. A string of magazines in New York—Spy, Wigwag, Egg—embodied snark for a few months at
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Social media has made this 1000x worse.
