[Curtis Gale Weeks]

Nietzsche addressed most of this throughout his writings. In Genealogy of Morals he wrote about the ascetics who lead the Herd, sheep leading sheep under the guise of non-selfish Priests of the Herd preaching non-selfishness.

From the article linked by Stephen: "A civilization that speaks in smarm is a civilization that has lost its ability to talk about purposes at all."

From Nietzsche's Genealogy:

I emphasize this major point of historical method all the more because it is in fundamental opposition to the now prevalent instinct and taste which would rather be reconciled even to the absolute fortuitousness, even the mechanistic senselessness of all events than to the theory that in all events a will to power is operating. The democratic idiosyncrasy which opposes everything that dominates and wants to dominate, the modern misarchism...has permeated the realm of the spirit and disguised itself in the most spiritual forms to such a degree that today it has forced its way....into the strictest, apparently most objective sciences...to the detriment of life...since it has robbed it of a fundamental concept, that of activity....Under the influence of the above-mentioned idiosyncrasy, one places instead "adaptation" in the foreground...an activity of the second rank, a mere reactivity; indeed, life itself has been defined as a more and more efficient inner adaptation to external conditions....Thus the essence of life, its will to power, is ignored...

Nietzsche even pointed up the fact that these ascetics are influenced by the will to power—the will to power permeates the herd, just as it permeates everything.

So when Scocca in the article "On Smarm" points out the fact that plutocrats, politicians, and writer-advocates of smarm are really self-interested priests of selflessness—claiming to be an antidote to the selfishness of purveyors of snark—and calls the smarmists hypocrites, he is correct. The turning-away from some issues and the turning-toward grandiose concepts like "tone" or "middle-class" and so forth is an effort to hide their own will to power.

And smarm works because of the audience's will to power. The Smarmists say to the audience, essentially, "Not through a will of my own do I do/say these things," and the audience sees that as an opportunity to have their wills expressed through these Vehicles. The Smarmists assume the role of Vehicle for the audience's will to power. To put that another way: The Smarmists appear unthreatening, to lack a selfish agenda; the audience itself can "act" in a non-selfish way—they act for the "good of the tone" or the "good of decency" or of "the middle-class"—via those Vehicles; and in this way selfishness itself can appear abolished. But woe to the Smarmist who is found out, because the audience's selfishness, the will to power in each member of the audience, will come raging forth.

The Snarkists at least do not appear to misdirect. They display their agendas up-front....but maybe not all of their agenda. Why did Scocca write that article, if not in service to a "higher ideal"? My opinion is that Smarmists and Snarkists are not very much different. "Content-free piety" is something of a misdirection, because content itself is an abstraction, and one could posit a "content-laden piety" used as a mask for the will to power. Scocca points up the way that Smarmists denigrate Snarkists*...by denigrating Smarmists. Smarmists, you see, are self-interested liars preaching a kind of let's-all-be-friends distraction from content; whereas Snarkists have content—let us all serve that content: i.e., look away from the Snarkist and toward the Snarkist's content.

I found the fact that Scocca mentioned performance interesting in the article. I think that both Smarmists and Snarkists use performative techniques in order to try to shape the world according to selfish goals—to remake the world either in their own image or, at the very least, in ways that will be beneficial to themselves. Such an impression may seem more distasteful to Smarmists, of course—but having selfish agendas, being self-serving, does not need to be viewed as an inherently evil disposition. It's natural, in my own opinion, and typically unavoidable.

*Edited because....clarity and weird unintended syntax.