Thinking about the many, many conservatives who thought Starship Troopers was a good, fun romp about killing evil aliens, think we're supposed to agree with the racist rants in the Sopranos, consider Gordon Gekko a role model, etc.
Short answer: conservatism is about expanding power structures. Satire attacks power structures, for instance it targets the most popular forms of entertainment for ridicule. Conservatives see Starship Troopers, or Blazing saddles, and can’t fathom why anyone would ever question military adventurism or structural racism, the only response they’re capable of is bloodlust for the former and guffawing at slurs for the latter.
Part this, and part the fact that a lot of satire glamorizes its target too much.
Take Starship Troopers. The protagonist is gorgeous, sleeps with two gorgeous women, is a football star, is born rich but doesn't take advantage of it, is loved by his parents/stands up to them/is still loved by them when he wants to come back, lives in a world with all sorts of cool sci-fi gadgets, joins the military (heavily glamorized in the real world and in the movie), he Tells the Truth and is a Good Soldier (even his bad boy fight with his ex's new boyfriend is done The Right Way), and eventually becomes successful (earning the respect of the tough, all-knowing mentor) despite not being particularly good at anything. Any pain he experiences along the way can be brushed off as a stage in the Hero's Journey. On a superficial level, it checks a lot of very appealing boxes. Even the violence has glamour to it: it's big and loud and splashy, if a significant character dies they get a distinctive death and usually some cool last words, and when the protagonist is injured he's perfectly healed almost instantaneously.
Not doing this is part of what makes The Sopranos so good. It puts all the ugliness of the protagonist right up front: he's fat, balding, trashy, self-destructive, destructive to everyone around him, intensely hated by everyone he cares about at some point, intensely hates everyone he cares about at some point, murders at least two relatives, is shot by his uncle, is involved in the least glamorous front business possible (literal garbage), and is ultimately shown to be not that big of player (he runs a "glorified crew" in New Jersey) and not even that rich (gets in financial trouble over 200K towards the end of the series, sees no lifestyle upgrades for all of his advancement, there are notable contrasts with the far greater wealth of Hollywood people). Everyone around him has a bunch of overtly shitty facets, too, and they constantly make trouble for themselves with how incompetent they are. The violence is unglamorous: characters will just get unceremoniously shot while pleading for their lives, there's a lot of focus on the unappealing work of body disposal, when someone's beaten badly they're shown to suffer effects for a long time (a character getting paralyzed in a beating is a whole arc, and he sticks around for multiple seasons), and when the protagonist is shot it takes him multiple episodes to heal.
I think you're onto something with the emphasis on power structures. A bit of off-topic speculation:
Jokes involving characters and a narrative often rely on status, and usually involve reversing a status relationship in some way. Classic example: Consider a person slipping on a banana peel. If the person is a struggling single mother in a poor neighbourhood, and slipping on the banana peel causes an injury that requires her to take time off work and lose income she needs to feed her family, that, to me, is not particularly funny -- she starts off in a bad and low-status place, and things just get worse for her. But if the President of the United States -- a guy who, at least in theory, is supposed to be dignified and respected -- ends a speech by saying "I promise that my administration will bring dignity back to America!" but then slips on a banana peel as he walks off the stage, that's hilarious. To paraphrase Krusty the Clown, a pie in the face is only funny if the victim has dignity to begin with.
But I get this sense that, in the US at least, there's not a universally recognized understanding of status -- possibly correlated with the lack of understanding of class and structural oppression (if only some Prussian philosopher over a hundred years ago could have described the kind of "consciousness" necessary to understand power structures in society). Which means there are a lot of people who just think watching a person get injured is funny in itself, whether it's the president or a struggling single mother. A lot of right-wing people struggle to understand the concept of "punching up" vs "punching down". Obviously I haven't done a study on this, but I bed you'd find that the audiences for various kinds of humour based around people getting injured without a structured joke beyond that are disproportionately watched by right-wing people, moderate to extreme. This would include e.g. Adam Sandler-type lazy slapstick, but also a lot of "dark" "humour" based around enjoying human suffering, "Darwin Award"-type enjoyment of stories and videos of people injuring themselves, as well as "edgy" comedians who claim they make jokes at everyone's expense but in practice tend to make jokes that support existing power structures.
Sometimes right-wingers are clever enough to realize that comedy works best when it's turning a hierarchy on its head, so they scramble to find a way to frame it as though the right-wingers are the underdogs. Which means that their humour has to attack high-status figures. They seem to have some success going after e.g. celebrities, Hollywood producers, bureaucrats, liberal politicians, university professors, journalists, anyone who's telling them they're being a jerk at any given moment and causing them to feel shame, all of whom can be construed to have high status. Or, if they want to be really insidious, they'll start out with self-deprecation to make themselves seem like the cute, goofy, innocent underdogs, e.g. pretty much anything involving identifying with Pepe or his variants.
Anyway, that's my half-baked theory of right-wing humour.
my high school english teachers screaming about how "protagonist" doesn't mean "the good guy"
I had to argue with my 9th grade English teacher this exact point. Dude wasn't good at the gig.
No sweaty, it has "pro" in it so it's the good guy.
Similarly, the "antagonist" has "ant" in it, which is why so many stories have anthropomorphic ants as the villains.
Sometimes they know it's satire, and agree with it anyway. I encountered someone online who said Ron Swanson from Parks and Rec was one of their heroes, even though they knew he was written to satirize right-wing views.
Possibly analogous to when I see the image of a drag queen and a Muslim woman sitting next to each other on a bus, with the caption "This is the Future Liberals Want" and I say, yep, that is unironically what I want (and don't call me Liberal). Or when they say "Leftist want universal health care -- next they'll want universal housing too!" and my first thought is, you're damn right I do.
doesn’t have any truthful elements to it, which is essential to satire
This is an underrated point. Seems like you can do satire in three ways:
- Taking something firmly grounded in reality and emphasizing its contradictions for humorous effect. "The Sopranos" does this.
- Creating something further from reality, but close enough to maintain a clear connection, then getting your humor from further exaggerating the outlandish parts of your real subject. Sacha Baron Cohen's "The Dictator" does this.
- Creating something far from reality, but making the characters and story points clearly analogous to a real subject, then doing Option 2. "Starship Troopers" does this.
Conservative satire usually shoots for 2 or 3, and often falls flat because they wind up too far from what the subject of their satire actually does. It's the whole "making up someone to get mad at" bit.
This got me thinking. What would be similar examples of leftist not recognizing satire?
haha, this was my thought. I can't think of any really big budget "heroes" though.
I think it's that a lot of conservatives have media preferences based on their personal politics to where they'll like/dislike a work solely on whether it agrees with their worldview, and when they encounter something they like that disagrees with them, they'll contort it around so that it does. turns lens inward Oh shit
In general, I notice that people on the right have to essentially get told what to think (hence why right-wing media is such a large genre and industry).
As a result, unless a medium explicitly says something is bad, they will think it is good if it is essentially presented as such, even if that person gets some form of punishment.
I was too young for starship troopers and only remember the grenade being shoved in the bug.
Its good?
Oh hell yeah. It's actually how I got here. The Chapo boys were guests at a live showing of the movie. Saw that on YouTube found the pod then the subreddit now I'm here.
It's basically Triumph of the Will against Space Bugs. It's a weird anti fascist movie because it depicts fascists from their own POV. It's a very odd kind of satire.
Something I think Matt pointed out which I never picked up on which seems totally obvious now is that the movie is basically the movie the fascists from a planet waging war on bugs would make about that war
Starship troopers is about a global fascist government that does space imperialism to a bug planet.
The book is unironically fashy though, so stick to the movie which is not
Verhoeven started reading the book, basically thought "this is fascist garbage", and then threw the whole thing out and made his own movie.
The same reason neo nazis loved Inglorious Bastards(even though it wasnt a satire) despite being a film about killing nazis. Theyre portrayed as powerful, terrorfying and honorable, while the Jewish-American nazi hunters showed no self control when beating a nazi with bat.
Ive also met people who identified with the spaniard officer in Pan's Labryinth for the same reason.
Leftwingers see satire while right wingers see a power fantasy.
Even if fascists are presented as bad guys, that won't make fascists denounce it, because they view themselves as the guys who do what has to be done, even if it isn't very nice.
See: how many fascists Warhammer 40k fans there are, in spite of GW insisting "but the Imperium are the bad guys!"
There's a lot of really good break down of their mind set here but I'd also like to point out that a lot of them are just clueless dipshits and they don't get the satire because they aren't thinking about it. Because their entire worldview requires them to not really think too far into anything.
I haven't thought about it much, but I'll try to spitball. A bulk of conservative people in the USA have been fooled away from their own class interests and so they have an adopted worldview and then figure out the facts to support it later, facts that are often malleable or completely fictional. I guess when they watch satire they only see the aspects of it that seem to support their worldview and then throw out the rest. They're probably able to do this with all media unless it blatantly, obviously has something they don't like, like a gay protagonist or explicitly clear endorsements of left wing stuff.
I could also just explain it as conservatives usually don't hold their convictions very strongly except certain core things (LGBTQ bad, white people good, etc). It's usually a contradictory mess of impulses and vague generalizations they can easily swap out for something else or just lie about, because it's my stance that conservatives are either wealthy and deliberately generating a nonsense ideology to fool people, or they're working class and have had their brain smoothed out by that nonsense ideology.
Correct me if I’m wrong but I don’t think that there are conservative workers. There are workers who are forced to work because they don’t have enough capital to live on, and this fact alone can turn them into fascists, but I feel like someone renting a tiny apartment without a car working at McDonald’s is probably not going to be conservative. Point being, their class interests are not confused. Typically the petite bourgeois identifies with the bourgeoisie rather than the proletariat, although there are obvious exceptions (like me).
I should also clarify that I mean economic conservative workers, even if the distinction between social and economic political beliefs is sexist and racist. You can have socially conservative economically leftwing workers (as are apparently common throughout the global south), but economically rightwing workers (known as libertarians in the USA) seem incredibly rare to me. In my experience they’re almost always disgusting white boomers who own fifty different rats’ nests they call “houses” which they rent at the most extortionate rates they can get away with. So in other words, they’re petite bourgeois.
By conservative workers I don't mean someone necessarily possessing a coherent worldview or economic framework, but rather, an everyday person who aesthetically presents as conservative in regards to their consumer habits and media preference, since that's about as far as most people go with their political ideology here. Yes, someone with some kind of working class individual with a structured right wing outlook is rare. Having a structured outlook is rare in general.
You also bring up a good point about the petite bourgeoisie. Working class conservative folk often identify their own interests as that of the petite bourgeoisie, hence their frequent vocal admiration of small businesses. (just the owners of small businesses though)
an everyday person who aesthetically presents as conservative in regards to their consumer habits and media preference, since that’s about as far as most people go with their political ideology here. Yes, someone with some kind of working class individual with a structured right wing outlook is rare. Having a structured outlook is rare in general.
Good insight. To be an incoherent normie (an aesthetic conservative) basically upholds white supremacy, capitalism, imperialism, etc.
There are definitely conservative workers. Think about the oil and gas workers, sand and gravel workers, construction workers, etc.
I think the labor hierarchy takes care of this. We Marxists always have a workaround for everything. Basically, those kinds of workers typically get paid pretty well, and if they're hardcore bourgeois they begin building their own businesses / properties as quickly as possible so they don't have to work anymore.
