You've seen it, I've seen it, we've all seen it. It's minimising to call it schadenfreude when it's really more like mörderfreude or something.
I just saw a video of a progressive reacting with glee at someone telling them a story about an (alleged) Trump supporter who is reliant on the Affordable Care Act in the US to be able to access healthcare. The story goes that he voted for Trump in part because he promised to get rid of "Obamacare", oblivious to the fact that this is the buzzword used to refer to the ACA upon which he relies, because (and this is where it strays into being exaggeration or apocryphal) Democrats bad, Obamacare bad, I hate Obamacare and I hate Obama.
The story continues and the narrator does the big reveal - you just voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act and now you won't be able to access the healthcare that you rely upon. The person reacting to this story shows increasing amounts of joy as it unfolds and, at the reveal, is gleeful and toasts the camera, taking a big gulp of their drink.
Many such cases, I get it, but it just blows my mind that:
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They didn't recognise it as a failure of the US political system that a person could vote so hard against their own interests
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They assume that they democrats are on the right side of history and that they serve the best interests of the average person
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They didn't seem at all bothered by the fact that maybe Kamala could have run on a platform of "He's taking your healthcare away - vote for me if you want to live" and won but her team failed so egregiously by not communicating this idea effectively
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They also have 4 years of Trump to deal with - they and their loved ones are also in the same situafion but they're acting like it isn't a big deal; they and everyone they care about is in the same queue for the slaughterhouse and yet they haven't figured out which way the line is moving because they're too distracted by the grisly excuse for "entertainment" which is happening ahead of them
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They would rather convince themselves that they have the correct opinion than to win or for there to be access to healthcare
These people are so smug and impotent and filled with ressentiment yet they have zero shame or self-awareness. Assuming this story is true and not just erotic fanfiction for the sadistic progressive, which is a very good possibility, where is their outrage about all this? A person who is politically naive, who is presented as being below average intelligence, who is duped by the vile bourgeois media and a despicable political system which is a grim mockery of democracy is, at the least, going to end up very unwell—if not homeless or even dead—and this scumbag is happily putting on their dancing shoes in anticipation of being able to celebrate when this person gets put in the ground??
You failed. Your team failed. Your system failed. Your democracy failed. And because of this consistent and ongoing series of failures, you hear that a person is going to suffer tremendously and probably even die but your response is to celebrate? This is some utterly depraved shit.
The next time a progressive claims to be left wing I'm not going to dispute it, I'm going to agree and tell them "Yes - the left wing of fascism." The only consolation is that it's shit like this which only serves to accelerate the collapse of the US, but it's very meagre consolation indeed.
They assume that they democrats are on the right side of history and that they serve the best interests of the average person
How on earth could anyone consider the Democrats to be "the good guys" after Biden commuted the sentences of thousands? of rich people, including the kids for cash judge, but not a single guy in prison for drugs or crimes of poverty.
I mean, most Americans still believe America is "the good guy" after all the demonic shit they do.
A lot subscribe to the idea of team politics, where their side is good and the other side is bad. Doesn't matter what they do.
That's why it's so easy to get people to vote against their own interests. These people are so propagandised that slapping the name "Obama" onto any initiative means droves of people can be made to rally against it, regardless of what the initiative actually is.
The American people are cooked, the propaganda is not going away and these people are not going to be deprogramming themselves any time soon either. They're just going to become increasingly more radicalised in the interests of capital, as they have been steadily over the last several years.
They didn't seem at all bothered by the fact that maybe Kamala could have run on a platform of "He's taking your healthcare away - vote for me if you want to live" and won but her team failed so egregiously by not communicating this idea effectively
Because democrats think that would sound like socialism and lose them the four or five never trump republican columnists that they are desperate to court.
Anyone that is poor or to the left of them is held in contempt, they are just supposed to vote for you.
One of the pernicious evils of fascism is how it cheapens all life. I know it's not a good and mature thing for me to laugh at a dead nazi. It's actually tragic that some gormless idiot got swept up in that movement and it got them killed. I still do it because I've become hardened to it. It made me worse. The Nietszchean abyss is not to be gazed into casually.
One of the problems that the liberals have is they have no solution to the evil they see in that abyss. They think they do but they don't. So all they have is this kind of reaction.
Libs love being right and they get to celebrate it now because they've got the proof that they were less wrong than the chuds. That is sufficient for a liberal. But they aren't really right. They cleared a very low bar and they're feeling their oats.
This might be kind of a libbed up take but I don’t like hearing about anyone losing healthcare, even pieces of shit. It’s not about whether or not they deserve it, it’s bad for the collective good when people don’t have healthcare. It negatively impacts us all. I’ve seen similar schadenfreude about parents who voted for Trump finding out that the Dept of Education is the reason their disabled child has an IEP and/or special education. Those kids didn’t vote for Trump and it’s actually very bad for society when children don’t have appropriate accommodations and education.
I don't think it's a libbed up take but I can give you the boilerplate lib-brained "rational self-interest" ethics response, which is just a variation on their answer to "Why would you support free education if you don't have any kids yourself?" with that answer being that we all benefit from a society where people have access to this, even if it doesn't benefit us or our loved ones directly; those people getting an education are your colleagues and neighbours and friends and everyone else in society so an educated population (or a healthy one) benefits us as individuals, if only indirectly. I don't need to point to the ongoing pandemic or previous ones to help you extend this analogy just slightly further for a real-world example of why this also applies to health. I don't think this is the ideal basis for justifying universal healthcare but if that's what it takes to shake people out of their edgy Ayn Rand phase then so be it - it's hard to argue against this point.
If you want to take a restorative justice approach then even the worst people to exist need good healthcare so they can repair some measure of the harm they have inflicted upon the world for as long as is possible.
If you want to take the most punitive approach to justice then even the worst people to exist need good healthcare so that their lives can be as long as possible in order to exact the most retribution from them because a swift death would be far too merciful for these people.
And if you're going to provide good healthcare to the very worst people in the world then you're kinda obligated to provide good healthcare to everyone else, at least if you're going to be morally consistent about it.
Yeah I don’t know how to explain to people why they should care about other people in general and children in particular. I don’t have children and won’t be having them but I want my taxes to go to education because an educated populace benefits us all and because I care about children
They may hate him now, but always remember how much liberals were nodding along to JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy about how white poors really are that bad and it’s ok for porky to exploit them, those rural poors WANT to be exploited.
Same energy I get from Vance that I do the average white liberal. This outright disturbing misanthropy for who they deem as NPCs.
Being gleeful is disgusting, but I find it hard to be empathetic to those that voted for Trump. If they didn't know what he supports they shouldn't have voted for him.
Sure, but there's a massive disinfo machine which has sprouted its own backyard propaganda industry that works 24/7 to mislead people. In a perfect world, this wouldn't exist. In a perfect world, people would be highly educated and politically developed where only if you are knowledgeable about the person you are voting for would you vote.
But based on my own anecdotal experience the average person who supports Trump isn't as intelligent and they definitely aren't as educated as the average person who supported Harris. I think it's safe to say that Trump's campaign exploited this demographic to get him into power again. Sure, if someone in his voterbase isn't grossly misguided then they have vicious political beliefs but the idea of celebrating a person's impending death because they are being stripped of healthcare for having the wrong political beliefs is really fucking vile.
The democrat supporters love touting the fact that studies show they have a higher level of intelligence and education and, often, that they demonstrate higher levels of empathy too. Yet they get a thrill out of shit like this or the carpet bombing of Gaza and, like the trees in the forest voting for the axe (like they always love accusing conservatives of being) not only do they vote for the (other) party that represents the interests of capital at their own expense but in doing so they vote for the (other) neoliberal party which continues to strip funding from welfare, education, healthcare, and housing that ensures that the next generation will have poorer educational outcomes and thus who will be in the prime demographic for conservative voters when they come of age but they are also actively ensuring that the development of the coming generations will have lower "IQ" because they are negatively impacting on nutrition during developmental years and doing shit like exposing kids to hazardous levels of lead in the water supply.
The only people who I have much more than a baseline level of sympathy for are the extreme progressives who haven't quite managed to figure it all out yet but I'm more inclined to be sympathetic to the person who is, allegedly, too stupid to know better than the person who is implicitly arguing that they themselves are more intelligent and that they do know better and yet still support a near-identical party. (Edit: I could have worded this part better. Fascists get no sympathy from me. Radicals get all my love. For all the liberal cohort, though, what I said in this paragraph applies.)
I think it just reveals a lot of liberals didn't care as much about the issues as much as they wanted to see trump supporters suffer. Blue MAGA tendencies lol.
I remember Chapo Matt making this point: USAmericans who vote for either of the two major parties have just abandoned the idea that anything could ever get better, so just vote for whatever will make things worse for the other team.
That's just the thing. The liberal-conservatives aren't even pissed off at the conservative-liberals. They are outraged that certain groups - muslims, blacks, latinos, lgbtq people - were less rabidly pro democrat than they ought to be. The entire democratic party machine courted Trump voters and liberal-conservatives will do anything, except blame the party OR the Trump voters themselves. They'd rather wish pain on the weak of society than blame their neighbors, parents or the rich.
couldn't agree more. anybody who voted for trump is a piece of shit and i'm having a real hard time getting upset about their suffering
Death to America
Good post. British radlibs act very similar if someone who voted/they think voted for Brexit gets fucked over in any way, drives me nuts and doesn't bode well for how things are gonna go when the lights go out and taps run dry for all of us.
"Would you say that Brexit was a scam?"
"Yes."
"And would you agree that it was sold to the British public through propaganda and outright lies?"
"Very much so."
"Do you take glee at the news at the victims of this mass-scale scam have faced hardship and financial ruin, if not openly wishing death upon them?"
"Of course I do."
"And would you agree that you are morally superior than these people and that you have their best interests at heart?"
"Undoubtedly."
It's shit like this attitude that I just cannot square the circle of. It's much easier for someone to detect the open scorn and contempt that another person has for them than it is to detect the lies that someone like Nigel Farage feeds them.
That's not to say that Farage isn't transparent with his bullshit but when someone genuinely hates you and wishes ill upon you, it's virtually impossible not to take notice of it. I'm not saying that reactionary and bigoted beliefs aren't contemptible or that they should go unchallenged but, generally speaking, treating people with contempt is one great big own-goal imo because you aren't gonna get far educating and agitating amongst people who you consider to be human garbage.
