Contempt-signaling is the dark side (well, the even darker side) of virtue-signaling, and it's becoming an even more dominant force in politics, because it offers an emotional rush with even less effort on the part of addicts.
At least virtue-signalers might occasionally stumble into a constructive agenda now and then. Contempt-signaling is about turning politics into a sport where you're totally focused on rooting for one side to lose because you hate those people.
Contempt-signalers don't much care what their candidates nominally stand for. It doesn't matter if their agendas are nonsensical or their conduct reprehensible. If the agenda makes Bad People suffer, forces them to violate their beliefs and lose freedom, it's all good.
All that matters is the other guy loses and his supporters feel bad, ideally venting on social media for the enjoyment of the winners. Contempt-signalers want the objects of their scorn to feel marginalized and frustrated.
It's an attitude that leaves us even more vulnerable to corruption and tyranny than earlier political degenerations because so little is asked of victorious politicians other than "win and make the Bad People go crazy." They become heroes by default because they oppose villains.
And contempt-signaling is INHERENTLY tyrannical because the goal is to make government more powerful so the Bad People can be punished. The boot stamping on a human face forever is given spurs and cleats.
Contempt-signaling weakens the public soul because the electorate becomes masochistic. People feel like they deserve to be punished. They think - they were TAUGHT - America is corrupt and can only be purified by pain.
As they become wholly focused on voting AGAINST politicians with the primary goal of making their deplorable supporters feel bad, their own resistance to abuse by the elite is sapped. They become helpless cynics instead of hardened skeptics.
Who cares if government wastes oceans of money and its programs are disappointing at best, counterproductive at worst? As long as the Bad People are angry because regulations violate their principles and taxes drain their wallets, mission accomplished.
Needless to say, contempt-signalers have no interest in hearing arguments or complaints from the people they despise. In fact, they police themselves against absorbing the merest scrap of the Bad People's ideas. They are easily manipulated by shrewd ideologues.
The worst thing about contempt-signaling is that people on the Right do it too, and it's an attitude deeply hostile to limited government and individual liberty. Centralized power accumulates whether Left or Right wins each round of the game.
And it's a game the Right will never win consistently because the medium through which these "signals" transmit is largely hostile to them. Their contempt will never be excused, indulged, or venerated as the Left's is.
Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, because it's a road sincere conservatives don't want to travel. Conservatives are revolutionaries today, and the politics of contempt serve the existing power structure they wish to reform.
And at the deepest level, voting and organizing to express your contempt for adversaries is an attitude hostile to the core convictions of individual liberty and the private-sector traditions that should be more powerful than the State.
To put it bluntly: if you don't respect your political adversaries enough to let them go their own way and want the best for them as individual people, you're accepting the core tenet of collectivism, not the spirit of the American constitutional republic. /end
