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It's no surprise that statists cultivate an atmosphere of anger, bitterness, envy, and resentment among the populace. Destruction is the one thing Big Government does well. Statists want the people to demand punishment for their enemies. They are connoisseurs of contempt.
Look at all the hot political issues on the Left today, and you see nothing but contempt-signaling and demands to make hated enemies suffer. There is nothing *constructive* there, no demands for positive goods that Big Gov could be judged a failure at providing.
The Left learned this lesson from the early days of the modern welfare state. The original promises were that welfare programs would reduce poverty, and by those standards, they were a catastrophic failure. The standard was therefore changed to making poverty less uncomfortable.
Now the standards have changed again, so that "success" for left-wing initiatives is judged by how much the "wrong" people suffer - how much wealth they lose, how many "privileges" are stripped from them, how aggressively their values are trashed.
The sole preoccupation of the climate change movement, for example, is punishing the "wrong" people while giving adherents an unearned sense of moral and intellectual superiority. No program is taken seriously unless it seizes and destroys huge amounts of wealth.
This leads to such incredible absurdities as the war on plastic straws - based unapologetically on pure junk "science," costs huge amounts of money, and most importantly makes huge numbers of people suffer inconveniences, all to remove an insignificant amount of plastic.
The final absurdity was when the new straws turned out to be worse for the environment on balance than plastic straws were. But the point of the exercise was purely political: to make people suffer and feel guilty, while giving the Faithful a little jolt of smug superiority.
Everything on the Left is like that now. High taxes administered through an incoherent and unfair system, destroying so much wealth that net government revenue is flat or worse, are a feature not a bug. They're the POINT of the all this.
It's even more obvious with left-wing policies that have a racial component, which is most of them nowadays. The objective is to make the "wrong" people suffer and make them angry. What happens to the ostensible BENEFICIARIES of racialist policies is irrelevant.
The trend has been there for a long time, but the rise of social media pushed it into overdrive. Social media created a HUGE appetite for punishment politics and a mighty echo chamber for contempt-signaling, the lazy evil twin of virtue-signaling.
A great deal of social media political posturing boils down to expressing contempt for despised foes, or at least politically useful caricatures of them. Making the "wrong" people angry is a popular online political sport. News coverage and public policy are following this trend.
An astonishing amount of online political discourse is built around expressing contempt for hated groups and advocating policies that would injure them. The putative positive benefits of those policies are an afterthought. "Justice" is now a synonym for REVENGE.
This is a wonderful environment for statists. Ideologies like socialism are built upon envy and class hatred. Promising to make hated groups suffer is easy, and as mentioned, it's the one thing Big Government does really well.
And the politics of contempt relieves statists and socialists of responsibility for delivering the positive outcomes they promise. It gives them unlimited license for corruption, as you can see from the big blue cities, where vast amounts of public money vanish without a trace.
As long as the rulers of left-wing political fiefdoms can show their policies are hurting the "wrong" people and siphoning money out of hated business enterprises, it's all good. They can coast on selling destruction and revenge for generations. /end
