The sadomasochistic Politics of Resentment – Republicans adore Trump despite pain he’s causing them as long as he hurts people they hate more

Why do Trump voters have no regrets? Because the people they hate are getting hurt more

The stock market is plunging, prices are rising, federal workers are getting laid off, students are being snatched off the street by immigration agents. The US is many things at the moment, but stable is not one of them. So, amid all this turmoil, how are all the Donald Trump voters feeling? Has buyer’s remorse set in? Are they starting to wonder whether voting in a convicted felon as president – a man who has declared bankruptcy six times – might not have been the wisest move?

Not according to the polls. Rather, the US appears to be a nation of Édith Piafs: they regret rien. I’m not saying that disillusioned Republicans don’t exist; do enough digging and you can certainly find a few. And journalists have been doing a lot of digging. During Trump’s first term, there was a steady stream of media pieces profiling the regretful Trump voter. The genre has remained popular through the first few months of Trump 2.0. But, according to a much-discussed segment by CNN senior data reporter Harry Enten this week, polling proves that the idea of “regretful” Trump voters is “more of a media creation than anything else”.

“I hear all these stories, all these articles, all the Trump voters, they regret what they did back in 2024. I’m here to tell you, uh-uh. Very few of them regret what they did back in 2024,” Enten said on Wednesday.

Enten was referencing a new poll from the University of Massachusetts Amherst which found that just 2% of Trump voters agreed with the statement “I regret my [2024] vote and would vote differently if I could”. That’s almost half the number (3.5%) of Trump voters who said the same thing in February 2017. Meanwhile, 74% of Trump voters said they feel very confident that they made the right choice.

Of course, polls aren’t always reliable. Indeed, I’m going to be a little cruel and refer you back to an Enten segment from five days before the election, where the data guru looked at three 2024 polling trends that pointed to a potential victory for vice-president Kamala Harris. “If Harris wins the signs were clear as day,” he declared. In short: Mark Twain had the measure of polling when he said “there are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics”.

Asking people whether they regret an important choice they just made is also a loaded question. It’s akin to asking them “are you a complete idiot?” So I would treat these particular polls with a dose of caution: just because people don’t actively admit to regretting their vote, it doesn’t mean that they’re not worried about the direction the country is headed in, or that they’re thrilled about Trump’s performance as president. On the contrary, Trump’s approval rating is dropping and a lot of people are worried about inflation and higher prices. Everyone is feeling some pain right now.

In a hyper-polarised country, however, what seems to really matter to many voters isn’t how much pain they’re feeling themselves, but whether the other side is suffering more. I could cite various academic papers on the politics of resentment; I could surface endless statistics on the subject. But I think the best summation of Trumpism is a quote from a woman called Crystal Minton from back in 2019, which went viral after being included in a New York Times report. Minton lived in a Florida town that had been ravaged by the double whammy of a hurricane and a Trump administration-instigated government shutdown, and was suffering. “I voted for [Trump], and he’s the one who’s doing this,” Minton complained. “I thought he was going to do good things. He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.”

…back in 2016 as I watched the woke social media Lynch mobs sacking people from their jobs for crimes against identity dogma, I coined a phrase ‘proxification’ to define something I saw the social media algorithms doing to our political debate…

Why are free societies sinking into an anarchic pit of social media hate?

Is it right to deny people who incite violence a public platform? You bet it is. All free societies do this to a greater or lesser extent.

Open democracies which guarantee freedom of expression have always drawn lines. You cannot attend a civic meeting, or even stand on a street corner, and shout death threats without being arrested. The obvious charge would be of threatening behaviour or causing an affray.

Scarcely anyone would be likely to dispute this. So that’s the easy one. There are far more difficult questions to examine in what is becoming a major political issue for our time.

…meanwhile Blackadder sang the blues…

Rowan Atkinson says cancel culture is digital equivalent of ‘medieval mob’

Online cancel culture is like a “medieval mob looking for someone to burn”, Rowan Atkinson has claimed.

The star of Blackadder and Mr Bean has long advocated for free speech and has campaigned against legislation he believes stifles expression.

…I’m surprised there wasn’t an Action Station petition demanding Blackadder be banned for appropriating a marginalised colour.

Social media algorithms have allowed for a toxicity of debate that is easily manipulated. A cacophony of sweaty truths all screaming for attention and no one listening. Woke Identity Politics activists have seized the joy of having no gatekeepers to express how much they hate white men while alt right Incel Nazi’s have seized upon the joy of having no gatekeepers to express how much they hate everyone else.

Millennial woke culture sees macro violence coming from micro aggressions and piously police those micro aggressions with virtue signalling purity mantras.

Alt Right Incel Nazis see white persecution and create some bullshit replacement narrative to justify their powerlessness and feed that resentment online.

This was former Green Party staffer and Tory Whanau Chief of Staff, Nadine Walker responding to a Union Wellington request for a Mayoral debate on the sale of the Wellington Airport…

Sixteen minutes later, Walker replied, “Tory is still going to decline going to this meeting, and I have to say, unfortunately, even with your commitment to a safe environment to discuss, I found this agenda item framed up in a way that is disconcerting.” Walker was referring to the agenda item described as “Pinning Councillors/Mayor down”. Rizos-Shaw was confused. “‘Pinning’ is merely community organizing slang for asking candidates yes or no questions,” she replied.

…here is the Nadine Walker quote that you have to read to believe…

“OK, thanks for clarifying,” said Walker. “I am used to Greens language/kaupapa, where metaphors that invoke violence are avoided, so perhaps that is why I was shocked to read that!”

…WOW!

Just. WOW!

“I am used to Greens language/kaupapa, where metaphors that invoke violence are avoided, so perhaps that is why I was shocked to read that!”

The only thing more passive-aggressive than that statement is slapping your own face during orgasm!

Tory’s Chief of Staff attempted to twist ‘pinning down the Mayor’ into some sexual assault safety issue and was triggered by the mere use of the word!

Brittle identity semantics like that doesn’t strengthen the Left, it weakens it as much as the woke war on free speech weakens it.

Most people are on social media and most people have a woke activist or Qanon antivaxx fanatic in their social media feed screaming their feverish truths. While these activists certainly think they are speaking truth to power by endlessly calling people out for breaches of woke mantra or fake news anti Trump lies, to everyone else they are simply toxic.

People stop seeing the political party and only see the activist and in the end proxification means the activist becomes the proxy representation of the Party, and seeing as people have negative feelings towards the proxy, they turn from the Party.

Voters aren’t voting on policy, they are voting on who made them feel resentful on social media!

The political is the personal now means what hurts me personally becomes political.

Before social media activists could only face each other off at protests or through letters to the editor or talkback radio. There were constraints of interaction but with social media there are none and it turns out the freedom to insult and dehumanise others is more addictive than nicotine, alcohol and meth combined.

Wokeness has become a puritanical religion with none of the beauty – it’s not so much the personal virtue signal, we are all dicks at times, it’s the weaponization by algorithms that make it so dangerous and damaging.

The danger of identity politics is that it locks people intellectually into only defining the world through their skin colour, genitalia or sexual orientation – it also becomes toxically subjective and tribal where the only solidarity is with other people who share the skin colour or genitalia or sexual orientation- without shared truths and values, the 1% and their 9% enablers continue to divide the rest of us 90%.

The Big Tech Tzars have manipulated our collective fear, ego, anger and insecurities through social media in a way that has led to the largest psychological civil war ever launched.

This current Western Democracy is late stage capitalism at its culturally most self defeating, which is why Trump’s win is so dangerous.

Aside from the rampant racism, transphobia, sexism, anti-intellectualism and hatred for anyone poor, liberal media despise Trump because deep down in places they never like to admit at their plush dinner parties, Trump truly represents what America is.

 

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