Caps mine.
It’s kinda on the tragicomic side. You got people who can’t act rationally, who can’t compromise, because their commitment to a particular political issue is immovable – based as it is on inerrant biblical truth. It’s like public executions, or women’s suffrage: the bible says yes on one and no on the other and that’s that. Onward, Christian soldiers.
Then there’s everybody else. Many people have no trouble with some restrictions on abortion, but because they are not religious fanatics, they are, broadly speaking, supportive of the right to choose. Americans “overwhelmingly backed pro-abortion rights ballot measures and candidates Tuesday night.” The blue wave was a powerful pro-choice wave.
The big exception was Idaho, Land of Shining White Supremacy. Get thee hence.
Hyperaffluence, and hyperinequality, generate some fascinating social pathologies in these United States. When lots of people here have tens of millions, up to billions, in personal wealth, it tends to make them arrogant to the point of sadism. Hence my term the Sado-state; hence William I. Robinson’s term, “sadistic capitalism” — both are efforts to capture the escalating cruelification of our country’s money and governing elites. Not just master sadist Donald Trump, of course, but his important allies and appointees: V. Ramaswamy, JD Vance, Stephen Miller, Jim Jordan, John N. Kennedy — all of them easily diagnosed as what Freudians would call sub-clinical paraphilic coercives.
Perverted money viciousness goes way back – recall the pre-revolutionary French court – but our inconceivably rich country has been generating its own particular forms of this depravity. In 2014, for instance, a reporter snuck into an ultra-private dress party for the financier members of a club called Kappa Beta Phi, where, not long after the national financial collapse, the partygoers reveled in the pain many of them had caused.
[V]eteran Kappas … gorge themselves on racks of lamb, throw petits fours at the stage, and laugh uproariously [while ridiculing] the real harm [they caused] to millions of people in the form of foreclosures, wrecked 401(k)s, and a devastating unemployment crisis… [A] group that included many of the executives whose firms had collectively wrecked the global economy in 2008 and 2009 [was] laughing off the entire disaster in private, as if it were a long-forgotten lark. (One of the last skits of the night was a self-congratulatory parody of ABBA’s “Dancing Queen,” called “Bailout King.”) These were activities that amounted to a gigantic middle finger to Main Street.
In sadistic capitalism, the suffering and deprivation generated become a source of aesthetic pleasure, leisure and entertainment for others, says Robinson; it’s as if the very effrontery of being an ordinary person with ordinary life struggles immediately qualifies you for brutal blows. Just as importantly, the very fact of having successfully exploited the American economy to an obscene degree now elevates you to a position of sadistic overlord, like the head of Oracle, who simply bought up many houses in a development near his estate and deposited his extensive personal staff in them. Established homeowners there, unaccustomed to thinking of their community as a feudal settlement, complained, but could do nothing.
The Cruelty is the Point, Adam Serwer titles his recent book, and in titling it so, he underscores the specific rough beast whose hour has come round. Although we have Ramaswamy’s attack ad to thank for prompting a national conversation about sadism, there is so much more to be said.
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For instance:
Vance’s bet is that the US is an isolationist country with white nationalist sentiments; that it will punish foreign wars and high prices and reward racism. But what the results of the midterms show is that the US is a pluralist country with a limited appetite for public cruelty…
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It’s like… Imagine a bunch of Trumpist operatives sitting around a table and discussing this Atlantic article, whose subtitle reads
SOME MIDTERM VOTERS MAY HAVE BEEN
DRIVEN TO REPUDIATE CRUELTY.
Uh-oh! Preliminary thoughts, people?
Yeah. We’re fucked.
Why?
Well haha you know the Latin. Si monumentum requiris, circumspice. If you seek our monument, look around you. Sadistic politicians inspired by sadistic Trump. Sadistic policies. It’s what we do. It’s what we are.
Can we change?
What? You mean undergo the Ludovico Technique? Do you see the lengths they take to program Alex out of the ecstasy of viciousness? For our lot, it’s orgasmically intense, hurting other people. I don’t see us changing.
Maybe find a new, kinder, leader?
All possible Trump successors are younger, more energetic, bestials.
In short, we’re fucked?
Yup.
Maybe Bret Stephens is right. Maybe Vance is trying to blame it on the Jews.
Me, I just recalled the one group of Americans Vance has always singled out as the source of our national failures – “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.” I assumed he’d blame them for the blue wave.
Maybe Vance meant to say “Jewish childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”
… black Senator? Heads up, y’all! Get a load of them Ole Miss students doing monkey grunts right on camera!
Oh no wait I made a mistake. That footage was back in 2013 when about 400 Ole Miss dudes were super-pissed that a black guy got elected president. What a fuss they made! Burned his pic! Also on camera.
No, this latest one was a bunch of Ole Miss missies being racist just tuther day. Hard to keep up.
What have the two old college friends been up to since the recent Series of Unfortunate Events?
They’ve been up to their old tricks, the rascals!
‘[In a video circulating online, a] man sits on the ground with his sweatpants on fire. He then lunges at a second person and tackles him. The second man’s clothing also catches fire, and they both roll on the ground removing their clothes as several onlookers intervene. One appears to be holding a small fire extinguisher…
Columbus [Ohio] Police Sgt. Joe Albert said it appears the matter took place on Saturday.’
Although the two men have not yet been identified, many believe they are the VP and Ramaswamy, whose friendship, starting at Yale, has always been based on shared sadomasochism.
Having been turned down by “Ultimate Fighting” Dana White, Trump has turned to Cooke-Case, well-known in her home state of New Hampshire for her feisty, no holds barred attitude. “I can think of no one better prepared to take on the fake media than Van,” said the president. “She totally knows how to defend herself and defend me.”
The White House distributed these background materials.
We’re a couple of shits
We loved old Don to bits
But now that he’s a loser
We will kick his saggy tits
We’re a couple of fucks
We smell like a garbage truck
This Sunday we will wash it off
In a big old church yuk yuk
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Old Don has asked us up for tea
We don’t know how to get there, no siree
No, siree
We would drive up Penn Avenue, but we haven’t got the price
We would skate up Penn Avenue, but there isn’t any ice
We would ride on a bicycle, but we haven’t got a bike
So we’ll run from the Avenue
Yes, we’ll run from the Avenue
Yes, to run from the Avenue’s what we like
—
Remember the Trumpians’ manifesto, Project 2025? It demanded that pornography be outlawed.
Given the predilections of the Republican elite, I’m thinking they would have exempted any form of sadism.
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Anyway, among the reasons to thank the Lord we Dems prevailed in the midterms is the blessed assurance that JD Vance and other sadism-adjacents will certainly forget all about that morsel.