Many people just love believing they’re part of an elite, superior group. In fact, when their self-image and self-esteem are dependent on such an idea, the notion can become impossible to relinquish. This explains supremacists, of all types — including ideological supremacists.
Enter hard-left MSNBC host Joy Reid. She believes that if you’re a conservative, you’re envious of her and other liberals because, well, you’re just not as cultured as they are.
“The thing the Right hates the most about Democrats [hmm, that’s a hard one!] is that Democrats have the culture,” she opined on MSBNC on Inauguration Day. “They have the Hollywood culture, they have the glamorous culture — and the Right hates that! They feel that the culture is too woke, it’s too multicultural, it’s not John Wayne anymore; there’s all of this multiculturalism and wokeness and liberalism, and they hate it!”
“But they also envy it,” she continued (video below. Relevant portion begins at 0:48).
Not surprisingly, commenters under the video responded with a smidgeon of sagacity and a lot of snark. The top post was, “If you have to tell people how ‘cultured you are’ You just aren’t.” Yes, and this is true of intelligence and most everything else as well.
A different respondent wrote, “Wanting a transgender 8 year old child is cultured[?]” Yet another remarked, “You know what I call people who say they are more cultured than others? Snobs.”
Of course, Reid’s first three sentences are correct. The Left has long owned the culture and its shapers — mainstream media, academia, entertainment, and Big Tech — and it is detestable. Communist activist Willi Münzenberg vowed many decades ago, “We will make the West so corrupt that it stinks.” This is now a fait accompli.
Moreover, what’s culturally acceptable determines what’s politically possible; thus does the Left’s cultural control explain its increasing political control.
Unfortunately, conservatives don’t hate our “liberal” culture enough. If they did, they’d “cancel” the mainstream media, Hollywood, and academia completely, instead of being canceled by them, and these entities would transform.
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As for Reid’s envy theory, well, she’s likely engaging in the common human phenomenon of projection. First, leftists are vice-ridden people and characteristically jealous, as even studies have shown. For example, “Professor James Lindgren, of Northwestern University in Chicago, found those who favour the redistribution of wealth are more envious than those who do not,” reported Peter Schweizer in 2008.
And because envy plagues them, leftists assume it characterizes conservatives as well. (Note: None of this means traditionalists can’t be envious, but the degree is far different.)
Moreover, Reid and other leftists do value today’s superficial, decadent, sexualized culture, so they assume conservatives must pine after the Münzenberg stink, too — and thus must be jealous that it’s not in their hands.
But, in truth, people are far more likely to be envious of what is good, or better, than what is wicked. For instance, often overlooked is that feminists cast aspersions on women devoted to domesticity because they’re sometimes jealous of those homemakers’ happy family lives and children, as I recently pointed out.
This brings us to yet another reason leftists might assume conservatives envy them: Liberals are superior — or so they imagine.
Consider: A major reason various types of chauvinism (ethnic, racial, etc.) are so appealing is that they afford even the most lacking and unaccomplished a sense of special status. For no matter what, at least you’re not like those other people — you’re part of an elite group. Thus could Nazis revel in master race status.
As for our leftists, remember how they love to talk about how stupid conservatives are, about how we’re knuckle-dragging Neanderthals? This is the same phenomenon. Leftists’ self-esteem is, often, largely based on fancying themselves members of an elite group: liberals.
The implications of this are serious. For one thing, it explains yet another reason why many leftists won’t relinquish their toxic ideology. While it’s always hard acknowledging you’re all wrong about something you’ve devoted your life to, liberals’ admission of ideological error could rob them of the very foundation of their self-image. And the narcissistic Left will collapse the economy, the culture, and even the civilization itself before it collapses that.
