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New piece by Judith Butler: Trump is unleashing sadism upon the world. But we cannot get overwhelmed:
Now, in one sense, her basic point is entirely correct. There clearly is a sadistic element to right-wing politics, plainly. Beyond formal concerns about limited government and the rule of law, Trump's followers have a libidinal investment in seeing illegal migrants be deported, and in seeing the "leeches" among the federal bureaucrats be exposed for their indolence. (This is not their only motivation of course, which is where the leftist analysis starts to go wrong -- people are complex, their motivations can be multifaceted and overdetermined -- but it is a motivation). To be clear, I am a follower of Trump, and part of my evidence for the thesis advanced here comes from introspection on my own psychology. It feels good to define yourself and your own as Inside, and others as Outside, and to apportion to each what is rightly due. Not many people give a rat's ass about fairness in women's sports qua fairness in women's sports; but lots of people give a rat's ass about maintaining the purity of a symbolic space which has been constructed for a distinguished population, and punishing those who would attempt to transgress these symbolic boundaries.
Fox News recently broadcast a "helicopter ride-along" to the southern border, where they accompanied border agents at night as they scanned the riverbanks for intruders. The searchlights trained on a man who was attempting to lay low in the brush; he made a run for it, but was inevitably captured. The camera lingered as he was handcuffed and put in the patrol truck, to ensure that the viewers at home got a good look at their hard-won trophy. Even for an amoral Nietzschean overman such as myself, there was something slightly nauseating about how brazenly exploitative the whole ordeal was. Your moments of desperation, packaged and commodified by a foreign mega-conglomerate and sold as entertainment.
Now, the narrative that the left constructs for themselves is that they're somehow above all this. This is false. There is plainly a sadistic element to left-wing politics as well (and, we may as well drop the qualifiers, a sadistic element to politics as such, and ultimately to life itself -- "nature is exploitation"). They too have their Inside and Outside, and they derive just as much libidinal satisfaction from exercising such distinctions; they simply use different terminology and establish the groupings using different criteria. "Legitimate targets" are pursued with an uninterestingly human amount of sadistic glee - not a diminished amount, nor an excessive amount, but simply as much as one would expect. Who could believe that they (and I include Ms. Butler here) don't enjoy the thought of deplatforming, debanking, and de-home-ing the reactionaries, neo-Nazis, and bigots? Even after the final revolution, if there is a shortage of actual reactionaries, they will simply be fabricated and the definition of "reactionary" will be expanded to include a new outgroup, as the libidinal machine demands to be fed with an unceasing series of new targets (North Korea's appropriately named "Reactionary Ideology and Culture Rejection Law" initiated a harsh crackdown on TV shows, movies, and music from South Korea -- I guess K-pop stans are all reactionaries now.)
I disagree with Ozy's old post (and, I suppose by extension, Haidt's conclusions as well) about the differences in the moral foundations of leftism and rightism. Leftists are actually operating on all the same moral dimensions that rightists are. They, too, have ingroup loyalty -- they simply define their ingroup as "BIPOC", or "allies", or "the oppressed", rather than in terms of (their own) race, (their own) religion, or (their own) nation. And they're certainly no strangers to purity either -- racial slurs become shamanic totems, anything that could be perceived as right-wing propaganda must be aggressively purged and cleansed lest it contaminate the space. I am not, of course, advancing a facile version of horseshoe theory. Plainly there are fundamental moral disagreements between right and left, otherwise there would be no impetus to distinguish between them in the first place. But some of the particular narratives that people like to tell themselves about what distinguishes them from the other side leave something to be desired.
Although I am extremely anti-Trump I appreciate your response to Butler (I really thought a Motte post beginning like yours was going to go in another direction).
Through introspection and observation of left-wing politics, I can also conclude that sure, some sadism is at play. Look at the meme of 'punching a nazi' being something to celebrate and a type of violence that wins you brownie points. (To me this is sadism kept to where it does no harm.)
But I also feel that many on the left are extremely conscious of this tendency and try to temper it. For example I in theory hate Trump and frankly on some level love the idea of him in pain. But when, in practise, an assassination attempt was made on him, I didn't actually enjoy it at all, nor would I have done if it was successful. Instead, I felt the urge to police left wing people celebrating the shooting. But I soon noticed there weren't actually nearly as many of these as I expected. The emotional response was pretty mature.
Okay – it's hard to argue that the left is better at self-policing than the right in general. I don't know if that's a coherent point of view across the whole sweep of history.
But I do think it is true at this particular moment in US discourse. In 2025, we see the right celebrating its worst impulses and relishing trampling on its enemies in what I suspect is a deliberately unplanned way (they could have tried to be 'good managers' of the cuts they are making, but they find it more satisfying to hack at the government they see as their enemy than use a scalpel).
On the other hand, we see the left having effected a peaceful transfer of power that the right could not, at a time when they have already rowed back from the worst excesses of deplatforming and censorship.
You can’t ignore the widespread open celebration by the left of the United Healthcare CEO assassination. That surpassed any levels of sadistic glee I have seen regarding firing fed workers.
I agree with your point on that one as far as Reddit debate goes, I don't see much penetration of this view into Democrat leadership though.
Because they’re corporate shills and healthcare CEOs are their ingroup.
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