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Notes -
I want to talk about Ressentiment, specifically the intro to a book I read of the same name by Max Schaler. I'm surprised the motte/rationalist circles haven't discussed it more, because it seems extremely relevant to the culture war. Here's the definition given in the book:
The reason I bring it up is that I see this emotional pattern as the driving force behind modern politics. More on the populist right surely, but the left also has a weird sort of ressentiment in which they kind of hate their own culture, see whiteness / western civ as a stain that they can never get rid of.
Importantly though I think the right falls into the definition of being 'impotent' FAR more than the left, which as this quote explains is crucial to the whole process of ressentiment:
Ultimately I know a ton has been written about this topic, but curious what folks here think of the idea?
Relevant Prior post, which in turn links back to my first AAQC
My problem with ressentiment is that I so rarely run into someone talking about it as something they are suffering, rather than a double-reverse-uno in which they are obsessed with how someone else is suffering from ressentiment, and as such their politics should be dismissed as the politics of envy.
Historically this is the province of the left, but it is better understood as the virus of identity politics in general.
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Yes, when I first learned about Slave Morality 10 years ago, I immediately thought "wait this is just social justice." However, the modern culture war isn't primarily focused on impotent weakness. It is more correct to say social justice is just Feminine Norms. This explains sympathy for the weak while also explaining why certain Ressentiments are not left-coded (e.g. Incels).
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I first came across the idea of ressentiment in this 2009 blog post, which in hindsight feels quite prescient - the right-wing inferiority complex, Palin as proto-Trump, and so on. As it says, you can't provide a political solution to a psychological problem, though I would probably reframe that as you can't force a political solution to a cultural or social problem, much the same way that Donald Trump could ascend to the most powerful office in the world but he could not make New York elites stop feeling contempt for him.
The word doesn't appear in the Sanchez piece, or in your top level post, but I think one of the key issues here is envy. Ressentiment is hatred combined with envy - it is the despising of people for being in the place that you feel you ought to be, it is simultaneously craving their validation and seeking to destroy them. If you ask any right-winger, "Do you want New York Times readers to like you?", they'll answer "No, of course not!", and on the surface level that's probably correct, but in the big picture I think they want the sort of validation or felt authority or elite status that one associates with the New York Times.
If you've read Screwtape Proposes a Toast, I think there's something here of the "I'm as good as you" attitude. I sometimes run into works by culturally conservative writers that express, as Lewis puts it, "the itching, smarting, writhing awareness of an inferiority which the patient refuses to accept".
This does not have anything to do with actual inferiority - just the perception thereof. It is entirely possible for people to feel this kind of hateful envy toward their own intellectual inferiors, if those inferiors have the professorships and go on the television and in general enjoy an entitlement to respect that the resentful person does not.
I've singled out the right here, but let's be fair - what about the left? Almost no pathology, in politics, is restricted to a single tribe.
I have perhaps less to say here, because there is already a great deal of writing about the left and envy that is obvious enough. The socialist left feel ressentiment and envy toward the mainstream left. Many on the socialist or extreme left manage the impressive feat of feeling simultaneously that they are the true rebels and radicals speaking truth to power and that they are entitled to good jobs and comfortable offices and big incomes. But even within the hallowed halls of media and academia, I think there is a kind of ressentiment that goes something like, "I'm smarter than them, I'm morally better than them, I'm more compassionate than them, I have better taste than them, so why do they have all the money?" It's hardly the most original observation in the world to say that plenty of lefty commentators have this kind of envy-hatred of Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos. Just as the conservative ressentiment is feeling that cultural elites occupy a status or command a respect that they do not deserve, the progressive ressentiment is the same feeling about economic elites.
In both cases I notice, within the tribe, a kind of endless group therapy that consists of people reassuring each other, "Yes, you are better than them". Be it Fox News or Bluesky, affirmation or validation has become one of the core activities of politics.
Thus, from both the left and the right perspective, what you get is a kind of performative attempt to offend the other side, to prove how little you care about what they think. From the right, this is Palin and Trump and triggering the libs; from the left I think it's more to do with luxury beliefs. Drag queens doing blasphemous tableaux before the Olympics, to pick a recent example. From either direction, you publicly show how little you care for the sensibilities or the sacred values of the other side, even if, underneath, it's not hard to see the desire for validation.
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Is ressentiment a good model here? As I understand it, the basic idea of ressentiment is, essentially, moral cope. Being unable to live up to your society's virtues, you redefine virtue to reflect the traits you already have (or are at least reasonably capable of attaining). I'm not going to say it describes nobody, but I don't think it describes the prevailing splits in American politics. Those are, I think, mostly about substantive and long-running values disagreements, and those disagreements are not explained by ressentiment.
Right-wing populists aren't abandoning left-wing values they cannot attain; they are rejecting standards they never supported. There's definitely a powerful element of resentment - a feeling that they are denied the status and respect to which they are properly entitled - but that is not the same thing. Not dissimilarly, I think the upswing in left-wing populism is directly traceable to anger over perceived moral hypocrisy and systemic economic failures rather than some tension between their understanding of conventional virtues and what they themselves can achieve.
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I'm not sure what "Ressentiment" adds to the discussion, or why it looks like a fake French version of resentment, which is similar and widely understood. If someone is resentful about their impotency, like some of the characters in JD Vance's book, how is it helpful to add "ressentiment" on top of that?
It lets you know that his came from the Ressentiment region of France, while you get by with mere sparkling resentment.
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Does Max Schaler claim to personally suffer from "Ressentiment"? Speaking generally, does anyone using the term "Ressentiment" use it to describe their own thoughts and feelings, or is this a label generally understood to be used on the thoughts and feelings of others?
Are new words exclusively intended to describe why other people are bad useful? I would argue that they usually are not.
impotency = lack of power, correct? So he's saying people want to realize their positive values, but can't, and so their chronic frustration curdles into "Ressentiment"?
You say the right is far more impotent than the left, but this seems straightforwardly wrong to me, because the question isn't how much power a person or group has, it's how much power they have relative to their valued end-state. If your values demand shrimp welfare or the abolition of poverty or a classless utopia giving rise to incorruptible humans who will not know greed or envy or malice, you are going to be living with "an abiding impotency which blocks any possible realization of particular positive values", no? And in fact, can we not see abundant examples of how such frustrated values lead to "rash, at times fanatical claims of truth generated by the impotency this feeling comes from."
But what does the special word and its attendant pseudo-medicalization add to the discussion?
That was my read on this excerpt from Schaler too, but it just seems to be describing resentment. If you want to realize your positive values, but can't, that can lead to resentment but ressentiment is something different. Ressentiment is- you can't realize your positive values so you just define your positive values as being the opposite of the Masters.
You can't join that exclusive WASPy frat, play sports, get the chicks, so you frame all of those things as bad and being a weak, loner, nerd as being the good.
Sounds like a difference with very little distinction. Is it any different to Nietzche's slave morality?
Resentment is bitterness towards someone or something, ressentiment is formulating your values to be the antithesis of your target of resentment.
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No, because Nietzsche popularized it to describe the psychology of slave morality.
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Personally I resonate with the concept and feel it quite often. So does the friend who recommended the book to me.
I think it helps illuminate a specific pattern of emotion.
Is it what the main character in Notes from Underground is suffering from?
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I think this has less explanatory power than a combined evolutionary and psychological model of politics. Both the Left and Right have always needed propaganda to recruit believers. Evolutionarily, humans hate the idea of someone having more than them if it seems excessive or unjustly begotten, and even primates form coalitions to overthrow the social order to more equitably distribute goods. Regarding this latter point, Abrahamic theism used to divert this instinct by extolling poverty, shaming the rich, and promising delayed treasure for the poor and delayed recompense against the rich (plus a plethora of other social technologies which prevented unrest — that God has established the social order and fighting it was a sin, that there were more awe-inspiring things to focus on, that you didn’t fight in wars if you were a peasant and had many paid feasts, etc). To me, this seems to perfectly explain the current political landscape and the trajectory of history. The Left hates the rich because it’s in their blood to hate them, not because they are Left or inferior mutants because they are humans and have an ingrained instinct to feel equality. The Right aims to sublimate this instinct through religion or through the Neoconic employing of economics as a quasi-religion. The populist right wants fascism to satisfy the former while turning the state quasi-religious. The Soviets went pure equality and totally ignored religion. So we can make a lot of sense with this model.
"In their blood to hate" sounds like a thought-terminating cliche. It seems to me just as correct to say the Left has an ingrained instinct to feel equality (=sameness). I think your model of the Right is right though.
What I mean is only that “I hate someone who has a more than me” seems to be a built-in instinct, which is exacerbated when there’s a question about the tactics used to acquire wealth, and which was historically answered by religious dogma in the West (preventing unrest) and is today answered by a mixture of religious and economic dogma (the latter being: if we take anything from him, everything will collapse). I don’t have the evidence I would like for this claim, but it does explain why the West became focused on wealth redistribution immediately after it became less religious, and why we see egalitarianism in a lot of primitive societies, and why the very wealthy and powerful in antiquity often justified their gains through divine descent. All humans would have this instinct but not all humans would answer it in the same fashion. But I find this more satisfying than “these people are inferior and lash out at their superiors”; this doesn’t explain why the pedigreed NYC liberal actually wants redistribution despite it hurting their own pocket.
And reasonably so, right? Sustained (as opposed to intermittent, via new inventions) economic growth probably first dates only as far back as the invention of agriculture. Other stores of wealth existed, but quickly capped out at the amount a nomadic hunter-gatherer could personally carry from place to place. For the past ten thousand years or so, if someone wanted a ton of fruit, they've had the option to earn it by planting and maintaining an orchard, or by buying an orchard with wealth accumulated from any number of other productive activities. But for the prior million years or two, if you saw someone with a ton of fruit, it was because that jackass just picked more than his fair share of the wild fruit your tribe had discovered. Screw that guy!
Huh, interesting thought. My intuition is that the evolutionary basis for jealousy is that it's a lot easier to steal someone else's stuff than to make your own, and the richer they are, the better the risk-reward ratio. But yeah, if most wealth disparity in the ancestral environment came down to monopolization of scarce resources, that would do it too.
But I don't think that's the case. It's certainly true that wealth disparities were far more compressed for hunter-gatherers, but there still was such a thing as capital. Fruit isn't capital, but, for example, a quantity of well-made spears or baskets or arrowheads would be. And creating those things takes effort and skill and in no way diminishes your access to them. Would you be more jealous of the guy with a lot of fruit or the guy with the nicest tent and finest weapons and best tools? The latter, I would think. Nomads can't have a lot of stuff, but the stuff they do have is all the more important for that reason.
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The populist right? Which populist right?
Maybe if you mean the groypers and GOPe. I don't expect the Motte to like my answer here, but I only find these feelings of ressentiment among the Panicans. Trump himself is maybe the most agentic man in the world, even when he's complaining about unfair treatment on twitter. I don't see impotence fantasies from the people behind Iran and Venezuela, or Trump's Ballroom and Victory Arch, or the MAGA loyal faithful who think we could pull out a victory in the midterms. I see a lot of impotence fantasies from the anti-Israel crowd and the neo-Tucker / Kent / MTG / Candace Owens people who say MAGA was betrayed and everything was lost. I see a lot of impotence fantasies from Hill Staffers and Congressmen who all of them, to a man, no matter what they say in public, believe that the midterms are 100% a guaranteed Republican loss so anything Trump tries to do about it is actually cope and therefore illegitimate. (They not only believe that we deserve to lose the redistricting wars for this reason, but that Trump squandered his 2024 mandate because of stuff like ICE protests in Minneapolis, oh well, we tried nothing and ran out of ideas, we deserve to lose, maybe we can try again next time in 3028.)
I suspect I will be accused of gross partisanship or bias but when I scan the landscape it's the faction that believes we can Make America Great Again that is the most ruthlessly optimistic about the future of America. Who is more excited about the state of the future today? The tech people? The peptide biohackers? I don't see a wellspring of optimism about the future coming from many other places.
More than that though:
Does this not actually describe, to a T, the modern leftist emotional bent? It's the left subsumed in infinite impotence fantasies about how invisible ineradicable all-powerful forces permeate society at every level. They believe, for example, that White Supremacy is woven into the fabric of American life, it explains everything bad that happens to a minority anywhere, you can't log off and ignore it, you can't hard work your way out of it, you can't argue with it. A black man who fails failed because of White Supremacy. A black man who succeeds succeeded despite White Supremacy. We have to have massive, world-spanning DEI infrastructure to even begin to address the imbalance, it's never enough, we need police reform, we need reparations for Haiti, we need gun control. We can't even begin to address everything wrong with the world until we address capitalism, and to do that we have to fight the billionaires.
Is it not a movement premised around an extremely negative emotional outlook?
Climate change is going to destroy the world and as individuals we're powerless to do anything about it.
Sexism and racism are vast systemic forces and as individuals we're powerless to address them.
Technology and capitalism are destroying the world and as individuals we're powerless to change things.
Leftists often believe in all these powerlessness fantasies even as they do exercise real power. Climate change is the perfect example, real environmental problems that could be solved are subsumed into the ultimate global problem. Instead of getting people to go into the forest and pick up trash out of the river, you get them to protest for regulations that could curb 1% of a country's Co2 emissions over a 15-year period so that 0.02% of the global climate problem can be alleviated. It's actually extremely consistent, a lot of leftism is a machine for transmuting its followers real problems into vast impersonal forces that we are all powerless to do anything about (until the final defeat of capitalism i.e. Alex Jones and Donald Trump).
I mean, "personal responsibility" is an idea so obviously coded one way that it's at this point a bad cliche.
There is something very admirable about the seemingly boundless faith some grassroots MAGA supporters have for Trump. It's a pure loyalty exercise for them. To a point where reality itself is just a test to be overcome. But that's also a flaw. Ruthless optimism that parts the sea of information and fact to lead us all to the promise land of hope through loyalty is only good insofar as the promise land is actually there and the parted sea doesn't collapse back in on everyone on the way there. J6 does come to mind.
To springboard off your example on lefties and white supremacy. The sociology theories lefties come up with to explain the racial gaps are obviously insane and untrue. But at the same time it's not possible to falsify them without actually explaining why the big gaps exist.
Now how does one explain that as a race blind MAGA supporter in Trump's America? Do some similarly half baked sociology based on the Moynihan Report? Do we just advocate for the implementation of a genuine white supremacy to mend the black nuclear family back together through force? Or do we just not talk about it?
Not talking about things seems to be the preferred option for dealing with most things that are unpleasant to think about for the MAGA optimists. We instead trust our leaders and don't think too much about things. Just listen to cope merchants on Fox and friends tell us about how everything is under control. No need to deal with hard reality. And that's where things stop feeling admirable.
When people start recognizing that this loyalty exists and start to pander to it for their own gain, then you're left with a snake swallowing its own tail. With hucksters abusing this captive audience that has nowhere else to go. It's very sad to watch.
Well I don't know I feel pretty confident that it's my view that matches reality and everyone else is just too jaded to believe in anything because they're cynical and old and mad at God. It's as if you described Christianity in very clinical terms and said, "There's something pure about belief in Christ even though these Christians have to put fact aside." Well, no, Christians believe (I believe) that Christianity is based in fact, just like I believe my support for Trump is based in fact.
But I understand that my perspective is rare so I get what you're trying to say etc. etc.
Sorry, it's not clear to me contextually what specifically is being hypothetically explained here, the existence of the racial gap as such? I think the mainstream conservative position is that blacks and whites behave differently, and then you fill that difference with some ratio of "culture" and "race" depending on how racist you are. And this more or less explains everything, without having to reach into every social institution and change every facet of society. I like the take of a friend of mine who described DC's local government as having "an abusive relationship" with respect to local voters.
This is a fierce, omnipresent debate within MAGA and I really only ever hear this line from people who don't like my explanation for why I trust Trump. It can't be that I've thought things through and reached a different conclusion from them (from you), it's that I haven't thought it through.
I guess, to add some specificity here instead of just talking on the meta level: I trust Trump because he's smarter than me, has better information than I have, and has better instincts than I have. People look at me like I have two heads when I say this, but if you were learning physics and your teacher demonstrated obvious learning you wouldn't say, "I trust my teacher and don't think too much about things." No, he clearly knows more than me, in this situation it's correct to be a little humble and learn something. I mean that with zero sycophancy.
To take an even more specific example, let's take immigration. I trust that Trump wants to stop illegal immigration. After ten years of Trumpian politics, I trust that Trump wants to stop illegal immigration. Now, in the day-to-day, there are all sorts of stories, why isn't Trump deporting more people, is this a broken campaign promise, or why hasn't Trump tried this strategy instead of that strategy, or what's he doing in Minnesota, or maybe he should defy judges, or this or that. There's a lot we could sit and debate I guess. But ultimately what reason do I have for actually supposing that Trump is wrong? He's much more agentic than I am, he's much more successful than I am, he has much better political instincts than I do, he has much more information than I do, he has much better judgment than I do. So take Minnesota. Maybe he could have done what twitter is saying and doubled down and called it an insurrection and declared martial law and forced an even bigger crisis. I'm sure that was presented to him as an option. But he didn't take it. Why would I assume that my judgment is better than his? Because I scroll twitter?
Note that this logic is not a blank check for trusting all leaders blindly. When leadership of the Republican Party passes to Marco Rubio or JD Vance I don't suppose that they will replicate Trump's skill in every domain. (Although they probably deserve more deference than random posters on twitter.) Likewise Obama and Biden don't deserve this kind of deference just by virtue of being the president. (Actually if there was one Democratic leader I would defer to it would be Nancy Pelosi: if you were a Democrat it would be entirely reasonable to take cues from her about what is politically possible, you wouldn't be very credible if you claimed to know better than her. That's because she earned it after a very long career of very highly-demonstrated competence.) Anyways, Trump has obviously performed at the highest levels for a generation now and succeeded in situations everyone else thought impossible. That actually obviously, trivially merits a pretty high level of trust. Backseat driving every decision Trump makes is about as compelling to me as a fat washed-up beer-belly in a sports jersey complaining that he can tell every time Lebron James makes a mistake.
I'm trying to lay this out very neutrally although reading back I think this conversation is not quite the right jumping-off point and I'll have to try again in the future. But I'm bored at work and I have time at my desk and so why not. I get why this sounds so irrational and strange to people. I also believe that Donald Trump dodged a bullet in an obvious miracle and is clearly chosen by God and clearly represents the deep spirit of America, U-S-A, U-S-A, and we're all too cynical so we need a reason why we should listen when Mom tells us not to touch the hot stove. But putting that aside I think loyalty can be extremely rational, which is what I'm trying to enunciate.
As an aside, Fox has always been relatively critical of Trump and is definitely not where you go to hear happy stories about how everything is fine. Fox is where you go to hear about how woke transgender dog clinics are ruining San Francisco with vegan homeless shelters. If I was woke I would watch Fox News because it would make me feel powerful.
Many MAGA optimists don't gauge things by what is happening around them. It's exactly like you say. Their barometer is what Trump does. If he does X, then X was the best thing to do because they trust Trump. Their gas prices going up or their jobs moving away or their farms going bankrupt is just not accounted for as a counterfactual.
HBD has no place in mainstream conservative politics. The functional reason for the existence of the dissident right is to be a right winger that can acknowledge HBD. The mainstream conservatives have no explanation or the gaps between the races beyond what I described before, if they even acknowledge them at all, which is rare. The conservative position is that maladaptive black behavior is driven by culture. Primarily the welfare state making them dependent and ghetto culture that glorifies violence. They never explain why blacks move towards this sort of thing, nor how they are going to fix it. It's an excuse that is just as loony and baseless as any lefty cultural excuse about historical oppression and omnipresent ethereal white supremacy.
Those in power being the most competent is only true insofar as they are competent in staying in power. I'm not sold on how that naturally translates to functional governance. From what I can tell the Trump we have now is so far removed from the 2016 Trump it's not comparable. If one wants to say that every decision that he has made that has removed him from his original brand has been the best course of action, then I'd ask, best course towards what? Draining the swamp, building a border wall and kicking all the foreigners out and give jobs to Americans? Or the best course of action for Trump to stay in power? If it's the latter, why is it good that he is staying in power if those same actions are removing him from the original promises?
I'm not a routine Fox viewer but as far as I can gleam from the Youtube clips, they are pretty much on the Trump train. Especially with regards to Iran. It's been a fair while since I saw any rhetoric comparable to the #NeverTrump of 2016, when Fox, outside of Tucker Carlson and similar, was anti-Trump.
I'm not sure what you're intending. Most people don't reason in the sense you're describing. There is no mass reserve of people who "gauge things by what is happening around them". Most people get their opinions from life experience, and most life experience is consuming media. There's nothing novel about MAGA here except that we broadly trust Trump's judgment. So that, if gas prices go up, I assume this was judged relative to other options and found to be the best course of action. It's not even that mysterious. It's not hard for me to make a case for why Trump went to war with Iran or how this is potentially a good thing. I don't have to appeal to mysterious subrational forces.
Respectfully, conservative politics has moved way far beyond whether conservatives can talk about race.
Well we are building a border wall and this is the first administration in generations that has seen more foreigners leaving America than coming in. As for draining the swamp, Trump has politically defeated a lot of powerful people in his attempt to reform the American government. To me this reads like making the perfect the enemy of the good, and declaring that, since Trump hasn't accomplished everything he must have moderated. But I don't know anyone, not a single person, who has ever accomplished everything they intended.
You describe the exact process I'm talking about. We both agree that MAGA optimists judge things by whether or not Trump did the thing or not. We both agree that this is novel.
Where we seemingly don't agree is whether or not a relevant amount of people care about 'things', like gas or housing prices, or something similar. I think a lot of people see or feel something that personally affects them like that and therefor want to vote for those things in specific. Expecting a solution and positive change. Using those things as the barometer. I think you understand and agree with this dynamic insofar as you understand that it's important to maintain that Trump is keeping his promises, like you do below.
I guess my point comes down to the question of how you determine values. It feels like we are doing a lot of outsourcing to Trump. My perspective is that MAGA optimists are going the way of the Dodo. They are politically a minority, their children will be a racial minority. I feel like I'm watching the sky fall and then I see them happy as clams because Trump is in charge.
But you are appealing to a very limited force. Mainly just yourself and your faith in Trump. You making a case and then asserting that the course of action being taken is the best because Trump took it isn't particularly rational. Apologies if this sounds too dismissive but I'm starting to feel like you're just constructing a rhetorical fun house of sorts, where you can make assumptions and assertions yourself but preclude others from doing so at any time if they disagree with Trump. Since Trump is smarter and has more information and such. Like, not to rehash things but what is the current state of the Iran war? At what point can we state that the war has been a failure and that Trump made a bad choice? Or is that even possible?
Not really. The small contingent that was bullied into white advocacy, like Charlie Kirk or Tucker Carlson, talked some about whites as a group. But they all defaulted back on individualism, culture and values when push came to shove. Which is the same song and dance they've been doing since they ostracized Peter Brimelow and similar voices from the mainstream.
Yeah, that sounds more true than not. So what is perfect?
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You answered your own question here!
The welfare state and ghetto culture are the mechanism. That doesn't explain why blacks are drawn to it more so than other races.
If race is skin deep and the sociological theory being presented is true then it should apply equally regardless of race. But instead we see very disparate results along racial lines. It's the same problem lefty sociological theories have. As soon as you treat them as serious theories and not convenient verbal political excuses that have no substance and only exist to help us turn our brain off, they fall apart.
The origin of the American federal welfare state traces its way back to the Freedman's Bureau, established during the Civil War. As you might guess from the name, blacks were "drawn to it" because the Bureau was specifically established for them.
A sociological theory that hangs it all on "IQ" and doesn't account for the facts of the historical case is less fixing the problems with lefty sociological theories and more embracing them, just swapping out "IQ" for "racism" as the Great Monocausal Foe.
I think some people assume that accomplishing this swap will lead to closing the welfare state tap off, perhaps unaware or forgetting that the tap was turned on at a time when (functionally) that very belief was widespread.
To take your narrative seriously one would have to imagine that a post-war government program that lasted 9 years in the 1860's which gave resources and education to a group of people was always going to lead to that people being welfare dependent. If that's not the argument, then we're just finding historical a-ha! moments that might feel satisfying to our brains but are of no real consequence or value beyond that.
Both the left and the conservatives assert that the gaps exist because of historical circumstance and/or oppression. They both assert historical just so stories without ever applying them seriously as sociological theories about the nature of man. Instead treating it like a verbal game, not a look at reality. They walk through the steps of history and pontificate on each as a cause for behavior, but not a consequence of it.
The 'monocausal' foe is the nature of human beings, the differences between them, the widely divergent population groups humanity is composed of and the wide variety of circumstance they find themselves in.
If history was causal in the way you describe and not consequential, one would see a vast difference between ancestrally similar population groups that had divergent historical paths. We have this case.
Iceland was the poorest country in Europe for centuries. Yet with the Marshall Aid program post-WW2, they went from being the poorest to being one of the most prosperous nations on the planet in the span of 50 years. The lesson is simple. Give high quality people technology and resources and they will prosper. Being colonized doesn't matter. Being poor doesn't matter.
Becoming a criminal or welfare dependent is not a consequence of history. It's the path of least resistance for a certain type of person. Most people find it easier to learn how to read than to have 5 children with 5 different men, collect child support, become obese and claim medical benefits on top of that. Most people find it easier to go to work rather than rob a liquor store and sell drugs. Most. But not all. The difference is the people.
The circumstance that make those anti-social actions possible are a consequence of the kind of people that would take advantage of those circumstances existing. On top of that, welfare programs existing doesn't cause, for example, Norwegians in Norway to abuse the programs at nearly the same rates as other groups do. In short, these history specific explanations fail to explain anything in a broader context. They're not applicable to the real world. These things happen in different context and the obvious determining factor is the humans, not their historical circumstance.
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If he's so agentic why doesn't he focus on getting rid of Somali scammers in Minnesota and passing the Save act? Why doesn't he focus on cost of living and securing institutions in the US to crush the left, rather than Middle East wars? Desert Storm was a smashing success and yet H. W. Bush still lost re-election... The track record of Middle East wars is terrible, as Trump himself pointed out.
Even focusing on self-preservation alone (nevermind national interest or ideology) it makes no sense to wage these wars, it's pure slavish devotion to the neocon/Israeli faction. Does he think that if the Dems win he'll escape prison again?
He's a mindbroken husk of Trump the candidate. He's very old and reduced to boomerposting long walls of text on social media while advisers and officials run rings around him.
It’s clear you and Donald Trump have different priorities. We shall have to fine some way of judging whose are more successful.
Why is it so hard to conclude that Trump has made a mistake?
Look at tariffs. Chaos, then backpeddling, the origin of the TACO idea (extremely damaging for any leader), then courts ruling them illegal and mandating refunds. The opposite of creating a stable business environment for US industry.
Yeah Trump makes mistakes too what does that have to do with whether he's agentic or not? In the sense of the discussion about ressentiment and whether the populist right is the political faction that casts itself as powerless and mad.
When you're actually "in the arena" the amount of criticism you face is infinite and I don't consider the fact that it exists to prove much of anything. One tweak in the algorithm and the viral meme would be "Trump Always Overdoes It" or whatever.
Trump the Agent: crushes the left with mass deportations and voter ID to advance MAGA ideology and safeguard own personal position. Political capital is solely wielded for the sake of strengthening the Trump faction. Critically, fuel prices are kept low and promises are not broken unless absolutely unavoidable.
Trump the Puppet: trusts Lutnick on imposing a retarded tariff policy (while Lutnick's son makes hundreds of millions buying tariff refund options), trusts the wisdom of neocon bunglers and Israeli intelligence and starts a war with Iran (completely against promises of no Middle East wars) that was predictably going to fail and embarrass any Republican successors, who are critical for keeping Trump out of prison.
The former judiciously navigates competing interests and pursues own agenda without getting derailed, the latter eats up whatever slop Mark Levin's show serves up, like this deranged idea that Iran's oil production was all going to explode or something after a few days of (leaky) naval blockade.
You've again just defined "agentic" to mean "Trump does what I want". Maybe Trump has different priorities from you.
For instance, fuel prices. Trump decided to go to war with Iran, which is currently causing fuel prices to go up. Trump decided that the risk was worth it. Ok, you can argue with that risk assessment. Do you argue that it shows that Trump is agentic?
For instance, voter ID. Trump cannot pass voter ID unilaterally, because of Congress. So he writes executive orders on mail-in ballots and cuts backroom deals to try to get votes for the SAVE act. Maybe President RandomRanger would say screw that and send in the troops. Ok, you could argue with that risk assessment. Do you argue that this shows that Trump is not agentic?
The actions Trump has taken are so stupid and self-destructive to all realistic or reasonable Trump goals (contrary even to his own statements, ideology and promises), the most reasonable conclusion is that he's under the control of other parties. Object, not subject.
Someone persuaded him that mass deportations are unpopular and should be toned down but Middle East wars, wow, that's catnip for voters! He's left reality behind, some neocon idiot would've told him something like 'no worries about fuel, the Iranians will be dealt with in one swift stroke' and he'll have accepted that because he's a credulous 80 year old.
In what universe would a man dependent on future Republican administrations to escape more aggressive prosecutions invest his political capital in 'predictably disastrous Middle East War' over 'structural Republican electoral advantage'? No rational actor would do that, only a controlled/misinformed actor.
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I think this description is pretty accurate. I don’t see the left thinking anything can or will be actually fixed, and when someone proposes doing the thing it’s not enough because nothing is ever enough. We could deal with climate change through a combination of energy efficiency and investment in nuclear power. We could attempt to fix the inequalities by addressing things like education and culture (psst: if you want to get rich, your best bet is to learn math, science and engineering) and work ethic (rich people tend to work consistently where most people who end up poor also have terrible work ethics). Of course any attempt to do such a thing is going to be called racist or something. Or there will be all kinds of “structural reasons” to believe that no poor kid should be expected to do his homework while suffering from poverty. And you just can’t expect poor people to just keep working even when they just want to stay home. So poverty continues because while we know the things that need to happen to make a person more likely to be rich, we can’t do that.
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According to Nietzsche's interpretation, ressentiment was derived from a "slave revolt" against Master Morality- flipping the concept of good/bad and making the weak "good" and the strong "evil." That's a cultural phenomenon that spans both ends of the political spectrum but is clearly more of a left-wing cultural phenomenon- the mentally disturbed transgender obese Reddit mod becomes the "good" against the White Frat Chad driving the cool car and getting all the chicks, who is "evil." The socially incompetent, weak, ugly nerd is the good and the charismatic, popular, attractive, strong Jock is the bad guy. That is the sort of moral inversion that strikes at the heart of ressentiment.
Ressentiment frames weakness, ugliness, slave morality as a moral superiority over noble values, strength, and beauty.
Ultimately ressentiment is not about being powerless it's about asserting that state of powerlessness as constituting moral superiority over those who have an exercise power. "I am morally superior because I am weak and oppressed" is the cornerstone of ressentiment and it's a phenomenon that spans both ends of the political spectrum but is clearly derived from left-wing cultural criticisms of traditional morality in the 20th century.
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