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Notes -
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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