MAGAts Are Just Joyless And Miserable All The Fucking Time
When your life is just a nonstop stream of unrelenting misery, you live to spread hate.
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There is one inescapable fact about the American right: They are joyless and miserable all the fucking time. Every day, they wake up and see a world they hate. Their lives are an unending nightmare where they can never be happy, even for a single moment.
The thing that appears to cause this soul-sucking angst is…the rest of us.
A shared prosperity is anathema to MAGA Republicans. If their neighbor is successful and happy and content, they are increasingly enraged and bitter and resentful. The only way for the right to feel truly at peace is for someone else to feel pain. They simply cannot thrive in an environment where everyone thrives, especially people they hate.
Take, for instance, marriage equality. Who you marry does not affect anyone else’s life in any way whatsoever. There are, in any given state, millions of people, many of whom are married and only the tiniest fraction of who you will ever know. Their significant other could be tall, short, left-handed, ambidextrous, have an extra toe, or be missing a finger. Who cares? I certainly don’t. Neither do you. And neither do MAGAts.
But they really really care if it’s a same-sex couple. Why? Because the happiness of people they hate is like acid on their skin.
Oh, they have all sorts of stories to justify it. It destroys the sanctity of marriage! Something about divorce rates exploding. All of that is bullshit:
A review of nearly 100 studies examining the consequences of same-sex marriage on multiple measures of family formation and well-being found no harm to different-sex unions, a report from RAND and UCLA found.
The analysis found that after states legalized marriage for same-sex couples, marriage numbers jumped in those states at rates greater than what could be accounted for by the new marriages of same-sex couples alone.
Researchers found no consistent evidence of an increase in divorce as a consequence of legalizing marriage for same-sex couples.
The analysis suggests that issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples had, if anything, led to a small positive impact on marriage attitudes among high school seniors.
Despite the reality that marriage equality has proven to strengthen the institution of marriage, the right is absolutely going to use the Supreme Court to strike down the right to marry whomever you want. Not on any real legal grounds but because they’re angry gay people are happy. And that happiness is intolerable. The right is manifestly incapable of being happy without seeing someone else in pain.
This miserable existence is not reserved for the poor and struggling of MAGAland. Lots of people are poor and struggling and they don’t spend every minute of every day praying for horrific things to happen to people they don’t know or associate with. But the right does. All of them do, even those who have everything.
Joshua Hill made an interesting point the other day about knuckle-dragging douchebag Harrison Butker after his obnoxious speech telling women to get their asses back in the kitchen. Butker is rich, famous, he’s even good-looking. He’s a professional athlete so he’s the definition of “manly” that the right subscribes to. And yet:
This man has everything we’re taught to want, but he’s unhappy and insecure and projecting his issues on college kids. Maybe, just maybe, he’s not actually who we should aspire to be. And maybe there’s some issue with what men have been told to aspire to.
Hill is talking specifically about men here but the same goes for the women of the right. I wrote about this recently. MAGA women have been going all in on the “Trad Wife” lifestyle. To their shock and horror, they’re discovering it’s an abomination. They’re miserable and sad and lonely because the things they’re being told will make them happy, don’t.
Have you looked at Elon Musk lately? He is one of the richest people to ever exist in the history of the human race. He can do literally anything he wants/ He can live his life free of all constraints. He is the most miserable and unhappy person I have ever seen. All the money in the world and he cannot find a moment of true happiness. His life is hollow and empty and the only joy he can find is through cruelty. This is endemic to the right.
It’s not “economic anxiety.” It’s not all racism or misogyny or anti-LGBT bigotry. They want white cisgender heterosexual liberals to be miserable, too. It’s not just that they want to be at the top of the social pecking order. Butker and Musk already are and they spend their lives fretting about what other people are doing. They wake up angry and miserable that someone, somewhere, is living their life and being happy in a way they disapprove of.
And that is the crux of it. The right can never experience true joy unless they are stealing it from others. There is a malicious evil that animates them. They have turned their states into the perfect expression of their inner ugliness. Children go unfed. Women have no rights. The LGBTQ community is persecuted and vilified. Christian Nationalism is rampant. Latinos are second-class citizens. White supremacy is dominant.
It’s the cruel and sadistic paradise of their warped dreams. States like Texas and Florida should be filled with happy joyful Republicans. Do they ever look happy and joyful to you? All I ever see is rage and hate and demands for more cruelty.
It’s easy to blame right-wing media like Fox and OANN or AM Hate Radio. It’s even more tempting to blame Trump and an awful lot of people try to do just that. But they’ve been this way longer than I’ve been alive. Whatever is broken in them can’t be fixed and they don’t want it fixed.
They don’t have to watch Fox or listen to the hate screaming out of their radio. They want to. They don’t have to blindly worship Trump. But Trump promises them revenge and cruelty and they crave it more than life itself. Quite literally. Tens of thousands, or more, of MAGAts committed suicide through Covid just to make the libs cry. They did it willingly.
It’s important to understand that this is the enemy we face. They can’t be reasoned with because they are irrational. They can’t be bargained with because the only thing they want is our pain.
The only thing we can do is crush the right and keep them as far away from the levers of power as possible until their hate burns them out. This is not something that will happen quickly. This is the work of decades but the alternative is to let the soulless monsters of the right burn everything to the ground in their never-ending quest to make everyone else as miserable as they are. I don’t know about you, but that’s not the future I want to leave for my kids.
There are 152 days until the 2024 election. Vote blue like your life depends on it.
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So true. Trump Republicans remind me of the "two-minute hate" in Orwell's "1984", except that their hatred, while just as performative, lasts far longer. H.L.Mencken described Puritanism as "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, might be happy". I think this description suits the MAGA leaders and their disciples too.
"David?"
"Yes, Ethel?"
"I can't sleep."
"Why's that, honey?"
"Just the idea that someone...somewhere...might be smoking a joint, harming no one, having a really good time...it keeps me up!"
"There, there, dear. I'll author a bill to make it illegal in the morning."
"Oh would you, honey? That would be swell!"