You've seen it, I've seen it, we've all seen it. It's minimising to call it schadenfreude when it's really more like mörderfreude or something.
I just saw a video of a progressive reacting with glee at someone telling them a story about an (alleged) Trump supporter who is reliant on the Affordable Care Act in the US to be able to access healthcare. The story goes that he voted for Trump in part because he promised to get rid of "Obamacare", oblivious to the fact that this is the buzzword used to refer to the ACA upon which he relies, because (and this is where it strays into being exaggeration or apocryphal) Democrats bad, Obamacare bad, I hate Obamacare and I hate Obama.
The story continues and the narrator does the big reveal - you just voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act and now you won't be able to access the healthcare that you rely upon. The person reacting to this story shows increasing amounts of joy as it unfolds and, at the reveal, is gleeful and toasts the camera, taking a big gulp of their drink.
Many such cases, I get it, but it just blows my mind that:
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They didn't recognise it as a failure of the US political system that a person could vote so hard against their own interests
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They assume that they democrats are on the right side of history and that they serve the best interests of the average person
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They didn't seem at all bothered by the fact that maybe Kamala could have run on a platform of "He's taking your healthcare away - vote for me if you want to live" and won but her team failed so egregiously by not communicating this idea effectively
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They also have 4 years of Trump to deal with - they and their loved ones are also in the same situafion but they're acting like it isn't a big deal; they and everyone they care about is in the same queue for the slaughterhouse and yet they haven't figured out which way the line is moving because they're too distracted by the grisly excuse for "entertainment" which is happening ahead of them
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They would rather convince themselves that they have the correct opinion than to win or for there to be access to healthcare
These people are so smug and impotent and filled with ressentiment yet they have zero shame or self-awareness. Assuming this story is true and not just erotic fanfiction for the sadistic progressive, which is a very good possibility, where is their outrage about all this? A person who is politically naive, who is presented as being below average intelligence, who is duped by the vile bourgeois media and a despicable political system which is a grim mockery of democracy is, at the least, going to end up very unwell—if not homeless or even dead—and this scumbag is happily putting on their dancing shoes in anticipation of being able to celebrate when this person gets put in the ground??
You failed. Your team failed. Your system failed. Your democracy failed. And because of this consistent and ongoing series of failures, you hear that a person is going to suffer tremendously and probably even die but your response is to celebrate? This is some utterly depraved shit.
The next time a progressive claims to be left wing I'm not going to dispute it, I'm going to agree and tell them "Yes - the left wing of fascism." The only consolation is that it's shit like this which only serves to accelerate the collapse of the US, but it's very meagre consolation indeed.
Sure, but there's a massive disinfo machine which has sprouted its own backyard propaganda industry that works 24/7 to mislead people. In a perfect world, this wouldn't exist. In a perfect world, people would be highly educated and politically developed where only if you are knowledgeable about the person you are voting for would you vote.
But based on my own anecdotal experience the average person who supports Trump isn't as intelligent and they definitely aren't as educated as the average person who supported Harris. I think it's safe to say that Trump's campaign exploited this demographic to get him into power again. Sure, if someone in his voterbase isn't grossly misguided then they have vicious political beliefs but the idea of celebrating a person's impending death because they are being stripped of healthcare for having the wrong political beliefs is really fucking vile.
The democrat supporters love touting the fact that studies show they have a higher level of intelligence and education and, often, that they demonstrate higher levels of empathy too. Yet they get a thrill out of shit like this or the carpet bombing of Gaza and, like the trees in the forest voting for the axe (like they always love accusing conservatives of being) not only do they vote for the (other) party that represents the interests of capital at their own expense but in doing so they vote for the (other) neoliberal party which continues to strip funding from welfare, education, healthcare, and housing that ensures that the next generation will have poorer educational outcomes and thus who will be in the prime demographic for conservative voters when they come of age but they are also actively ensuring that the development of the coming generations will have lower "IQ" because they are negatively impacting on nutrition during developmental years and doing shit like exposing kids to hazardous levels of lead in the water supply.
The only people who I have much more than a baseline level of sympathy for are the extreme progressives who haven't quite managed to figure it all out yet but I'm more inclined to be sympathetic to the person who is, allegedly, too stupid to know better than the person who is implicitly arguing that they themselves are more intelligent and that they do know better and yet still support a near-identical party. (Edit: I could have worded this part better. Fascists get no sympathy from me. Radicals get all my love. For all the liberal cohort, though, what I said in this paragraph applies.)