Myside bias is the tendency to perceive the world in ways that flatter one’s ideological, political, or tribal priors. All intellectual and political movements are subject to this bias to some degree. What should we do with the fact that such flaws in human cognition are universal? Broadly speaking, we have two options: to acknowledge and try to correct such biases, or to indulge in them.
A fundamental principle of liberal movements is that they adopt the first option. Here, I’m using liberal in the classic sense, to mean those who think that the Enlightenment was a good thing, and who value individual liberty and reasoning about the world in a scientific way. This includes mainstream center-right and center-left politicians in advanced democracies, along with most libertarians and believers in social democracy. The term liberal excludes Marxists, fascists, postliberals, and Critical Race Theorists.
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I think it was Katie Herzog on Blocked and Reported who said the only common throughline for maga is just “own the libs”. They have no principles and barely even push policy discussions, it’s just owning the libs for them.
She’s completely right but with your article it’s really that they want to “hurt the libs”, they get off on the suffering and yeah cruelty is ironically now the only principle maga has left aside from bootlicking Trump.
Like I know so many guys who watch these “when men fight back” compilations of a blue haired woman maybe pushing a man only for the man to lose control and knock her out and meanwhile that guy is watching with this sadistic glee to see a leftist white woman getting punched in the face. (Not saying it’s okay for women to attack men but there is a difference between having that type of content pop up in your feed randomly rather than actively seeking it out because you get this underlying sexist-sadistic satisfaction at seeing a woman get flatlined).
Good article, but it might have been better if youd have realised all this before voting for him in 2024. I knew all of this and I'm in the UK.