Elon. Trump. Resentment. - The Atlantic - 0 views
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In the late-19th and early-20th centuries, nationalism had its turn at spurring us to destroy ourselves; in later years, the struggle with monstrous ideologies killed tens of millions and brought us repeatedly to the brink of nuclear war.
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Today, however, social and cultural resentment is driving millions of people into a kind of mass psychosis.
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Prominent and wealthy Americans such as Trump and Musk, along with the former White House guru Steve Bannon and the investor Peter Thiel, are at war not so much with the American political system, whose institutions they are trying to capture, but with a dominant culture that they seem to believe is withholding its respect from them. Politics is merely the instrument of revenge.
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As one Twitter wag noted, Musk’s acquisition of Twitter is like Elmer Fudd buying a platform full of Bugs Bunnies.)
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Trump and those like him managed to get a ticket in the swankiest carriage on the train, only to find themselves sitting alone. And if that’s how it’s going to be … well, the only answer is to derail the entire thing, from locomotive to caboose, and make everyone suffer.
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As the British journalist Simon Kuper noted a few years ago, anti-system parties in the United Kingdom, Italy, and the United States are powered not by struggling workers, but by the “comfortably off populist voter” who has “never been invited into the fast lane of life: the top universities, the biggest firms, the major corporations.”
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These citizens think that the disconnect between material success and their perceived lack of status must be punished, and if that means voting for election deniers and conspiracy theorists, so be it.
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There is one more example of such resentment, and it’s a lot less funny. Russia is an entire nation seized with a massive inferiority complex, and the Russian regime is giving vent to that resentment in the continual murder of Ukrainians
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the brutality of the Russians on the battlefield against their Slavic kin is very much rooted in resentment: Why do you live in freedom? Why are you living better than us?