When Facebook Becomes Blogging

Modern American conservatives are obsessed by issues of pride. It isn't enough to have gun rights, it has to extend to AR-15's. It isn't enough to have freedom of worship, it has to be freedom to impose religious beliefs. It isn't enough to have free speech, it has to be free incitement. If their concerns were truly about freedom and survival, the extent of their demands for impositions on the rest of us would have limitations. But they have no limitations - and that's how you know these demands are about pride rather than efficacy or survival: it's the conservative equivalent of if liberals demanded 100% taxes and the abolition of churches.

And because they're obsessed by issues of pride, they can't not desperately crave intellectual acceptance from the people they loathe, because every time they don't get it, the pride turns into humiliation. Eric Hoffer put it best when he said "You can never get enough of what you don't need to make you happy." So for so many conservatives I know, the relationship between them and liberals has to be unequal, or else they feel they've lost. They behave toward liberals with mixture of hatred and contempt on the one hand, and bewilderment that they get hatred and contempt in return. They can't just have a relationship to liberals, they have to have the kind of relationship where every interaction is combat with them that always results in their victory, and the proper place for the rest of us is to simply accept their superiority over us. It's very similar to Russia's relationship to Europeans.

But then they wonder why they can't get complete acceptance from people they've literally told to fuck off every day for thirty years, and that feeds their resentments and their aggrieved sense of pride even moreso, which makes them double down on their rage against us every time they think of us because they pathologically need to be accepted by the very people they so hate, but why would people they so clearly hate ever have a reason to accept them? They end up feeling hated by people they go out of their way to hate, humiliated by people they go out of their way to humiliate, and persecuted by people they go out of their way to persecute.