The Ideology Of Ressentiment

Over the weekend there was a poll released that said only seven percent of Americans have a high opinion of the Democratic Party. It also said that the party is enjoying its lowest approval rating ever recorded. The events of last week suggest that the party is a disorganized mess at the moment. This is due in large part to the fact that what we call the left has collapsed into chaos. They no longer can explain what they oppose, much less what they claim to offer.

This is due to the transformation of the left over the last thirty years into a grab bag of conspiracy theories and grievances. The American left has always been a conspiracy theory, of sorts, owing to its roots in American Protestantism, but it had a positive agenda through most of the twentieth century. The long list of things it opposed stood in the way of the things it desired. Over the last thirty years, those desires have largely faded, leaving just a list of enemies.

The most obvious example is the antifascist conspiracy theory that was dominant with self-identified leftists for the last decade. The fact that there are no fascists in this age has been used as an opportunity to create them. The same thing happened with conspiracy theories around race. Instead of Hitler hiding behind every bush, it is men in white hoods ready to pounce. The dominant subcultures of the left over the last few decades are all conspiracy theories of some sort.

Another defining feature is that the progressive coalition is all driven by something called ressentiment. This is a sense of hostility towards something or someone that is viewed as a cause of one's diminished condition. It is frustration at the sense of inferiority and hatred at a perceived external cause. This blend of envy and hatred results in a moral code which delegitimizes the cause of the person's failure and elevates the status of the alleged victim.

This is what lies behind tabloid news of the rich and famous. The primary appeal is to people who feel they should be rich and famous. The failings of the actual rich and famous allow these people to feel as if they are living better lives or are better people, despite the fact they do not have what they desire. On the one hand they envy the people they follow, but on the other hand they relish their suffering as it allows them to feel morally superior to them.

What we call the left operates the same way. They often target people who are living good lives but hold opinions that the left does not like, and this is what triggers their envy and resentment toward that person. On the one hand, the person "exposing" the bad person is a loser in the conventional sense, while the person they are harassing is successful by conventional measures. Doxing is a formalization of a process by which the loser flings her poo at the winner.

The recent spate of vandalism directed at Tesla automobiles is a good example of how this blend of righteousness and anger works. These people are attacking cars because on the one hand, they envy Elon Musk and what he is doing. He is the man of action they wish they could be, but they are losers, so they hate him for his success as a way to justify their low status. The attacks on the cars themselves are like a child throwing a tantrum when frustrated by a toy.

This is not a surprising development as what we call the left in America is a manifestation of certain aspects of American Protestantism. The progressive ideology is popular Christianity stripped of its Scriptural foundation. What was supposed to console the weak and downtrodden with a promise of everlasting life now seeks to comfort losers with the claim that their betters are not really better. They are bad people because the believers have declared them to be bad people.

The trouble for the people we call the left is that Christianity is a life-denying religion in that what matters is what comes after this life. The faithful navigate this world of sin to reach everlasting life after death. For those who care only about this life, this cannot work, so those Christian ethics at the core of what we call the left quickly curdled into a bundle of resentments and hatreds. The American left is a workshop of resentment staffed by the ugly who live to oppose beauty.

The genius of Christianity is that it offers an image of beauty, the perfectly beautiful, that allows the faithful to catch glimpses of it in the fallen world. Resent and envy toward these glimpses of beauty are sins. Instead of cultivating these qualities among the lower classes, it celebrated those glimpses of beauty to motivate the faithful toward a Christian life with the promise of eternal life after death. Failure in this world was turned into a motivation to strive for success in the next.

The modern left lacks all of this. Instead, it offers the faithful nothing but a sty in which they can wallow in their own crapulence. As a social and political force, it is nothing more than a bundle of incoherent hatreds. While those hatreds provided a rally point for a period, no movement can exist only on hatred. This is why what we call the left is falling to pieces and taking its party with it. The last ideology, American Progressivism, is sinking into the mire of its own hatreds.