I’ve been thinking about this topic for a while and finally got motivated to write about it when I saw this tweet from Nate Silver. He tweets, “Kind of amazed how well the ‘Did You Possibly Feel A Small Pang of Joy? Here's A Reason To Stay Miserable’ genre continues to do, though it was a pandemic thing but still going strong.” He highlights three stories: one against those rooting for orcas; one denouncing traveling from home; and one against using ice in cocktails because of climate change.
As Sonny Bunch notes, there is a reason environmentalists are so often the bad guys in movies. Thanos wanted to save the universe by killing half of humanity. In the Godzilla movies, the bad guys are environmentalists who want to unleash monsters to kill humanity and save the planet. In Aquaman, the bad guy thinks humans are destroying the earth. Go back to the Kingsmen movie and Samuel L. Jackson played a crazy environmentalist who wanted to wipe out the poor, unenlightened non-celebrity.
In real life, 60 Minutes has tried rehabilitating Paul Ehrlich, a Malthusian, in just the past year. New York City wants to regulate coal and wood-fired ovens out of existence. The feds want to take away gas stoves. Together with corporations, they want to ban the family road trip by forcing us into electric vehicles. More and more corporations push us to pay a small fee for climate offsets. They’re even pushing the trans agenda as a back door way to sterilize kids to prevent Paul Ehrlich’s population bomb.
Add into that the reaction to Noah Rothman’s piece at National Review on “The War on Things That Work.” You might have thought Rothman has carved up a sea turtle with plastic utensils. Leftists heaped scorn and disgust on him for making a very straightforward point:
By itself, an electric range, a heat pump, an ugly LED bulb, or a paper straw is a minor irritation. In a mandated aggregate, they look like a society-wide assault on the dignity of personal choice. Activists, like-minded bureaucrats, and their allies in elected office are, in the name of climate change, waging war against products and conventions that make everyday life work. For the targets of their hostility, they would substitute alternatives that either perform less effectively or demand more of your time and money. And you’re expected to bear this burden indefinitely. Or at least until you communicate your displeasure in no uncertain terms at the ballot box.
Rothman is absolutely right, and the left got angry at him for pointing it out.
These people are miserable and want you to be miserable. They cannot laugh. They have no sense of humor. They have chosen misery, lab-grown meat, and veganism. They have turned their backs on the ultimate plant-based food — cow, charred on a wood-burning flame — in favor of white guilt and childlessness.
That’s going to be on the ballot in 2024. Americans who can laugh at things have a way to break through. Most Americans, I think, are getting resentful of the bitter malcontents always lecturing us and sucking the joy out of life like Dementors from Harry Potter.
This is why I don’t discount Tim Scott, who always has a smile and laughs at these absurdities with an upbeat, positive message about America. It’s why I think Mike Pence, who believes in the greatness of the country, has an opportunity to carry a message forward. Haley, DeSantis, and all of them really can use the left’s misery and madness to rally Americans against it.
The left is dominant in cultural institutions. They don’t care for the country. They think your skin color defines your lot in life. Just look at the Yale-graduated New York Times editorial assistant who wrote that believing hard work can propel you forward in society just props up white supremacy. They are a loud minority who should be mocked, laughed at, and repudiated.
The GOP should put happiness on the ballot in 2024. Run against the misery of the Dementors who suck joy out of life, would deprive you of smoked meats and Neapolitan pizzas, and want to force you to stay home and masked.
I will always remember you saying the left is in a constant state if pissed offedness. So true!!
Oh, I recognized this years ago living in liberal land and having so many friends on the left side of policies and noting that they are generally not happy people.
I go back to the fabulous recent N.S. Lyons Substack post with an on-target theory for what is going on. First, my perspective is shaped, like it is for most people, from my life path and personality. My life path was one where I have been working since I was 12 years old. Many of my early jobs were physical. I met my wife of 40 years when I was working for a steel galvanizer (since then all those types of jobs have been exported to China) and was buff. However I was attending community college and got very interested in computers. That sent me to quit the union-wage physical job to take minimum wage in a corporate supply room where I quickly weaseled my way into an entry-level job in the MIS department. I eventually attained my Bachelor’s degree and they later a Masters in business… but continued to advance in my corporate IT roles where I focused on managing change, project management and leadership. So I went from blue collar work to become a white collar professional. I lost all that muscle mass sitting in a chair in front of a screen, but my brain got bigger.
But having both career experiences, I see both sides of economic politics.
My interests and responsibilities also all required investing myself in understand human organizational behavior and human psychology. I am CEO of two companies today and I count those lessons and skills as being the most contributory to my advancement.
So I have a pretty good capability for assessing personalities and traits in people. And statistically, from my observations and experience, people with left-leaning political views tend to be social and economic malcontents.
I think there are two reasons for this. One N.S. Lyons covers in his explanation that we have bunched up too many over-educated people noting that their path to socioeconomic status has too much competition. They require change to open up more opportunity for brain work. So much of their clearly destructive ideas, policies and orders are “Great Reset” connected in forcing change. They care less that the change is causing chaos to society than it provides them opportunity to peddle their skills in information manipulation. Their dislike of working class people and policies to bring back manufacturing, etc., are because these things do not benefit them directly. They are malcontents noting the lack of high-status opportunity and think the system is broken… when the problem is that we have allowed the industry of higher learning to crank out way too many people with useless degrees and a lack of interest to do any physical work.
The second reason I see them as being unhappy is that they are secular and lack spirituality to ground them. This was even more apparent during the pandemic crazies as they supported all the draconian policies and pushed the idea that authoritarians were justified in forcing the population to comply to help keep them safe from death that they feared. Thinking about a belief in God, those without it are going to be a psychological mess constantly thinking about the fact that life is short and they will die relatively soon. They are more fearful of death and it makes them a bit crazy… in fact, pushing for change that trades short-term risk-reduction for long-term damage to the system.
I had been taking the unfortunate path of seeing left leaning people as evil. But now I see that they are both pursuing their own self-interest while suffering a crisis of lacking spirituality. They are frankly dangerous in charge for these reasons because their drivers are largely negative emotions of anxiety and anger. They virtue signal care, but are generally hostile and selfish in their demands. A WSJ oped coined the term “cry bullies” and it fits.
I do agree that a positive message will help candidates, but only to a degree. Because we have so many people with useless degrees, high student debt and an opinion that they are deserving of a high-status career… and are grumpy about it… the GOP needs to go further in explaining how conservative values and policies will benefit these malcontents. But also there needs to be a more aggressive plan to combat the political activism of these people that also infest the mainstream media sources and big tech. The long-term destructive tendencies of the change chaos they are unleashing needs to be prominent in that messaging.
Clearly the right and center is tired of the chaos.