They Wanted to Own The Libs

Now what do they do?

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On this Independence Day, I’m thinking about Wile E. Coyote.

He wants to eat Road Runner so bad.

It never happens.

(Or does it…?)

Failure after failure only drives his determination. You remember everything Wile E. Coyote goes through. He blows himself up a hundred times. He crushes himself with boulders. He falls off cliffs. He smashes into mountainsides. He gets run over by trains. He never catches Road Runner, but he always thinks the next time will be different. What makes Wile E. Coyote different from MAGA?

Wile E. Coyote never feels sorry for himself.

MAGA is feeling extremely sorry for themselves right now. It’s all over the internet. They didn’t know Obamacare was the Affordable Care Act. They didn’t know the program that paid their kid’s medical bills was Medicaid. They didn’t know a quarter of our electricity comes from solar. They didn’t know it was actually AI sucking up all the power, and not their snowflake nemeses.

Is now the time to reach out to them?

Well, you go ahead.

We’ve been through all this with MAGA. They watched their friends and families drop dead by the dozen during a pandemic. They wept and felt sorry for themselves. They lost more in four years than they had in four decades. They begged us not to make them feel more guilty than they already did.

We thought it was regret.

It wasn’t.

We thought they might learn something.

They didn’t.

The pain and sorrow we watched was merely self-pity. It doesn’t take empathy or compassion to feel sorry for yourself. Any narcissist can do that. Any psychopath or sociopath can cry and demand sympathy.

These performances of grief mean almost nothing by themselves. They don’t mean any of them are ready to listen.

It’s not a prelude to change.

We wish it was.

The grim reaper could scare the hell out of Ebenezer Scrooge and convince him to change his ways in time to make a difference, but those transformations of character stand few and far between. There aren’t enough hours in the day for the Grim Reaper to visit every member of MAGA and make them stare at their own grave. Besides, they’d just call it fake news in the morning.

It doesn’t seem to matter what Republicans do to their base. Ten years ago, he joked about getting away with murder. He said he could shoot someone in the middle of the street in broad daylight, and he wouldn’t lose support. His supporters didn’t think he would be shooting them, but they’re rolling with it.

It doesn’t matter if ICE arrests their wives and girlfriends. It doesn’t matter if tariffs and trade wars double the price of smartphones and groceries. It doesn’t matter if their children die from measles and other preventable diseases. It doesn’t matter if they lose their healthcare, then their eyesight. It’s all good, as long as they know their enemy is suffering even more.

In the meantime, they’ll seek pity.

Except their enemy isn’t really suffering that much, are they? The affluent liberals they hate so much are like Road Runner. They go meep meep, and leave them in the dust. The rest of us have to suffer along with them. The train hits them. It hits us. The boulder lands on them. It lands on us.

What does MAGA see when they close their eyes and imagine liberals?

I think they see Rachel Maddow.

I think they see Ellen, or Patton Oswalt, or Steven Colbert. When they vote for Trump, even against their own interests, they see ICE rolling up to Rachel Maddow’s house and throwing her in the back of a van. I think it makes them squeal with delight. It’s a moment of ecstasy. Do you know why Donald Trump won in 2016? It wasn’t because of Russia. It wasn’t because of class tension. It wasn’t because he promised to build a wall. All of that played a role, but it wasn’t the reason why MAGA voted for a man who promised to screw them over, to their face.

He won because he promised to lock up Hillary Clinton, the quintessential lib. My god, they hated her. They hated her so much, they were willing to endure almost anything to make it happen, even Trump.

Spoiler alert, he didn’t lock her up.

MAGA didn’t get to own the libs. Instead, they got hit by a train. The rest of us got hit by the same train, and we thought they’d finally learned their lesson. But it was all just a big show of self-pity, nothing more.

This time, they thought they’d get to lock up Anthony Fauci. They thought they’d get to lock up Biden’s son. They thought they’d get to slap a bow on Zelensky and hand him to Putin. Once again, none of it happened.

What does it mean to own the libs?

Nobody knows.

A few times, MAGA thought they owned the libs, just like Wile E. Coyote thought he caught Road Runner. They gloated. It made them feel superior. That feeling never lasted very long. Worse, a lot of the libs they care so much about owning don’t really believe in the policies they promote. Do you think Chuck Schumer really cares about the big ugly bill? He doesn’t. He’s running a grift.

What made libs their enemy, anyway?

I think I know.

Libs told them what to do. It made them furious. Even if it was for their own good. Even if they would’ve done it anyway. Even if we were also doing it. Even if the entire point of having a government is putting someone in charge and doing what they say, as long as it’s for the greater good.

They hated it.

They hate paying taxes, even though they benefit from taxes. They hate vaccines, even though they benefit from vaccines.

They hate the idea of a living wage, even though they want one. They hate the idea of food stamps, even though they use them. They hate the idea of education, even though many of them desperately need one.

Believe it or not, psychologists have studied spite. Time and again, they’ve found that the average person is often happy to hurt themselves as long as it screws over someone else in the process.

Why do they hate vaccines?

Because we value them.

Spite motivates the weirdest decisions. They want to take everything away from us that makes life long and healthy, even if that means taking those things away from themselves, then forgetting what they did. They don’t want to admit it’s because of spite. So they come up with all kinds of pretzel logic to justify it. That’s probably why their reasons make no sense. They’re all excuses.

But spite, that makes sense.

Why do they keep forgetting Trump’s record as a con artist?

Their hate overpowers their memory.

For a normal human brain, spite has limits. There’s a point we’re not willing to cross. There’s a point when self-preservation kicks in, and it keeps you from ruining your life. Many of us were no big fans of Biden. We abhorred many of his policies, but we made choices out of self-interest, not spite.

There’s plenty of people we despise, but there’s a difference between voting your conscience and voting for spite. Whatever you did last election, you probably didn’t vote just to own someone else.

We keep waiting for MAGA to wake up. It would be nice if they could realize most of us want the same thing, and we could all have more than we ever dreamed if we could just stop trying to own each other all the time.

That hasn’t happened yet.

Maybe it won’t.

What do Republicans have to do to their MAGA base to make them finally turn around and see the real enemy? Does Trump have to drown a baby in a bathtub? I’m not sure it would be enough. They’d find a way to discredit it. They’d blame it on AI. And that’s the thing with this kind of spiteful loyalty. If someone finally does something bad enough to turn their stomach…

They just ignore it.

When someone is lost in the pit of spite, you can’t appeal to their self-interest anymore. They’ve given that up. They’ll cry for themselves, but in the end they’ll still find a way to blame us for all this.

Eventually, they’ll come to see the loss of their future as the price they had to pay to own the libs. Except it didn’t work. They’re never going to own the libs, not the ones they see in their heads. The harder they try, the more it doesn’t work, the more they’ll hate us. Wile E. Coyote never gave up. His failure motivated him. Wile E. Coyote had endless lives. MAGA doesn’t.

The internet knows all things. It reminds us that, yes, eventually, Wile E. Coyote does catch Road Runner, not the way he thought he would. In those final moments, he holds up a sign for the audience that says:

Okay, wise guys, you always wanted me to catch him.

Now what do I do?

What would happen if MAGA finally owned the libs?

I don’t think they know.