{"id":4576,"date":"2010-01-07T10:19:10","date_gmt":"2010-01-07T15:19:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/2parse.com\/?p=4576"},"modified":"2010-01-07T10:19:10","modified_gmt":"2010-01-07T15:19:10","slug":"ressentiment-redux","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/?p=4576","title":{"rendered":"Ressentiment Redux"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/trueslant.com\/juliansanchez\/2009\/12\/21\/ressentiment-redux\/\">Julian Sanchez<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>But national-level political communities <em>really are communities<\/em> now, in a fairly robust sense. Between dedicated cable and radio channels and the Internet, you really can live in them in a pretty literal and immersive way&#8230; What\u2019s really pernicious about a politics of <em>ressentiment<\/em> is that it cuts that tether\u2014it enables a political identity that\u2019s generated and defined by political conflict itself&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Part of the problem is that politics is no longer seen as a narrow tool for addressing some well-defined set of problems, but a kind of all-purpose machine for the satisfaction of human desires&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>We don\u2019t need to do some kind of probing psychoanalysis, because this stuff isn\u2019t subtext; it\u2019s text.\u00a0 Remember Palin\u2019s infamous \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.huffingtonpost.com\/2009\/08\/07\/palin-obamas-death-panel_n_254399.html\">death panels<\/a>\u201d post? It wasn\u2019t just a claim that the government would deny care; the fear was that this was <em>Obama<\/em>\u2019s \u201cdeath panels\u201d getting to <em>decide how worthy you are<\/em>. Liberals treated it as a generic argument about \u201crationing,\u201d but by its own terms it was an argument about <em>being judged<\/em>. Conservatives\u2019 <a href=\"http:\/\/images.google.com\/images?&amp;q=obama+snob&amp;aq=f&amp;oq=&amp;aqi=&amp;start=0\">favorite photo of Obama<\/a> has him with his nose in the air looking down on the hoi polloi, testifying to his purported arrogance. Then the outrage over a strained reading of an Obama remark about \u201cputting lipstick on a pig\u201d: He\u2019s calling Sarah (and therefore you!) a pig! The message is pretty insistent: <em>They think they\u2019re better than you<\/em>. It\u2019s not, again, that I\u2019m asking why people hold certain policy views and concluding that it\u2019s really about this kind of cultural resentment. I\u2019m asking why the political coalition organized around this set of views is putting so much emphasis on this frame, and whether it isn\u2019t ultimately a bad idea to.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Julian Sanchez: But national-level political communities really are communities now, in a fairly robust sense. Between dedicated cable and radio channels and the Internet, you really can live in them in a pretty literal and immersive way&#8230; What\u2019s really pernicious about a politics of ressentiment is that it cuts that tether\u2014it enables a political identity [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[4,458],"tags":[1732,2472],"class_list":["post-4576","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-the-opinionsphere","tag-julian-sanchez","tag-ressentiment"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8qcx-1bO","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4576","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4576"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4576\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4625,"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4576\/revisions\/4625"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4576"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4576"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4576"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}