Over at Marginal Revolution, there is a long thread on the callous indifference of liberals to the damage they have caused with ObamaCare. I called out an someone calling himself Michael Foody for his arrogance. What’s remarkable about the exchange is that he and his supporters are incapable of mustering empathy for the people that have been harmed by this ridiculous program. It’s as if they are enjoying the suffering of others.

A striking feature of modern liberalism is the bizarre pleasure they take in the suffering of people they consider inferior. In my youth, they put a lot of effort into claiming they were motivated by compassion for the little guy. The poor, afflicted and oppressed were turned into posters they could wave around to close off debate. It was never sincere, of course, as appealing to the masses is a common tactic of authoritarians, be they of the fascist variety of the communist type. Hitler and Stalin were men of the people.

Modern liberals have abandoned much of this. They still have their imaginary victims and imaginary bogeymen, but all of their empathy, if we can call it that, is directed to people in their own class. Progressivism is the religion of the managerial class, the new class, that sees itself as apart from the rest of us. In fact, it appears the identity of these people is defined by their hostility to the rest of us.

If you read the MR thread, you see quite a few commentators who appear to delight in the suffering of their fellow citizens. The Brookings Institute guy comes off like a Soviet Commissar when asked about the number of Ukranians they have starved. You can just imagine the guy muttering, “A single death a tragedy.A million deaths a statistic” as he dismisses the complaints of those screwed over by this law.

It is increasingly clear that the appeal of this program, and maybe the entire Obama administration, is that they think white middle class people hate it. In other words, the Obama presidency is just a long act of spite. If middle class white people started warming up to Islam, the Left would swing over to the neocon position and demand endless wars in the Middle East. That’s the central truth of the cult of modern liberalism. They are defined by a deep hatred of those they see as their natural enemies.

Southern whites, the religious and the middle class are the enemy. A harmless old woman like Paula Deen is savaged because she is popular with Southern Whites. The governor of Texas is mocked and ridiculed because he is publicly religious. Sarah Palin is the devil because she is 100% middle American. Normal people have seen her type at the PTA meeting, the soccer field and the grocery store. That’s why the Left loathed her so deeply and instinctively. She was the typical American mom.

As ObamaCare rolls out, it is becoming obvious that the bill was written to cause maximum damage to middle class institutions. They have rules that force the religious to pay for abortion and birth control. There are rules that make it difficult for small business to offer health coverage. There are rules that punish families. Now we are seeing that the new policies that are offered up as a replacement are two and three times as expensive as the old policies, while covering less.

The thing about compassion is there is a limit. You can only give so much. Cruelty, on the other hand, never has a limit. You can always find some new way to be monstrous to people you hate. When it is a contest to see who can be the most intolerant of the dispossessed whites, the process spirals out of control. That’s what the future holds for us as the Left competes with itself to find even more creative ways to attack the enemies of the state. This will be an age of intolerant cruelty.