I would like to add an analytical category between Sybaritic Leftism and Cultural Sadeism: to whit, Soft Sadism.
We hear this term “codependent”. That means that one person is seriously dysfunctional, but that their dysfunctions are enabled, facilitated, allowed to continue without consequence by, someone else.
That person, too, is mad.
I see socialists, and they NEED the poor. The poor are their raison d’etre. Without the poor (oppressed; somehow disenfranchised in reality, or more commonly plausibly enough that the facts can be created to support this need), they have nothing to do.
This is a form of cruelty. If you need me to suffer to feel alright about yourself, you are an idiot, and a mild sadist. You don’t realize that you want me to not succeed, consciously, but it is there all the same.
That is why Sade is so “liberating” for many leftists: he says what they come to feel, that the sense of power is itself liberating in some ways, and that you need no longer even PRETEND to care about others.
If the Left gave a flying fuck about the poor of Detroit, Detroit would not be Detroit. But this is, of course, a counterfactual statement. What they really care about is power, and there is no extent of OTHERS suffering they are not willing to countenance to get and keep it.
Suffering lays as a blanket keeping the wicked warm in the cold winters of failed worlds.
As I say often, this is my think out loud blog. I can and do change my mind. That bit of poetic metaphor is not far off, though. The kings of old who did so much to oppress the poor of their lands are not so very different than the kings of Detroit City Hall, who live well, without doing ANYTHING to help the plight of their subjects. That their subjects continue to vote them in is testament to their powers of deception and guile, and, of course, naked corruption.