Rare is the human being who never experiences schadenfreude, i.e. the pleasure derived by someone from another person’s misfortune. I’ve been on both ends of it at various times in my life, and have even been subjected to a sort of pre-schadenfreude by people who wished failure upon my family in our past business. It’s not a pretty or humane feeling, but few of us are candidates for canonization or epitomes of enlightenment.
That said, there does seem to be a proper time for reveling in schadenfreude. Yesterday’s news about the conviction of Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane on multiple charges of, lets call it political shenanigans for the purposes of this discussion, is one such time. I felt similarly pleased at the takedowns of New York politicians Sheldon Silver, Dean Skelos, Malcolm Smith, John Sampson, Pedro Espana, Nicholas Spano, Carl Kruger, Alan Hevesi, Larry Seabrook, Andrew Stein, Joe Bruno, Efrain Gonzalez, and others (and this despite having met a couple of them personally). New York does seem a bit of a political cesspool, doesn’t it?
I must also admit guiltless schadenfreude over the scandals that took down Eliot Spitzer and Anthony Weiner. I generally disagree with the exposure of public figures’ private lives, but when such exposures demonstrate hypocrisy (Spitzer, busted for prostitution, was an anti-prostitution crusader) or turpitude of a sort that suggest unfitness for public trust, I’m not going to bewail violations of privacy.
There’s a dichotomy in our cynical resignation that politicians will be corrupt and dirty while simultaneously expecting them to represent us and act in our best interests. We really keep getting played for fools and suckers, time and time again, and yet we keep investing pols with power. This, I suspect, is what makes seeing the crooked and corrupt taken down so delicious. Even though they are strangers, and even though many of the crimes they’re convicted of have little to no impact on us personally, their positions as entrusted representatives of The People engender certain expectations of propriety. When those expectations are violated, it’s rational to expect that we relish their punishment.
There’s also some schadenfreude in the outcomes of political elections, especially those in which we feel railroaded by the actions of others. Yes, I’m talking about Election 2016, in which the GOP somehow picked Donald Trump out of a field of 17, and in which the Democratic National Committee engaged in all sorts of shenanigans to tip the scales away from Bernie Sanders and toward Hillary Clinton.
When one of them loses, the party loyalists who did not favor their eventual nominees will be justified in feeling righteous anger at those who perpetrated those nominees. There will be accusations and recriminations aplenty. While the party loyalists who supported the nominees, even if they originally backed different horses, will blame the “defectors” for their failure to take one for the team and vote for the unacceptable, the real fault will be with those who put Trump or Clinton at the top of the heap. It is truly astounding that two people saddled with so many negatives are the last ones standing in the race for the most powerful position in the world.
Here is the final and most tragic form of political schadenfreude, pithily voiced by H. L. Mencken:
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
I’ve opined time and again that the nation may need to “bottom out” in its addiction to big, authoritarian government before it can recover, and have started to conclude that such a bottom may never be achieved. Some, myself included, think that an epic wipeout of the GOP in this election might be necessary for a properly responsive and responsible small-government party to emerge. That would most likely be a phoenix-like GOP rising from the ashes of its statist conflagration, but it’s not outside the realm of possibility for a third party to become the gathering ground for the discontented. It could also be that Trump actually wins this election, and in doing so would continue the march towards statism and authoritarianism that we’ve been on for far too long. Perhaps Trump would be the one who’ll burn it all down, bottom it out, and wake the addicts up. Perhaps it’ll be Clinton. Either way, I’m going to enjoy my bit of schadenfreude regarding the voters who’ve brought the nation to its knees, even though I’ll be suffering along with everyone else. That’s the only pleasure I can see coming out of the next couple years.
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