Exactly what I had in mind (as you probably guessed).

vs when you mention city-owned grocery stores.

Opposition to the most basic political implications of liberal equality is to so many libertarians like a potato is to Marge Simpson. But less charming.

Correlations, causation, limited datasets (MR comments), etc, but live your life so no one could believe you boosted infamous misogynists.

idk. There's overlap and probably has been convergence. Plus, maybe my specific word choice is wrong.

But having spent so much of my life with both types of people, I'm certain it isn't, or wasn't always, one group.

Reactionary centrism is performatively aloof, but that accommodates cruelty rather than encourages it. Reactionary centrists believe politics can be powerful if done right, and that's not going to be the belief at bottom for misanthropes.

Both certainly think sincerity in politics is naive or fake.

I agree about the details, but I also don't think that political misanthropes have to be consistently outside of politics. They absolutely have their own politics and it was a politics that appealed to me most at my most libertarian (also when I was younger and coarser—surely relevant).

They were definitely hanging out with the libertarians who were fancy enough.

(Maybe practically it doesn't matter anymore—but I can't shake feeling like that difference probably mattered when South Park was at its most influential.)

I don't think they were centrists unable to anchor themselves because of some idea of sophistication. I think they were (are?) political misanthropes who think it doesn't matter where we drift.

I have no doubt that there will be fundraising banquet dinners this year at which Republican politicians will say that they're celebrating the 250th anniversary of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations who the next morning will go back to their jobs serving an administration devoted to undoing Smith.

Getting pampered elites at Harvard and CBS to give in is easy. Threaten their privileges and they fold. But ordinary people — ordinary *Americans* — are proving to be made of sterner stuff.

Also, MAGA forgets most Americans do not share their total contempt for women.

This is what a lot of Canadians find so scary.