The Pleasure and the Sadness of “Owning the Libs”

 By Rev. Steve Edington

This editorial was originally published in the Saturday/Sunday—June 7-8, 2025 —edition of the New Hampshire Union Leader

****

While doing some mall shopping recently I noticed someone wearing a sweatshirt that read “Make a Liberal Cry.” That sweatshirt message is a variation on the more widely popular MAGA slogan of “Own the Libs.”

However vacuous I find such slogans to be, I recognize how they point to an ironic and perplexing phenomenon when it comes to our nation’s social, cultural, and political life. The alleged conventional wisdom by those of a moderate-to-liberal stripe is to question how so many persons in lower socioeconomic brackets can, as we often put it, “vote against their own interests.”

Indeed, as I write this, the US House of Representatives, by a single vote, has passed Trump’s  “Big Beautiful Budget Bill” that calls for cuts in Medicaid and Medicare funding, and even greater tax breaks for our wealthiest citizens. The final outcome of the Bill is yet to be seen after the Senate weighs in.

Those House members who voted for the “Beautiful” Bill, many of them from solidly red and generally low-income States, obviously felt they could do so without endangering themselves politically, even though many of their constituents depend upon the very programs they have voted to cut. And we center-left types are left shaking our heads.

But before we raise another lament about those who “vote against their own interests,” we should take a closer look the multiple meanings of “own interests.” While the easy assumption is that it has to do with social and economic matters, it’s far more complex than that.

Every person’s “own interests” have as much to do with their sense of who they are, and how they feel about themselves and their place in this world, as they do with their material existence. It’s a universal phenomenon.

What does all this have to do with “owning the libs”? Many, albeit not all, of those who derive pleasure from this slogan tend to feel looked down on or dismissed. For many of them their lives are largely ones of resignation and cynicism: Resignation to their lot in life; and cynical about any government program designed to supposedly improve their lives. But for all that, there is still a certain pleasure to be had in seeing those whom they feel look on them in a dismissive way get their comeuppance.

Trump’s latest attack on Harvard University is a case in point. While in this case it’s Trump’s attempt to deny visas to all of Harvard’s international students, in the MAGA world the particulars are moot. For many in that world it’s really about those who feel they are better and smarter and more enlightened than those of us who are barely scraping by out here finally getting smacked down. Through Donald Trump they get the vicarious pleasure of “owning the libs.”

As one who grew up in what has become one of the reddest states in America, I’m familiar with that sentiment. I also see a profound sadness in it. The sadness is for those whose need for self-worth and personal validation—needs we all have—are being exploited by a manipulative, amoral conman who has managed to gain the US Presidency. The feeling is: “I may not have much, but by God, thanks to my man in the White House, I own the libs.”

This feeling is a 2025 variation on an observation by President Lyndon Johnson during the civil rights movement: “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, he will empty his pockets for you.”

Johnson’s observation, in today’s atmosphere, is more about class and social status than it is about race, although race is not to be discounted. The pockets being picked are Medicaid, Medicare, and higher prices for household goods should Trump’s tariffs ever actually take effect. But these matters are secondary—so far—to the need and desire by those most affected by such things to “own the libs.”

The saddest thing is that the conman who has managed to convince so many that they “own the libs,” and that they are “making a liberal cry,” in truth owns them; and he will keep picking their pockets for as long as he can get away with it.

But just how long can Trump’s con game go on? Once the reality of diminished Medicaid coverage sets in, once the prices at Walmart start going up (as its CEO says they will), once the delivery of veterans’ benefits is stymied due to the VA staff cuts, once the opulence of Trump’s billionaire buddies becomes ever more apparent (and that’s the short list), how much more pleasure is there still to be derived from “owning the libs”?

That is what remains to be seen.

****

Rev. Steve Edington is the Minister Emeritus of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Nashua. He will be a speaker at the June 14, 2025, NO KINGS protest at Lowell’s Kerouac Park from 1 pm to 3 pm.