Little Morsel #8: The Party That Hates Its Own Fans
Have you ever noticed how the people screaming loudest about freedom are always the ones getting the worst deal? It’s like cheering for a team that keeps tackling you. Every. Single. Play. And after the game, you still buy the jersey. You defend the coach. You swear, with a bloody lip, that next season will be different.
That’s the modern conservative movement. Not “conservative” like careful, or thoughtful. Conservative like preserving a system that’s perfected the art of hurting the very people who swear loyalty to it.
The core belief goes something like this: Everyone is on their own. Suffering builds character. If you’re struggling, you didn’t try hard enough.
It sounds tough. It sounds virtuous. But it’s a psychological trap. It trains people to resent anyone who gets help—including, secretly, themselves. It makes compassion feel like a moral failing.
So when a policy comes along that would actually make life easier—cheaper insulin, a cap on a medical bill, anything that stops an illness from becoming a financial death sentence—the reaction from that base isn’t relief.
It’s suspicion.
Because if hardship is the proof of your worth, then easing hardship feels like cheating. The system has them scared of the cure.
Let’s look at the part that should stop everyone cold.
There was a rule, a simple one. It said medical debt couldn’t go on your credit report. Not erase the debt. Not forgive it. Just… stop a hospital from destroying your financial future because you got sick.
That protection was killed.
Let’s translate that:
You can survive a heart attack… and still lose your apartment.
You can beat cancer… and still get denied a car loan.
You can do everything ‘right’—and the system still gets to look you in the eye and say, “Too bad.”
And who gets hit hardest? The same working-class voters who were told, for decades, that this party was “on their side.”
This isn’t strength. It’s not discipline. It’s not freedom.
It’s loyalty to a machine that profits from your pain. You’re not a fan in the stands; you’re the tackling dummy.
Now—before anyone claps too hard for the other team—let’s be brutally honest. Democrats have their own symphony of failure. They fundraise off fear. They talk a big game about justice while protecting the donor-class backers. They mistake a well-meaning tweet for a result, a symbolic gesture for systemic change.
That’s precisely why this isn’t about liberal versus conservative anymore. That’s a stale food fight.
This is about progressivism versus stagnation.
Progressivism isn’t left. It’s forward.
It’s the radical, common-sense idea that if one of us drowns in medical debt, all of us are poorer for it. That a society should be judged not by how cruel it can be to the “undeserving,” but by how many people it keeps standing. It’s the understanding that you can’t MAGA your way out of a $200,000 hospital bill. You can’t bootstrap your way through chemotherapy. And you sure as hell can’t call it “freedom” if getting sick costs you your home, your credit, and your future.
At some point, the question stops being, “Who do you vote for?” That’s the easy part.
The real question is, “Why is anyone still defending the team that keeps tackling them?”
When does the loyalty you show to them ever come back to you? Where’s your jersey? All you get is the bill. And another concussion.
The play isn’t going to change. The coach isn’t coming to save you. Maybe it’s time to stop cheering for your own bruises.
The play isn’t going to change. The coach isn’t coming to save you.
If a team keeps tackling its own fans, that’s not tradition — that’s a business model. And every time you defend it, you’re not proving your toughness. You’re underwriting the next hit.
Maybe freedom isn’t cheering harder. Maybe it’s finally leaving the stadium.
— The Baker