Being an asshole is one thing. But thinking you can be an asshole by proxy by becoming an asshole's victim, is something else entirely.

They're not assholes by proxy, they're also assholes. They were before, and they will continue to be after.

They're seeking maximum asshole alignment and some recognize that while supporting the primary asshole may be causing them pain, it's lesser than the pain of the people they've always wanted to hurt.

Well, we disagree on our asshole classification. To me a true experienced asshole notices when another asshole is about to swindle them. There is some inexplicable tendency for swindlers to get swindled, but that's probably more at the periphery. Not sure if those qualify as assholes. I'll have to think about it.

I'm just talking about people who are angry and mean to the point that it's harmful to themselves

I see the general phenomenon of those people as an outlet for a set of social defects we have. Keep in mind that "immigrants bad" and so on cultural wars repertoire is always the go-to of populists when they want to point to an easy enemy to rile up the population.

It works because it's like short-circuiting. You have the easy to identify superficial traits, and so the current goes straight through, and shorts the system. Except it's social electricity in this case. My point is while we can blame the individual assholes in this, their generation itself is an inevitability in the right toxic environment. These populist explanations seek to address real concerns of people like bad work conditions, inflation and so on, but it invents an easy to digest (and entirely wrong) premise about why their lives are bad.

I wish I could say hating the assholes works, but that's just another short-circuiting of social electricity. Polarization, hate, enemies. It all just serves to divide and conquer us. Unity is strength, division is weaknesss.