Temporarily Embarrassed High School Bullies

Your bullying isn't a necessary evil--you're just evil, and need a convenient target.

You might be familiar with the idea of the “temporarily embarrassed millionaire,” a concept (sometimes attributed to John Steinbeck or Ronald Wright) meant to explain why poor or working class people in America typically vote for capitalist agendas—instead of seeing themselves as the proletariat, they see themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires and vote accordingly.

Well, I’d like to talk about something entirely different (and unrelated to economics). I want to talk about temporarily embarrassed high school bullies.

These are people (typically seen online, where you can be as mean as you want, but sometimes in real life) who, despite never having really been “cool,” per se, will use an ideological platform to unleash the locker-stuffing and swirlie-giving power they believe is owed to them. This absurdity is underscored by the fact that even as they attempt to bully other people, they give off big dorky “head in the toilet” energy.

I recently read a piece by

Lirpa Strike

about this phenomenon (albeit not identified as such by name, as this is MY special term, trademarked). She described progressives and leftists in the 2010s who leveraged their beliefs about privilege and intersectionality to taunt poor and working class white people for not amounting to enough despite their white privilege. If you exist in leftist or liberal spaces, you probably see a lot of this (which

Phoebe Maltz Bovy

referred to as the “smol bean” phenomenon) but it exists on the Right too, and it exists within spaces that aren’t political at all. This phenomenon is truly universal—all it requires is a vengeful geek who really wishes they had administered more atomic wedgies and is desperately looking for an excuse.

I will start with a personal story, because at one point, I was the temporarily embarrassed high school bully.