I watched an old 2003 movie, “The Barbarian Invasions” which the right love, because it depicts the ruling progressive left elite as decadent, corrupt, hypocritical, incompetent and destroying the civilization that they rule, and the ruling progressive elite love, perhaps because it is about their favorite topic, themselves.
When someone who is not part of the ruling elite watches this movie, the first message he sees is that socialist health care is a disaster, inflicting third world squalor and neglect upon the sick.
The next thing he sees is all the good progressives sneering at the USA as hateful and deserving destruction, while a hick town in the US provides smiling faces and scientifically and technologically advanced medical treatment, something notably lacking from the Canadian hospital, where even the priest just goes through the motions while waiting for patients to drop dead.
After that, the next thing he sees is that part of the problem is that the elite class of corrupt progressive government medical administrators cream off all the money for themselves, abandoning their patients and nurses to crime, squalor, disease, and death, abandoning even fellow members of the elite when they are so unfortunate as to become ill.
After that, the next thing the viewer sees is that union bosses and organizers are criminal thugs who shake down everyone, including the workers they supposedly represent, with the quiet threat of brutal violence.
And the next thing he sees is that progressives are personally immoral, disloyal, lazy, irresponsible, incompetent, and feckless, yet very comfortably off at the expense of the taxpayer.
Yet when I saw the ads for this movie, I see ruling elite progressives their target audience. The ads say that if you are one of the superior ruling progressive elite, you should watch this movie to get a warm fuzzy feeling about how superior you are. And I read the reviews, and find they did get a warm fuzzy feeling about how superior they are.
So what does a ruling elite progressive see when he watches this movie?
What I suspect he gets is what the priest was dispensing to the patients in the first scenes of the movie: Absolution. The forgiveness of sins.
Perhaps the good progressive hears that even though he and his kind screwed up totally, he is smarter and more cultured than the revolting masses, and if he is destroying our civilization, our civilization had it coming because of colonialism and imperialism and all that, and no matter how bad he may be, his good intentions make him such a superior person.
Whatever it is that he hears, the fact that the movie’s absolutely devastating depiction of leftists and leftism does not trouble him, implies that it is not news to him.
I think this is the problem of purely negative critique, such as satire. It doesn’t really lead anywhere except either to the kind of round-about reinforcement you describe, or else to disillusion, despair and distraction.
Yet of any alternative if offered to progressive politics, elites will simply see cruel fascism (i.e. modern secular anti-Liberalism) or cruel apologetics for slavery (i.e. religious reactionary politics). Both are which are core-immoral to the progressive sensibility.
The only current morally acceptable alternative to progressive politics is tribal (preferably hunter gatherer) fantasy. This is what serious Leftists yearn for.