Trump Derangement Syndrome Is Real

 

I am linking to Brandon Morse’s “Trump Derangement Syndrome Is Real and It Needs to be Studied” at RedState because I expect that almost all visitors to this blog have witnessed the Syndrome up close.  If any of your family, personal, or professional relationships have been disrupted or destroyed by this Syndrome, then Mr. Morse’s observations will resonate:

The concept of “Trump Derangement Syndrome” may have started as a joke to describe the over-reaction of hatred toward Trump, but after years of people upending good sense and their own principles in order to get at this man, I’m pretty convinced it’s real and that scientists need to study this in the future.

I see it every single day and as we drift closer and closer to the 2024 presidential election, I have a feeling we’re going to see it even more and in big ways.

. . .

I also see it on social media daily. Any disagreement with a leftist figure, no matter who, always results in the same replies about me being a Trump-obsessed drone, MAGA extremist, Trump-humper, etc., etc.

. . .

Yet, there are some who will craft an entire fantasy world around them where Trump was a great evil who never did anything but great evil and will do nothing but great evil in the future. In their minds, he must be stopped at all costs, even if that cost means ditching firmly held principles. I’ve seen this kind of mentality before in personal situations, but never on a mass scale such as this.

Decades from now, when we’ve left this age behind, I truly hope scientists and clinical psychologists study this moment. I truly believe that this is something of a shared madness that has ruined the minds and relationships of many people. It’s caused them to debase themselves and become unreasonable. I hope future generations look back at this and learn from it because I fear if we don’t then this problem will just fester, and I’d hate to see how this could get any worse.

Read the full column here.  

# # #

Primal Screams and Mass Hysteria

art credit: MaliaLitman.com

We all had a good laugh over the anti-Trump “Screaming Helplessly at The Sky” temper tantrums last week, but in a sense, the Scream Fests are not funny. There is something on the order of mass hysteria going on here. It's a year after the election, and adults are still stamping their feet and wearing stupid pink hats and screaming in genuine outrage.

I’ve come across a few think pieces on the phenomenon. Victor Davis Hanson examines the various “hysterias and frenzies” we have been witnessing:

Human nature is prone to a herd mentality and the politics of excess. Groupthink offers a sense of belonging and reinforcement to most people. Democracies in particular in their radical egalitarian culture and exalted sense of self-righteousness are particularly prone to shared frenzies. 

Richard Fernandez, Mr. Belmont Club, summed up his take on the Primal Scream-a-thon:

What they were mourning was not some conservative's sublunar fallibility, but their own. Whatever happens now, the progressives have lost decades of "gains," not to the alt-right, which is nothing special, but to the realization of their own human frailty. 

  

Last summer, Dilbert / Scott Adams wrote about the “mass hysteria bubble” and how he defines it:

if you are not experiencing mass hysteria, you might be totally confused by the actions of the people who are. They appear to be irrational, but in ways that are hard to define. You can’t tell if they are stupid, unscrupulous, ignorant, mentally ill, emotionally unstable or what. It just looks frickin’ crazy.

I thought I would post these links, since we live in crazy times, and maybe we are not the crazy ones. All three articles are worth the read.

# # #