Like the rest of you I've long
lost count how any criticism made of Trump from the start of his run to the
White House right up to the current day, however legitimate, is mocked by the
right on cable news, his followers and the President himself as 'Trump
Derangement Syndrome'.
Like so many labels of conservatives
for the 21st century it has the added benefit of having an element
of truth: so much of what he has done in the last decade has been done to piss
off so much of the liberal establishment that it has increasingly made far too
many of them so angry in their rhetoric of anything he does whether it is
small, large or in between that much of the time they do sound deranged. And long before he arrived on the scene the
right has always known that if you can make Democrats sound upset about
everything it negates all legitimate criticism of Republicans into noise which
they can shrug off. Fox News still does
it after thirty years even after so many Democrats and left-wing thinkers will
tell you how they are manipulating the masses. So many people on the left will
tell you it’s a trick done to distract you – and yet every time there's a
broadcast of any kind they will immediately do the exact same thing they have
for decades.
Now I will admit during much of
his first term there were times where I suffered from what both sides call TDS.
It wasn't until I started doing my series about Hollywood and Politics (I will
finish it) that I finally realized that we've been misdiagnosing this for years
and in fact it existed well before Trump was making names as a developer.
What everyone has called TDS is
actually RDL: Republican Denialism by Liberals. This syndrome has
existed since 1952 when Richard Nixon gave his famous 'Checkers' speech which
saved his political career. Nixon was the first major political candidate of
either party to realize just how television could be used to win over the
average American on a purely guttural emotional level regardless of what one
knows intellectually. Liberals have never been willing to accept that emotion
should play a part in politics: they believe every decision for voting should
be made on a purely intellectual decision. That never in the history of the
republic have voters based their decision for political candidates on that
metric – right back to when Andrew Jackson brought about Jacksonian Democracy
after running an emotional campaign over the intellectually superior John
Quincy Adams in 1828 – is something that has never once entered so many
intellectual minds, and if it does it's only to argue the electorate or the
system is fatally flawed, never their perception of it.
Because Nixon was openly
contemptuous of the liberal intellectual the same way they openly hated him:
the fact that much of the Republican party as well as the voting public found
sympathy to his tone is something that liberals refuse to accept as reality.
This denialism has caused them to ignore right up until the 1968 election even
the possibility the voters would pick Richard Nixon as their President. The
fact that by this time the Democratic Party was fatally split because of so
much liberal division rarely, if ever, enters the discussion of Nixon's winning
the Presidency in 1968. And given how his character would end up destroying his
administration and forcing him to resign in 1974 those same intellectuals have
spent the last half century arguing that his 49 state landslide in 1972 over
McGovern didn't count because of the corruption of Watergate. The fact that to
this there are many people still convinced Nixon got a raw deal and that many
of them would still effect our politics for the next half century has done
nothing to stop them from negating that appeal – and it has continuously caused
them to either ignore conservative victories that have followed as somehow
tainted as well as any role the left might have played in them occurring.
This pattern can be found in
almost every Republican triumph that followed in the next forty years. Reagan's
landslide defeat of Jimmy Carter in 1980 only happened because of the Iran
Hostage crisis as well as the fact that people in Reagan's team engaged in
behavior to stop the crisis from ending to give Carter an 'October surprise'.
The fact that Carter's approval ratings were at 21 percent, that many members of the left were so unhappy that Ted
Kennedy ended up challenging him for the Democratic nomination in 1980, and the
flaws of Carter as President – all of which were manifest long before the
hostage crisis began – are ignored in this retelling. Carter, a man the left of the 1970s loathed
for not being liberal enough, is now a hero and martyr less for his
Presidency's accomplishments but for losing to a man they've always considered
a boogeyman.
Reagan's two landslide victories
which completely destroyed the old-label of liberalism are swept aside as
aberrations even though he managed 1014 electoral votes combined to his two
opponents 59. Because the voting turnout was low compared to previous elections
the left will argue that Reagan and the conservative movement were not popular
and that liberalism really was what the public wanted. The question why then did Democrats lose so
horribly to Reagan is never asked?
By the time of Gingrich's
revolution in 1994 the left has begun to lay the groundwork for the argument
Republicans are rigging the game: the Heritage foundation and the Federalist
Society have been established, the Fairness Doctrine has been repealed and
Gingrich has spent years tearing things up in the House. In this narratives
Republicans were perfectly happy being the minority party in the House and
going along with everything Democrats did. Only after talk radio and Fox News
came along did Republicans become vindictive and the public started getting
brainwashed that liberalism was bad and conservatism is good. Again the public
has no free will of its own and they are tabula rasa who can reject their built
in liberal values simply by watching cable news for an extended period. The
possibility that they might have always been Republicans in the first place is
rejected, as is the fact that everything conservatives were doing to 'rig the
system' liberals could have done just as well. The left's hands are clean
because they never bothered to get them dirty in the first place.
By the time of George W. Bush's
win in 2000 the narrative has become clear: the country wants Democratic
administrations and its only because Republicans cheat by means of the
electoral college that they are suppressing the true will of the people. The
fact that the election was essentially a tie and then many of those people
voted for Nader because they thought there was no difference between him and Al
Gore is shunted aside by progressives. They start counting elections from 1992
on and ignore the ones from 1968 to 1988 where they were flattened by
Republicans five times out of six, four of them in landslides. They point to Florida
being stolen in 2000 which the circumstances at least have some basis in reality
and become scurrilous in arguing the same thing happened in Ohio in 2004 though
the margin was far larger and they have nothing but innuendo. Republicans only
win the White House because they cheat; that they are winning both Houses of
Congress during the 1990s and through 2004, completely dismissed.
When Obama wins in 2008 it's
official: Democrats are the party of the future, Republicans are that of the
past. Ignored is the fact that Obama's victory of 361 electoral votes is
nowhere near the level of any previous Republican landslide or even Clinton's
two previous victories. The GOP is dead, and it is their solemn duty to accept
it and just become docile. That the left doesn't particularly like Obama is not
important: by this point the Democrats are at best a necessary evil to smash
the conservative movement.
The Republican rise of the Tea
Party and its takeover of Congress to the point that by 2014 the party has
margins it hasn't had since 1928 is dismissed by a combination of the wealthy
one percent own elections, various Supreme court decision and racism towards
the first African-American President. Senate leader Mitch McConnell and a
succession of Republican speakers are thwarting the will of the President of
the United States. The fact that many of these people screamed about how
Bush-Cheney were running roughshod over checks and balances with their grand
unitary theory of the executive just ten years ago is dismissed entirely. The
President is the sole arbiter of government and Congress should do whatever he says.
Well before Trump becomes the
frontrunner for the nomination gospel has come: the GOP is only doing this
because they are in their death throes. Racial identity has overpower them and
they are all white men resisting the tide of the future. They need to accept
the fact that Democrats will always win the White House from now on and live
with it. The fact that over the last 24 years there has been a pattern of eight
years of a Democrat followed by eight years of a Republican is ignored. Hilary
will win in 2016 no matter who the Republican nominee is and of course the
Republicans will never nominate a man so uncouth and intellectually unqualified
as Trump.
The left ignores its own history
and dismisses the emotional appeal he has over the electorate. That Hilary
Clinton is, at best, a stilted and flawed candidate – one many of the left and
the party find unlikable most of the time -is ignored as the fact of all of
Trump's. Any abuse against her is of course a conspiracy of the right and
sexism. No sane person would vote for Trump any more then they would for W or
Reagan or Nixon.
In the aftermath of 2016 the fact
that Hilary won the popular vote by three million leads the left to believe the
system is rigged. Never mind that she won California by 4 million votes over
Trump: the masses truly wanted her. All
the flaws of her campaign are erased. The system is rigged against true
expression. The people have not been heard. That seventy million people voted
for Trump is ignored: they're not real Americans.
Which brings us to today.
At no point in this narrative,
you will note, has the average voters decision to vote Republican either for
President or at any level been taken into consideration. That is because in the
minds of so many people they can't comprehend why any rational person would
vote Republican. That's because many of them can't comprehend why any rational
person would vote, full stop. None of the denialism of Republicans appeal
necessarily leads to unity with the Democrats either: if Democrats have lost
elections at any point, it is because they spent too much time trying to appeal
to people who voted Republican in the last election. The only reason Democrats
have lost is because they haven't embraced a far-left agenda which all
Americans clearly and obviously want. The fact that they have chosen Republican
Presidents or representatives is because they're not smart enough to understand
how great liberalism or progressivism or whatever left wing label is or
alternatively, they are all secretly white supremacists, even the African-Americans
and LatinX or all part of the patriarchy even those who are women.
Historically the left has always
had an intellectual snobbery over the average American and it has become more
pronounced with each Republican victory well before Trump ever ran for
President. For all of their assaults on Republicans being the party of the
elites and oligarchs and the one percent, the loudest and angriest voices from
the Democrats have never come from the working class voter. They're always from
the academic or Hollywood or the media or certain wealthy people, the
overwhelming majority of whom are mostly white themselves. There are college
students and high class people at so many of their rallies but the working
class they speak for are rarely there.
Where they are, increasingly,
have been at Trump rallies. These are the people, according to the left, who
are being the most abused by the Republicans for decades and who need the most
saving. But it is rare, if ever, they will try to talk to them and if they do
it is invariably to mock them in Hollywood sketches or to judge them as
unevolved species by academics.
So much of the left's philosophy
on these people is to argue the kind of conservative ethos that they mock when
Republicans do it in their speeches: they have to raise themselves up by their
bootstraps, realize how they are being brainwashed by the conservative media
and Republican politicians and they must do it without any help from those
intellectuals who clearly know better. The liberal denialism prevents them from
even talking to other Republican voters even if it helps them – and more
importantly (you'd think) the country as a whole. But it's their job to make
the first step and until they do, the RDL argument goes, it is perfectly
acceptable for you to cut out people like that from your liberal life even if
they are your friends, family or children.
The biggest problem with those
who have RDL is not that the Republicans are not guilty of many of the
crimes they are accused of – they are and some will even admit it – its that
those who have RDL know about these crimes and every level do nothing
constructive to stop it or dismiss using that method as a counterattack. Every time the conservatives suffer even a
momentary defeat, they learn from it and alter their approach. RDL's never
learn from anything they do: they feel that their warning, even if they come
long past the point to do anything, is sufficient to the cause. It is the
responsibility of all of us to find a way to counterattack. They never give a
method, they never give time to it, and they never give their money. All they
do is write stridently and scream at the rest of us that its our fault for
ignoring their advice. Most of the time they do sound – deranged.
I think the biggest problem with
those who have RDL is that they can't accept the reality that Republicans will
never truly disappear from America. No matter what happens after the midterms
or 2028, no matter what reforms the Democrats might or can make in the interim,
no matter what changes that happen, the Republicans will still exist. They
might change their approach, they might change their policy, but they'll still
be here.
And unlike all of those in
identity politics, those who vote for them don't wear a Scarlet R on their
chests or all live in flyover country or rural America. They vote in every
election in deep blue states and are voting against members of the Squad no matter
how futile the effort is. No amount of magical thinking by RDL will make them
all disappear or even all vote Democrat. These people can cut them out of their
lives, of their families, of their chatrooms – but just because they don't talk
to them doesn't magically make them disappear. They exist; they're going to
vote Republican. And unless you're willing to engage them in debate or
acknowledge their existence, what reason do they have to change their mind?
I don't deny many on the right
don't see much of what is blue America is as human. But I've spent too much
time on this site and others to know that's not a flaw that is solely limited
to those on Fox News or MAGA. A lot of them are on this site; I encounter them
in my algorithm whether I want to or not.
This is reality no matter how
many severe the case of RDL is. People who suffer from it can stay in their RDL
bubbles as much as they want; it's not going to change that reality. They can pontificate from the heights of
their virtual ivory towers; it will not change those facts no matter how many claps
they get, no matter how many favorable comments that approve of them. (Yes I am
openly baiting some people here; as established I give no F's on what they
think.)
Because I don't suffer from RDL.
I live in the real world. I accept that Republicans exist. I may not agree with
them some or even most of the time but then I'm in that same place with almost
everyone else I meet regardless of their political affiliation. I accept that
they live in the same country, state and maybe even the same building I live in
even though I do live in New York. Some of their points of view may turn my
stomach at some times but that's never been enough of a reason for me to wish
them out of existence and its certainly not enough for me to say they shouldn't
vote or run for office.
And anyone who can't accept these
basic realities, well I hate to say it, then you really are deranged.
No comments:
Post a Comment