It is quite extraordinary that January will see the return of Donald Trump to the White House. His remarkable re-election last November was a wonderful moment of colossal disruption to Woke’s relentless advance to dominance in the Western world. Say what you will about Trump, he has at least provided many of us with an utterly delicious helping of schadenfreude, served in the face of liberal progressive hysteria which took TDS – Trump Derangement Syndrome – to new levels of absurdity in the run-up to the election and in its immediate aftermath.
The anti-Trump histrionics of the lib-prog clerisy has been so over the top as to be completely counter-productive. Their playbook of fear, echoing the failed anti-Brexit campaign in Britain, was so extreme that everyday voters with common-place common sense simply dismissed it for the nonsense it is. Not that these people, in their millions, started their day with a barista-style coffee while perusing the latest edition of the New Yorker or, here in the UK, say, Prospect, from which to take their party line and assuage their confirmation bias. But to understand the level of the lib-progs’ histrionics, furiously and incontinently exploding from people who are purportedly the cleverest and most-enlightened of us all (please doff your caps to your superiors, you proles) it is necessary to give a few examples of their measured, reflective and learned thoughts. And then have a good laugh.
Let’s take the prestigious New York Review of Books just before and after the election. The NYRB regularly contains brilliant essays and is always at its best when taking a balanced view on issues; in many ways it is an admirable intellectual publication. But when it takes upon itself the mantle of being the bible for the lib-prog intelligentsia, the bulk of its readership, it can become childishly imbalanced. Laurence Tribe from Harvard warns of ‘the tyranny that a return of Trump to power would represent’. Jacqueline Rose of Birkbeck in London is astonishingly callous in her dismissal of the first assassination on Trump, claiming that he was ‘barely grazed by a bullet’, attempting to undermine Trump’s impressive display of courage having just been shot in a near-death experience of a few millimetres. Jonathan Lethem of Pomona, fittingly for a professor of creative writing, catches himself ‘dreaming his [Trump’s] comeuppance like I notice my sexual fantasizing’ and partaking in ‘Trump hate porn’ (which is a bit creepy, to say the least).
After the utterly decisive democratic victory of Trump, there was even more wailing and gnashing of teeth. The ever-reliable NYRB stalwart and its advising editor Fintan O’Toole (I have valiantly restrained from swapping his initials around) is sorely disappointed that the election ‘came down to the margin for error’. In other words, Democracy is only right when it votes the right – ie Left – way. Patricia J Williams of Northeastern (we’re back to university dons now) is the one most in need of smelling salts: Trump utilises ‘Hitlerian embellishments’; ‘Trump, Vance, and the entire Republican Party seem to have recycled antebellum race science’; Trump is about to unleash an ‘ethnostate’; his policies can be identified with ‘Nazi antecedents’; and ‘Trump’s words’ can be likened to ‘Mein Kampf’. But then, Prof Williams’ judgments are a little off-beam at the best of times: in the pre-election issue she opined that the lighter-than-air Kamala Harris is ‘a model of release and liberation’. Er, from what? Substance? Harris herself, of course, also called Trump a fascist. She is in a long line of lib-progs to declare that.
These examples from NYRB offer merely a few instances of lib-prog Trump Derangement Syndrome. That the come from one of the world’s leading intellectual publications is symptomatic of how pervasive TDS is at even the supposedly highest cognitive levels. It demonstrates their habitual contempt for voters and democracy.
