TDS is Not a Mental Health Condition

trump opponents are dedicated to the glorious victory of fundamental transformation

Mark Halperin caused some waves by predicting to Tucker Carlson that if Trump wins the election then Trump Derangement Syndrome will explode.

I think it will be the cause of the greatest mental health crisis in the history of the country. I think tens of millions of people will question their connection to the nation, their connection to other human beings, their connection to… their vision of what their future for them and their children could be like. And I think that will be, will require an enormous amount of access to mental health professionals… I think there will be some degree of protest…

And I don’t think it will be kind of a passing thing that by the Inauguration will be fine. I think it will be sustained and unprecedented and hideous.

No. I think that Halperin misses the point. This is not about mental health. It is about the political cult that rules America.

Politics is never just about power, and not just about defeating the Enemy and helping our Friends. It usually involves a belief system about the nature of good and evil. And when a political movement fails, the question is why? Is it because the political beliefs and the political program make things worse and create hardship and poverty? Or is it due to the evil manoeuverings of the Enemy?

Obviously, none of our liberal friends believe their beliefs are nonsense, or that Social Security and Medicare and government education and DEI are wrong. They believe they are true, and they believe that they are going to save the world. They believe that they are the allies of the oppressed peoples fighting against the white oppressors.

If Trump wins the election it will not destroy the belief system of millions of believing liberals, people who think that 2016 was an aberration, that the 2020 election was a return to normal. Not yet.

A Trump win will call all their assumptions about how the world works into question. But they won’t give up, not yet.

A Trump win will be the political equivalent of a cult dealing with the failure of its prophecy. But cults don’t give up when the prophecy fails. Not yet.

There’s a book about this, When Prophecy Fails written in the 1950s by Festinger et al., a group of social scientists studying end-of-the-world cults. I read it just as the Mueller Report came out in 2019 showing that there was no Russian Collusion in 2016.

See, when you are in a cult and the Day of Judgement fails to occur on schedule, the believers don’t give up and go home. Not at all. Instead, they talk to each other and reconfirm their beliefs and their enthusiasm increases. For a while.

Festinger and his fellow researchers were studying a UFO cult in the early 1950s. The cultists were expecting to be picked up by a UFO on a certain day, and when the pickup didn’t occur they decided they had just got the day wrong.

Eventually, people started walking away from the cult and it slowly dissolved.

However, when we are dealing with a political movement that has actually won a revolution and the revolution fails to transform the world, the ruler and their followers typically conduct a reign of terror. As the French Jacobins did in the 1790s. As the Stalinists did in the 1930s. As the Maoists did in the Cultural Revolution. That’s what Crane Brinton writes in The Anatomy of Revolution. The moderates that start the revolution get replaced by the true believers who come down hard on the non-believers that they know are trying to sabotage and wreck the revolution.

But the reign of terror doesn’t last forever.

In the case of France, the Reign of Terror ended in the Thermidorean Reaction and then Napoleon and then the conquest of Europe and then defeat at the Battle of Waterloo. In the case of the Soviet Union and Maoist China the revolutionary enthusiasm died down into a simple authoritarian police state.

When a political movement loses a battle, it determines to fight back twice as hard.

That is what is really going to happen here in the US. It’s not a mental health crisis. It is the soldiers of the revolution rededicating themselves to the glorious victory.

What Mark Halperin is telling us is that our liberal friends aren’t going to give up. Not yet. Initially they will redouble their efforts. At a very minimum our friends at AntiFa will be out in the streets. And liberal cat ladies will have a new version of the #WeBelieve yard signs to show their devotion to race and abortion and climate change.

But it isn’t a mental health crisis. It is just politics as usual.