We are living through an astonishing time in our nation’s political history.  Somewhat more than half of Americans see President Trump as a leader of courage, energy, and commitment with a proven record of promoting peace and strengthening both the U.S. economy and the southern border against an illegal invasion, whereas the other half sees only personal evil in Trump and describes him with adolescent hyperbole, habitually comparing him to Adolf Hitler.  That half is not able to thoughtfully assess Trump’s policies, or even its own economic or political interests.  Instead, these people cling to a sense of moral superiority and are obsessed with the imputed personal sins of a man they despise.

This obsessive hatred, popularly called Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS), is not a free-standing mental disorder.  Rather, it is a delusional symptom cluster at the terminal stage of a sixty-year vast, progressively insane attempt by the left wing, especially the cultural, educational and political elites, to entrain the American people to despise their nation, their laws, and themselves in order to break their self-respect and mentally enslave them to government control.  Few people can stand against indoctrination and brainwashing that they have been exposed to all their lives.

The terminal TDS symptom cluster arose when Donald Trump, almost alone, stood up with an unbreakable resolve and rejected to its core the quasi-religious, anti-American indoctrination inculcated and absorbed across the lifespan of most living Americans.  Trump’s message, that America and her people are actually great, good, and just, created, among those indoctrinated to multifaceted America-shaming, a psychological recoil proportional to their anti-American brainwashing, a recoil so violent as to render them irrational and hateful toward the man who challenged their beliefs.

When psychoanalysts try to understand mental disorder, they begin with the conflicts of childhood.  The same model explains the incurability of TDS when we conceptualize the arrival of the Baby Boom generation as a kind of childhood for America.  Several conditions of the Baby Boom generation set the stage for 60 years of America-shaming, which reached its current culmination in TDS.  First, the Baby-Boomers were the first generation to be raised in improved material security, which tends to loosen the bonds of family and societal loyalty.  More importantly, they were the first generation to cast off the strictures of what we will call Judeo-Christian morality, to use the sociological term.  The Baby Boom generation was the first to abandon religion-based morality, the only consensually accepted moral code in American history, in favor of a secular ethical system that emphasizes personal freedom.  And lastly, the Boomers were the first generation where the privilege of access to a modernized, non-classical higher education vastly expanded to include the middle class.  For many Americans, these factors set the stage for a shift into disloyalty and ingratitude.

The Baby-Boomers coming of age in the backdrop of the Vietnam War set a pattern of bifurcation of American society from which there is a direct line to the terminus of TDS.  The objection to the Vietnam war was not only the moral rejection of the cruelty of war itself.  If it had been, the Boomers would have cared about the Vietnamese people after the war, which they did not.  The 1960s saw the founding of a socio-political worldview that America herself was a malevolent force in the world — greedy, militaristic, polluting — instead of the truth, which is that America was and is the beacon of freedom in the world.  That worldview can be called adaptive America-shaming.

America-shaming is adaptive for reasons that still obtain today.  First, it relieves its adherents of responsibility to defend their nation and provides the gratification of feeling morally and intellectually superior to those who do.  It provides a gratifying experience of that superiority without the bother of actual moral self-control, charity, or selfless service.  Above all, it is much easier to solve imaginary problems than real ones.  It is easier to bemoan non-problems such as diversity and America being evil than to solve severe, difficult problems — for example, the decades-long astronomical increase in autism.

So adaptive America-shaming was off to the races from the ’60s.  In an crescendo of falsehoods through the years, America was racist, just as structural racism was disappearing.  America oppressed women, just as discrimination against girls and women was smashed.  America was homophobic, just as sexual minorities were placed on a glittering cultural pedestal.  America was burning up the world with pollution, just as actual pollution was being vanquished in the water and air.

The problem with big lies is that they can never turn into truth.  On the contrary, big lies have to become more strident, bloated, anti-factual, and anti-natural as time goes on.  But across fifty years of media and educational indoctrination, sophisticated Americans who rejected traditional faith more and more could not give up their unearned moral superiority.  They had no choice but to accept increasingly insane assertions, such as that all white people are privileged or that a boy is a girl if he says so or that unworkable electric vehicles will keep the world from burning up a few months from now.

And suddenly, one guy comes along, an infamous womanizer who sounds as though he learned to talk while waiting for a bus in Queens, and he says it’s all nonsense.  America is great.  And the half of Americans who have accepted the indoctrination, who have been deluding themselves, aggrandizing themselves, and generally taking a vacation from hard work such as actually teaching, in the belief that America sucks and feelings are all that matter, lost their minds because of what he was saying.  They caught the worst case of cognitive dissonance in world history.  They couldn’t bear to actually think about Trump’s policies, or question his ideas, or look for some value in them.  No, they simply went nuts.

Many Americans have had a change of viewpoint through the decades.  There was one too many reasons given for them to hate themselves and destroy their own dreams.  But for intractable TDS, even in the face of a candidate like Kamala Harris, who made the average Shih Tzu appear self-aware and informed, TDS sufferers could not think incisively about issues.  For them, there is no cure.

As Trump says, there are fine people on both sides.  For the fine but deranged people in your life, don’t challenge their delusional system.  It will not work.  Don’t gloat; it will harm the relationship, and anyway, it ain’t over yet.  Quietly let them know we are all in this together, you love them, and time will tell.

Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.