Over the last couple of days I have been teaching the Salem Witch Trials in my colonial America class. So I naturally gravitated to University of Virginia professor Mark Edmundson piece at Liberties titled “The Politics of Possession in America.”
He writes:
From every direction now one hears the voice of hollow righteousness. It is monotonal, jargon-ridden, condemnatory, fierce. It calls others out for their crimes. It hunts our racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia: you name it. It is relentless, unforgiving, and cruel. It raves madly in the idiom of reason. Those who deploy it would give anything to be judges, with hanging prerogatives…I am not saying that every person who endorses the social justice agenda is mentally ill and needs a shrink or an exorcist. People who hold these ideas sanely–and there are plenty of them–tend to be humorous, self-aware, and well-disposed to irony. They are serious in their commitments, but they don’t take themselves too seriously…But there are times when a society, or a significant portion of it, takes on pathological qualities….
How, then, do you distinguish the sane members of the leftist tribe from the whackos? You start to recognize both versions–the sane and the pathological–by their voices. The sane speak with self-awareness and usually some self-doubt. Irony infuses what they say, as does a willingness to listen to counter arguments. The whackos speak in one tone of voice, a tone that a dictator would be proud to deploy. (For what is a dictator but a non-stop, obsessive talker who is always right?) It says, I am authority, I am truth and power, listen to me. Their voices sound mechanical, robotic. They sounds, in a word, possessed.…
And this:
To Freud, writing in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, there is a certain sort of leader who draws obsessive, even pathological allegiance. The leader must love only himself, and others only insofar as they further his ends. He must be, or be perceived as, completely self-reliant. He needs nothing from anyone else. He trusts his own thoughts to the exclusion of others. And he holds himself with a regal seriousness. He does not ever criticize himself. He never admits that he was wrong or could be wrong. He is inevitably male…
I do not mean to say that everyone who endorses Donald Trump is psychologically ill and in need of treatment. Two lawyer friends of mine, among the more intelligent people I know, endorse Trump for clear and cogent reasons. They find him humanly objectionable, but they believe that on a number of issues his instincts are good. They like his views on trade; they like his views on borders; they like his reluctance to use military force….
And this:
Half the people in our country, by definition, have an IQ less than a hundred. They have been tossed into a life during a time where the world can be a joyous place indeed, but it can also be a rankly complicated one. And along comes a figure who clears up the confusion. He relieves citizens of the burden of intellectual activity that every open society in some measure imposes upon them. He knows what is true, right, and just. He tells you the idealized past is better than the chaotic present, and he give you hope that we might return there. He is never wrong. Not for nothing did the ever-shrewd Trump say that he loves uneducated people.
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I taught high school American history in a Christian school setting and it seemed to me that two events turned many Americans against evangelicalism. The two are the Salem Witch Trials and the Dayton evolution trial. We may have a third–evangelical support of Donald Trump.