Can a Political Party Have a Personality Disorder?

Ask the "Barber in Peru"

Who are those people, I wondered Tuesday night, as I watched the Democrats sit on their hands when brain cancer victim 13-year-old Devarjaye “D.J.” Daniel was recognized as an honorary Secret Service agent?

But that was only one moment in a litany of similar nauseating reactions, or lack thereof, during President Trump’s first address to Congress for his second term.

And that’s not counting Al Green’s sad acting out that resulted in his ejection. Mr. Green needs help but is unlikely to get it.

I had to shake myself to remember I was once a Democrat in what seems like the Paleolithic Age but was actually a tad less than twenty-five years ago., scarcely a minute in human time.

Nevertheless, the party I left, even though it was trending in the wrong direction, didn’t seem much like what I was watching now. What had happened? Why did they all behave like sullen children without an ounce of optimism for the future?

The simple explanation was “Trump bad.” But it was almost too obvious and only part of the story. Something more is involved even if “he doth bestride the narrow world like a colossus.”.

I had been wondering this for some time but especially a couple of days ago when I saw the endless list of Democrat senators who voted in lockstep against codifying the prohibition of trans women (aka men) in women’s sports via the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act. It had passed the House but needed 60 votes in the Senate but only received 51—all Republicans.

According to polls, the vast percentage of the country, the common man and woman, Groucho Marx’s “Barber in Peru [Indiana],” wanted its passage, but not the Senate Dems.

So who were these psepople voting in such a uniform manner? Didn’t they have wives, daughters, granddaughters? Their actions, in defense of a tiny minority a certain percentage of whom were probably acting from a pathetically selfish desire to win at all costs, not only veered to the pathological, it was arguably pathological.

They were also in evidence Tuesday night, some of them anyway.

When I looked out at that audience of sullen faces I saw myself to some extent. I saw the road not taken. These were my peers, or close enough. These were the people who had been fighting for “causes” since 1968, or had been following obediently in the footsteps of those who had been fighting for those causes, the sons and daughters of activists become quondam activists themselves.

It was how they defined themselves. Only there was a problem—the world had changed. But they had nothing to fall back on, so they continued as those causes became increasingly dubious and out of touch with normal life..

This was something of a replay of the French Revolution with the waving of dopey signs replacing the guillotine (thankfully), yet the impulse is not dissimilar. Ever onwards to the next revolutionary thing, always wanting more, without thinking the obvious—is this enough? Does this make sense?

CRT, equity, DEI, intersectionality, triggering, safe spaces, pronouns for all, pick your gender in elementary school, one thing after another, each increasingly disconnected from normal life as Groucho’s barber, the rest of us, lived it.

Yet these Senators, especially these Senators, did not object to any of it, although I would wager in their heart of hearts, inside their psyches, most of them were not happy about what was happening. There was nothing to be happy about.

How could they not have realized the results of their decision on women’s sports was misogynistic? This was supposed to be the party of women and yet they ignored the possibility that their own family members could be raped by a trans woman in the locker room, let alone humiliated by her/him on the playing field to the extent that the sport itself was rendered irrelevant.

Again, a disconnect. Again, they forgot their reading of Carlyle on the French Revolution that some of them at least, I assume, read in college.

So they had to pretend to themselves they were doing the right thing in part for the excuse of that most cowardly of all things, party unity, and in part for God knows what, maybe some version of what I once called moral narcissism.

This was true of the audience Tuesday night as well. In many case, they squelched their true feelings to maintain that unity.

If ever there were a way to manufacture a party-wide personality disorder, that was it.

They are stuck in time to such a degree they are virtually embalmed, flailing about with nothing positive to say, no ideas, fresh or otherwise.

They also are faced with the realization that they are no longer cool, not for a long time. In fact, the notion of cool itself is no longer cool.

The only hill they fight on now is that hill of gender. In that they are fighting both science (evolution of the human species) and religion at the same time. Neither are to be taken lightly.