Donald Trump Is Here To Stay - Tears, Flapdoodle, And A Progressive's Sorry, Inconsolable Lament

Betty Barnard was a lifelong liberal, a woman of unflinching progressivism.  Nothing - not her prairie upbringing, her fundamental Christianity, or her family's ethos of hard work, discipline, fortitude, and principle - had deterred her from a life of Utopian promise.  There was something simply right and good about helping others, consideration, and sharing that resonated with her from a very early age.  She had an instinctive compassion for the disadvantaged, the disabled, the poor, and the marginalized.  She would give up anything to help them, to support their struggle for recognition and respect. 

She was in the words of Artur Friedrich-Sauer, Psychiatrist Emeritus at the Vienna Institute for Advanced Psychological Research, 'a feeler', someone whose objectivity had never matured, whose childlike love of animals and all living creatures remained a personal ethos and an ineluctable, predominant feature of arrested psychological development. 

'This phenomenon', he said in his characteristically guttural, heavily-accented English, 'is at the heart of the febrile, loose-hinged political longing of the idealistic fantasies of political zealots', an overstatement perhaps, given the millions of such characteristically compromised progressives in his adopted country, America, but certainly a relevant observation.  

There was a seemingly preternatural abandonment of objective reasoning among those who were most adamant about injustice, inequality, and viral individualism, and this might well be explained by something missing - a cornerstone of logic, a patent objectivity that came to most quite naturally as reality intervened into childish fantasy. 

Whatever the reason and whatever the cause, Betty cried every time she listened to the news.  Donald Trump was not only a conservative president, an advocate for free markets, individualism, patriotic commitment, and a muscular foreign policy, he was a morally absent plantation overseer, a man out to reshape America into a violently contentious, fiercely aggressive, grasping, greedy, and inconsiderate society. 

Everything the man did smacked of moral vacuity, an absence of principle, and a rejection of every compassionate, considerate element of a righteous and good society.   He might not be evil as her colleagues had suggested, but was approaching a No Exit moral turpitude that beggared anything that had come before.

'Calm down, dear', said her husband, cradling her gently in his arms, soothing her, whispering 'It will be alright' again and again until she stopped crying. 

'But it's so...so....', she started sobbing again, this time in convulsive gulps which made her gasp for air. 

Her husband was also a progressive but one with a long historical perspective.  Even a cursory glance at the historical record showed no signs of progress.  Human society was the same nasty place now as it was a millennia ago.  The Twentieth Century, that of Stalin, Hitler, and Pol Pot, responsible for tens of millions of deaths, was one of the bloodiest in history and the Twenty-First was starting off just as badly. 

 

One could make minor adjustments in societal evolution - more equal opportunity, more internal stability, better health care and education - but in the existential scope of things nothing more than window dressing. 

And so it was that Andrew did the comforting of poor Betty, increasingly disconsolate, unhappy, and depending on the news, miserable.

She was not alone of course.  Many shared the same ailment - if that's not jumping gun and giving Professor Friedrich-Sauer more credibility than he deserves - and were as pitifully overwrought as she; but most other unafflicted progressives were simply airing their grievances in a rather happy-go-lucky way.  Not that they devalued any of their protests against global warming, racism, homophobia, and all the rest; just that they took comfort in numbers and the joyful camaraderie of shared outrage.  

The No Kings rallies were a good example - sound and fury signifying exactly nothing, Sturm und Drang in a teapot, a good time had by all in the open air with thousands of likeminded people while Betty and her friends could not move from their darkened rooms, radio on, unhappiness everywhere. 

Even if Dr. Friedrich-Sauer was off his rocker and he just conflated political obsession with notions of psychological dysfunction rather than hone in on actual disturbing phenomenon; or whether Betty's frighteningly horrible breakdown over politics was the result of dull thinking and a deeply credulous personality made no difference.  The American political left was a mess. 

Kamala Harris, the defeated - humiliatingly defeated - candidate for President of the United States was done with public office, but took it upon herself to speak for the millions of disaffected Americans who were shocked, dismayed, and profoundly upset by Donald Trump's actions.  She spoke to a large gathering of Democratic faithful in Chillicothe, Ohio but was speaking to the nation at large carried by MSNBC 

My fellow Americans, we stand at a crossroads of history, a benchmark, a point of no return, left on the curb by a madman, an intellectual cripple, a devilishly corrupt moral reprobate, a man with not an iota of dignity, self-respect, or God-fearing behavior...

Here she stopped for breath, gathering herself, preparing for her long-prepared onslaught

The man is....

Here her staff began fidgeting, for when their lady paused like this, they knew she was heading into the weeds, into uncharted, unscripted territory which always spelled trouble. 

Let me put it this way, history has always been, history which comes around and goes around, never stops until this, a table-turning event which I know will cause backstabbing, and knives from behind the arras, but I will say it not only because I was unfairly and dismissively spat upon by a woman-hating, emotional deviant but because history will judge fairly as it always does, and the Liberty Bell of Philadelphia will ring loudly once again...

 

Here her chief aide gave her the 'cut!' sign, but she ignored it and went on and on making less and less sense.  Betty who followed every word, every syllable, every nuance and subtlety felt she had to drop to her knees when the heard the former Vice President's words, cut short but still resonant. 

This episode went far to explain progressives' belief in the notion of social justice.  It was as garbled, nonsensical, and incoherent as Kamala's words.  It was intellectually confused nonsense and made sense only to true believers, Friedrich-Sauer's 'feelers'. 

Betty turned off the television and looked out the window.  It was cold and rainy - God had given her a day to match her feelings - but she couldn't turn away, light a fire, sit and sip a sherry and think about her grandchildren. No, the Trump crisis could not be so easily and summarily dismissed.  Her tears, her anguish, were the only reactions that could express the virulent but frustrated hatred she felt. 

As she watched the comings and goings on Garfield Street, she saw Margot Phipps and her young husband, tripping the light fantastic, dressed to the nines, headed down to the White House to celebrate the inauguration of the new White House East Wing ballroom.  How indecent! How ignorant! How unspeakable! but so it was that progressives must suffer in the days of Trump, halcyon days for America and the demise of all that Biden soupy fol-de-rol.  

Poor Betty Barnard; but she was not alone.