It’s certainly the kind of self-blinding unfathomable cluelessness that lead a small but critical number of people on the left to decide it was okay to sit the election out or vote third party rather than vote for that awful Hillary.
*Update (apologies to the two five pre-edit likers).
You know, I just read the thing again and was even more gobsmacked by the truly epic scale of the cluelessness. I mean, even for Judis, the archetype of a school of left of center discourse that sounds profound and insightful yet misses the point so completely that one wonders whether the author lives on the same planet. It’s the exact same blinkered, almost naive, kind of cluelessness we have see time and again from the NYT editorial board and from the news editors who thought Emailghazzi and Whitewater were huge stories worthy of vast reportorial resources.
“I have three different kinds of reasons to offer, each of which partially, but not entirely, explain Trump’s behavior,” he takes as his thesis. And here I am banging my head against the table because there is one theory, one well-known and widely discussed theory, that explains all of Trump’s known behavior and has near-perfect predictive power. And at this point, the refusal of smart people who write about politics for a living to acknowledge it, accept it and work from it can only be explained by a mulishly obstinate form of willful blindness.
Donald J. Trump has a profound mental disorder. One that is well-known, well-studied and well-defined. His case of it is so serious, that people who study Narcissistic Personality Disorder marvel at the stereotypical presentation. It’s a case so profound that it would have been crippling had he not had the cushion of vast inherited wealth. His behavior is literally determined by this disorder. He is subject to literally ungovernable compulsions because of this disorder. His behavior can be explained and can be predicted with great accuracy by this disorder.
Yes, he is also a stone racist. But it’s not the central feature of his life you see from the Nazis or Klan, or, alternately, the bundle of unacknowledged and repressed preconceptions and prejudgments and attitudes it is for most “I’m not a racist” racists because most of his behavior is determined by his disorder, not his racism.
And I can’t believe I’m still having to point this out. I can’t believe that so many people who hold themselves out as astute and insightful stubbornly resist even acknowledging the possibility that this glaringly obvious truth is true. I cannot for the life of me fathom what drives people to continue trying to analyze him as if he was a normal, rational actor with no more mental illness than the average person with the normal range of more or less well-compensated neuroses. What the fuck is up with that?
