A REPLY TO MARTIE SEROIS
Martie: thank you very much for your thoughtful reply.
When I spoke of “your psycho-babble,” I didn’t make myself clear. I meant the general use of psych-based terms, not your use of them in particular. I think liberals like me make use of such jargon as a way of giving their arguments a scientific or medical aura. I can’t be accused of trashing my opponent, I’m just providing clinical insights.
As for my saying that Trump has been diagnosed as a malignant narcissist, that’s a diagnosis I read online before the election. It was made by a senior member of the department of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins. He described the condition as un-treatable and incurable, and that everything observable about Trump was consistent with the condition. Given the man’s credentials (I can’t remember his name), I didn’t see what he wrote as just one more armchair diagnosis.
Make no mistake: I am just as disturbed by what’s taking place as you are. I am an old man, largely shaped in my politics by the Kennedy years, and those that followed. But I have come to see the last 20–25 years as a period that culminates with Trump’s election. The U.S. has always been strongly anti-intellectual. The idea of someone fundamentally ignorant, inarticulate, contemptuous of history as well as of behavioral norms in both conduct and in his use of language — but rich and powerful — is obviously appealing to about 40% of the electorate.
The whole idea of an American president dismissing all expertise and experience in his advisers, and asserting that he leads by “listening to my gut” is perfectly consistent with the rural, agrarian folk who long ago tarred and feathered uppity preachers who came to town with their book learnin’ from them fancy schools back east. Three hundred years later, that point of view has again asserted itself. It kept its head down during the economic Golden Age following WW2. But once talk began to describe the coming of a very different, far less white America, the gloves came off. And Obama was the last straw.
