“Trump derangement syndrome” is invoked by his fans gleeful at his driving opponents nuts. Of course, those opponents are entirely rational; it’s Trumpers themselves who are deranged.
Max Boot is a writer and pundit, a public intellectual. His 2018 book — The Corrosion of Conservatism — Why I Left the Right — mirrors my own trajectory.
Like me, Boot saw the Trumpification of the Republican Party and the conservative movement, of which he’d been part, as a perversion and betrayal. He cancelled his GOP voter enrollment the day after the 2016 election. I took a few months longer.
Boot thinks what happened to conservatism has pre-Trump roots, and that people like him (and me) bear some responsibility for failing to see it. I’d put it this way: conservatism long had a principled, idealistic, intellectual strain, but also a primitivist “blood and soil” white nationalist strain of cultural revolt. The former was exploiting the latter, but was riding a tiger, and wound up eaten.
It may not be so surprising that primitivism won out. But what Boot (and I) found so shocking is how people who seemed to be principled conservatives capitulated so completely. Not so much eaten by the tiger as changing their own stripes.
What exactly is (or was) the principled conservatism Boot is talking about? His prologue sets it out: prudent and incremental policymaking based on empirical study; support for American global leadership and allies; willingness to oppose the enemies of freedom; respect for character, community, personal virtue, and family; limited government and fiscal prudence; freedom of opportunity rather than equality of outcome; a social safety net to help the neediest without stifling initiative and social mobility; individual liberty to the greatest extent possible consistent with public safety; freedom of speech; embracing immigration. The Declaration of Independence defining us by a shared belief that all people are created equal, with a right to pursue happiness. The Constitution advancing this by limiting government power and ensuring rule of law.
Trumpism repudiates all this. Trump exploited pre-existing primitivist tendencies on America’s right to a depth no previous Republican ever had; but also catalyzed them, turbocharged them.
The resulting transmogrification might be almost comprehensible if led by some charismatic leader, a white knight. But here we have, in Boot’s words, “a moral abomination.” It makes one’s head explode. And of course this doesn’t travesty just conservatism, but America itself.
A key point for Boot is the attitude toward immigrants. He was one himself — at age six, from the Soviet Union. Though he feels totally American, he’s very mindful of the welcome his family experienced, and considers that aspect of America’s culture one of its crowning glories. So do I — seeing someone evidently born elsewhere gives me a jolt of satisfaction to be part of a society so attractive to so many, and with such generosity of spirit to welcome them.” Or rather,” as Boot remarks, “I felt that way before the rise of Trump and his demonization of immigrants.”
Irving Kristol said a neoconservative is a liberal mugged by reality. Boot writes something similar from the other side, telling how greater understandings of realities made him revise some of his cookie-cutter conservative precepts. For example, opposing any gun control, which took him decades to realize is insupportable. More broadly, he says he hadn’t just drunk the Kool-Aid of conservatism but bathed in it; a kind of self-brainwashing. Being part of the tribe felt good, and leaving it felt horrible. Boot notes that when a conservative intellectual pal went whole hog Trumpy, the guy justified it by saying politics is tribal, and he had to stick with the tribe.
That helps explain what made Boot different. He was not free of tribal feeling, but his rationalism was strong enough to supersede it. Unlike most conservatives, even the most seemingly intellectual.
My experience is again similar. Since I became a conservative in the 1960s, the world has changed vastly, and one must adjust one’s viewpoint accordingly. (I’ve written about my “ideology of reality.”*) Furthermore, there can be contradictions between positions taken by most adherents of a movement and its underlying principles, properly understood. Illustrated by the left’s tortured relationship with freedom of thought and expression.
Boot says he used to dismiss liberals calling Republicans racist. Now he thinks they were actually right, and white nationalism was long at the core of what actuated most rank-and-file Republicans. And Boot candidly faults his slowness to understand the rotten treatment Blacks, women, and other disadvantaged groups continue (despite progress) to suffer in American society.
Most of the book chronicles the 2016 campaign and the start of Trump’s presidency, all the while lamenting the awfulness and conservatism’s concomitant defenestration of principle. This incisive, comprehensive indictment, showing how much America’s been damaged, would be hugely shocking were it not already so familiar.
What still is really shocking is how we’ve accepted, even normalized, this litany of evil. Well, Republicans have. Boot has plenty to say about their disgusting justification of Trump’s every atrocity. And Boot was writing before Trump was even halfway through his term. Before the pandemic, before January 6, the attempted coup, the Big Lie.
An epilogue recaps again the policies Boot now embraces: social liberalism (pro-LGBTQ rights and pro-choice); fiscal conservatism; free markets; helping the needy; free trade; environmentalism; gun control; pro-immigration; free speech; strong defense; internationalism. Stances generally favored by most Americans, but no party embraces them all. Thus Boot found himself a man without a party. Unwilling to plump for Democrats, whom he saw as going too far left, in the Sanders-Warren direction. He did not say he’d vote for either against Trump (having voted for Clinton). This was 2018, remember. The name Biden doesn’t appear in this context. I myself did join the Democratic party, precisely to use my vote against the left. In this regard, Boot may have been too pessimistic. While I was too optimistic in hoping a Biden presidency might restore some normality to our politics. I kept saying of Trumpism, “it will get worse,” but didn’t foresee how much worse.
So: what does, after all, explain Trump derangement syndrome? For seven years I’ve busted my head over this; have written much about it. Most Trumpers are — apart from politics — good, sensible, reasonable people. Who, when it comes to politics, go completely off the rails. In the final analysis, I can’t really make sense of it, except to say that human beings and their mental processes are complicated.
* https://rationaloptimist.wordpress.com/2013/02/22/an-ideology-of-reality/