The Left is having the worst flu season ever. Almost all of them have been infected by Trump Derangement Syndrome to such a degree that they can’t see or think straight. It’s a plague year — make that two years — and we’re living it. Oh, how we’re living it!

Self-destructive, nincompoop behavior is rampant with members of the so-called Resistance (what a desecration of the real Resistance that is!) now showing up at restaurants to harass members of the administration while they eat. Do these clowns have any idea how that plays in Middle America? Do these people think they are accomplishing anything but their own defeat?

And how about yet another Fonda hoping Trump’s young son would be locked in a cage with pederasts? Does that aging Hollywood nitwit actually think he’s influencing public opinion in his direction by saying that? Has he had a lobotomy?

The problem is that it’s not just Hollywood lamebrains and jejune social justice idiots that have been infected, it’s the entire liberal/progressive side of the country, starting with the literary/media elites who give them their marching orders.

They are all having a nervous breakdown and it keeps getting worse, because… because…. because Trump.

But I have news for them. It’s not at all about Trump. It’s about them.

Trump is what the shrinks call the “presenting complaint.” The real problem, as is often the case in psychotherapy, is something entirely different. And it is this: The left is dead. It’s not only dead, it’s decomposed with no there there or anywhere.

Only dopes or con artists believe in socialism anymore (hello, Venezuela!) and identity politics has been exposed as the racist shell game it is with blacks and Latinos actually doing better than they have in decades under the current pro-capitalist administration.

So the left has nothing to say, only most of them don’t quite realize it yet. But this blockage, this reluctance and even inability to deal with what is actually happening shuts down the brain and emerges as anger, the hamster wheel of constant rage against Trump.

And that, of course, feeds on itself, as we have seen for the past year and a half, making matters worse, not just for the obvious reason — the aforementioned alienation of the public — but for what it does to their own minds.

Anger makes you stupid. When is the last time you heard a creative idea coming out of the left? (Herbert Marcuse? Okay, scratch that.) When is the last time they even debated the issues in a serious way rather than simply hurling invective or worse?

Infuriating them even more is that Trump is not even a conventional Republican or a conventional anything for that matter, making a mockery of people (like leftists) with rigid, reified (and highly conventional) ideologies that, in most cases, haven’t altered one jot in decades.

Trump is the reverse. He’s not a conservative either, but a Dengist, as in China’s Chairman Deng Xiaoping (one of the most positive figures in the twentieth century for almost single-handedly overcoming Maoism), who abjured ideology and famously said “I don’t care if a cat is black or white as long as it catches mice.”

That’s Trump to a T and the very opposite of his adversaries, who obsess about whether a cat is black or white and couldn’t care less if it catches mice. Trump’s pragmatism exposes their (no other word) bullshit. All they want to do is talk and do nothing. Thus, he leaves them naked, which generates yet more rage.

But again, it’s their fault. As an ex-leftist myself, I am acutely aware how ideology can be used as an excuse for destructiveness. I attended meetings in the sixties and seventies where people endlessly discussed violent action, but almost never discussed what they really wanted to do if they took control. Sound familiar?

Roger L. Simon – Co-founder and CEO Emeritus of PJ Media – is an author and screenwriter. He recently discussed his work on CSPAN’s BookTV.