Beto O’Rourke, I do believe, is a psychopath. Let me explain.

First, we must admit the evident. O’Rourke, spectacularly privileged by every measure, boasts an unspectacular political career. City councilor, sometime congressman, he offers little of anything notable, at least by way of accomplishment. Except, of course, for himself; jumping earnestly from one platform to another, he is, at the very least, a virtuoso opportunist, a character trait he likely imbibed in utero.

Failed, though, as a candidate for the Senate (we Texans might be right-wingers, but we are not dumb), he will soon undoubtedly be a double political failure. Polling just under 2%, he is circling the drain of the Democratic party among the dregs of political delusion.

And so, he practices now that willful fantasy born of desperation, common to all early exiting presidential hopefuls. He struggles to say something that will catch a headline, that will catch that magical adulation he drank like a novice drunk when he ran for Senate in 2018, when he visited politically unreal cities like Austin. A political star among political stiffs, he believed his own hype, and he likely continues to believe it, even though the more sober and more seriously political see him for what he is, and that’s an inexperienced city politician doing his best with his unearned wealth, his un-scrutinized privilege and his white liberal charm.

Which is why I suggest, not clinically of course (the humorless may relax), that he is a psychopath. Because that’s what Norman Mailer, that clear seer of the political class, would’ve called him, a “philosophical psychopath,” an ambitious follower of all that’s progressive, a privileged borrower of the oppressed, parroting the righteous anger of those genuinely marginalized and hunted by the inequalities and racism which created him but which also created the people he thinks he champions.

This explains the clean cruelty of his ideology, the ease of his political stupidity. I don’t need to iterate examples; you already know what I mean. His recent simple, unsurprising “Yes” to the question of whether churches and other institutions should lose their tax exempt status for holding the conscientious tenets of their moralities is but the latest example of an inexperienced man saying something plainly foolish because he can’t just say, “Look at me!” This, alongside his practiced emotions when talking about gun violence and his foolish, uninformed commentary on what the Dallas Police Department might be up to, is but the evidence of an unpracticed politician.

And it’s precisely what Mailer called a psychopath, a person who for ambition and power borrows the wisdom of the oppressed (black and brown wisdom, poor wisdom, gay wisdom) and packages it into campaign soundbites, begging to be noticed, begging for votes, all the more outlandish the more desperate he gets. This, really, is the fundamental problem with Beto O’Rourke, finally clearly visible once one closes one’s eyes and gets past the charm.

But let’s be clear, the irony and the danger is manifold. Surely conservatives are right to see in the words of Beto O’Rourke all the secret hopes of the progressive left revealed. The result being that Beto O’Rourke has likely won more votes for the Republican party than he’s ever won for himself. But that’s not the worst of it. The problem with Beto O’Rourke, and why he is such a horrible candidate for the Democratic party, is that as a Mailer-esque psychopath, that is, as a borrower of the radical wisdom of the people he claims to speak for, he can’t help but tame and cheapen the radical left.

What we need to hear from the left in full, for instance, about inequality, racism, reparations, and all those other barely palatable but genuinely radical ideas, Beto O’Rourke simply mines for votes. As ideas, they were never his, nor could they ever be. Overprivileged, he can’t help but be an exploiter of the left, an ambitious opportunist as I said. Not radical enough, not radical at all, this is the flaw in the man as well as the candidate. And, no matter how much we may need to find a better president than the one we’ve currently got, O’Rourke promises little but chaos of a different sort.

We need good candidates for office, reasonable ones, not dividers. Which Beto O’Rourke, jumping the shark in an attempt to stay relevant, can no longer claim to be. We need politicians genuinely of the left to present their uncomfortable criticisms and ideas plainly and in a way we all can hear, without politically ridiculous existential threats. This again, O’Rourke clearly cannot do. Which is why the Democrats should look for someone else to be their nominee, someone less willing to make himself an enemy to so many.

Joshua J. Whitfield is pastoral administrator for St. Rita Catholic Community in Dallas and a frequent contributor to The Dallas Morning News.