The Democrats’ behavior after 2016 is not mass delusion or mass hysteria or Trump Derangement Syndrome, or any of the other psychobabble explanations that dominate our political commentary. My first career was as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, and I am not impressed with spraying around clinical terms as a substitute for looking at what is in front of us. Trump Derangement Syndrome is a colorful description for political behavior. It is not an analysis of what causes it.

Under Barack Obama, ordinary Democrats became enamored of the narrative that they were the Good People, hence entitled to crush anyone in their way, because everything they do is in the service of social justice.

The derangement we are facing is not Orange Man Bad; it is America Bad.

The Democrats don’t believe in our two-party system anymore. They utterly reject American civic norms of treating the president with a modicum of respect and cooperation. They don’t want to alternate presidential power every four or eight years. They think theirs is the only party that deserves to be elected.

Before Trump was a gleam in their eye, Democrats saw themselves as the only morally valid people in the country. They don’t want individual rights anymore, only group rights. They want Republicans and dissenting liberals to be silenced. Silencing is too good for us—they want us publicly shamed, if need be physically attacked, and any contrary ideas hounded out of the public and the private square.

Democrats hate our electoral system as unjust because it doesn’t deliver to them guaranteed victory. All their efforts towards 2020 will be focused on changing our election laws and norms. They don’t want the electoral college, which guards against domination of the country by politically narrow urban population centers.

They don’t want any safeguards against voter fraud. In fact, they want to legalize a broad highway to fraud, voter “harvesting.” Paid political operatives go door to door, picking up unused mail-in ballots (sent out without request if Democrats have their way), fill them in for the Democrat candidate, and voilà, the Democrats win. They just rolled out the beta test in Orange County, and it flipped long-time red districts blue.

To win in 2020, Democrats will commit every voter scam and fraud ever invented and they are in the process of inventing a whole lot of new ones. Intimidation and moral grandstanding are keys to success for them, hence, attacking Republicans who dare to wear a Trump hat, put up a yard sign, or put a bumper sticker on their car. They will stop the census from asking about citizenship, because illegal voters on the population rolls gives California alone six seats in Congress they would not otherwise have, robbing those seats from more rural, more Republican states.

Social justice, like all Marxist ideologies, believes the ends justify the means. Democrats have no shame that they lied for two years, pretending that a farrago of clumsy lies whipped up by Russian agents for Hillary Clinton was a valid reason to investigate a sitting president. They need hatred of Trump to unify their disparate voting blocks and whip up the frenzy necessary to cover over their unpopular, radical policies.

Naked political power is the driving force behind our culture wars, and behind the weird war on President Trump. It has little to do with his specific policies, let alone his tweets and his pugnacious personality, except that Trump’s counterpunching and toughness have allowed him to survive. John McCain and Mitt Romney didn’t drive them crazy because they caved without a fight. Trump drives Democrats crazy because he won, and because he won’t give in or give up.

That Trump keeps doing a fantastic job on the economy and foreign affairs makes them scared of voters liking what they see, hence they become more determined to take him out by dirtying him up with hysteria. It’s a tactic they use to propagandize low information voters, and suburban moms who don’t like conflict. So Democrats will cause nonstop noise, anger, and conflict, out of thin air if necessary.

It’s not derangement, it’s war.

The Democrats’ onslaught against Trump—the only force that stands in their way—is a testament to their will to power. President Trump didn’t cause the crazy attacks on him. The Russian collusion hoax was foisted on the country by the highest levels of the Obama Administration (likely including Obama himself, although no one will state the obvious) before Trump even entered the Oval Office.

This isn’t delusional or deranged behavior, it is deliberate political behavior aimed directly at the same old political end: power. Democrats—voters as well as party hacks—followed their leaders into the moral abyss because they didn’t care about undoing a legitimate election. They just wanted to win, at any cost to America and to our democracy.

The Democrats have one power tool to patch up their differences and stop voters from fleeing their left-wing radical nonsense. It is the same power tool demagogues have used through history. They need an outgroup to hate and vilify. They plan to unify the party around hating Trump and his followers as a racists. They want their voters to hate and distrust white heterosexual males.

None of this has anything to do with President Trump, the people who support him, or their policies.

Democrats are not deranged—their tactics work, and work well. They are not well meaning. Do not believe their moral preening. They are power hungry.

The derangement we face is a deliberate and calculated strategy of the social-justice Left. It has been turned into a mass movement by a bandwagon of Democrat politicians and media professionals who are riding it to personal power, publicity, and financial profit.

Orange Man Bad because America Bad. Trump and his supporters’ big crime is that they believe in and love America. The Democrats real derangement is that they no longer believe in American individualism and freedom of thought, speech, and enterprise. They don’t believe in the philosophy of “live and let live,” so vital to our republic. They don’t even believe in justice, only what they deceptively call “social justice.”

A political movement based on a sense of moral monopoly and it’s own unquestioned right to rule is anti-American at its core. Keep your eye on the main game, not the tactic of attacking Trump. Trump will only be here to defend us for six more years at the most.

The Democrats are in the dismantling of America for the long haul. It is a national tragedy and it must be stopped.

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