Conservatives remember well how some liberals and Democrats piteously howled at the moon when Trump won a solid victory in 2016. How thoroughly enjoyable was their dismay. After eight years of Obama’s self-centered transformation, it was like a dirty work glove slapped across the face of the elite left and the propagandized millions who make their continued political existence possible.
Now the piper has come playing a different tune, a dirge for a threatened future. It is conservatism’s turn to walk in the maelstrom of powerlessness, at least in terms of Washington’s balance of power. Holding the line is the best to be expected, and even that prospect is threatened. Republicans, and all right-leaning affiliations, are forced to subsist on a perpetual diet of disappointment, and outrage, the way Hillary’s braying legions were during Trump’s term. The Joe Biden administration is stupidly dismantling the great policy and ideological agenda formulated and set in motion by former President Donald Trump.
Dark days descended when Trump “lost,” Fox News higher-ups turned their backs on our greatest president since Reagan, and Rush Limbaugh passed away. The new power nexus could not be more diametrically appalling to citizens with conservative values. For the politically observant on the right, every waking morning yields something new to be distressed about. This simmering anger–exacerbated by the conviction among many that the 2020 election was stolen–produces a chronic undercurrent of stress and unease for conservative political animals (except for the RINOs.)
Related: Rush Limbaugh Changed America
Not to overdramatize the situation, but stress from any source or in any form is unhealthy for the human body. Stress kills. Waiting for deliverance is a stress producer that takes a toll. Example: Anxiously anticipating a midterm Republican vindication (like Obama’s “shellacking” in 2010 and 2012) is an anxiety dynamic that wears on the nervous system even as it functions to hold out hope.
Conservatives remember how elevated the Democrat misery index was during Trump’s term. Many leftists experienced pathologies more severe than the garden-variety angst that typically characterizes their state of mind—even when they achieve political aims.
Now, with the tables turned, with Trumpservatism cast into officialdom’s political wilderness, it is the Trump-aligned political right’s (80+% of Republicans) turn to dwell in angst. With each tick of the Biden/Harris doomsday clock, vein-punishing blood pressure readings rise. Anger with the morning coffee, tired resignation with the nightcap. Many have turned away from politics altogether. The phrase “happy warrior” is endangered. Gallows humor is not “happy.” For those who give a damn, the trick becomes not to let the malfeasant deconstruction of Trump’s revitalized national spirit destroy the enjoyment of life. The key to that is to maintain a quiet, abiding belief that a reckoning is in the cards.
Conservatives witnessed Democrat lives fall to tatters between 2016 and 2020. Many of them, the most politically engaged among them, could simply not live happily in a world where Trump was president of the United States. They became deranged. If, as Dr. Michael Savage and others are convinced, liberalism is a mental illness, Trump’s ascension transmogrified what was a chronic-but-functioning state of disaffection into an acute psychological crisis. Trump in office made the Democrats do things that changed the county for the very much worse. So threatening was his popularity with the people that the things they did to counter and collapse his presidency will go down in future history books as among the most blatantly illegal machinations in the history of world governance. If the historians are honest.
Etched on the faces of officeholders like Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and Maxine Waters during Trump’s term was a traumatized realization that their best laid plans to do the very worst were in danger of becoming extinct. They entered a cognitive twilight zone, and their panic and desperation spread down into the ranks of a base already predisposed to hate what they saw as the white privilege and racism personified by Mr. Trump, as surely as COVID spread from China and infected millions
A biased media chorus chanted the TDS mantra while a weaponized Deep State set in motion wildly unprecedented investigatory actions and surveillance regimens . Dunderheaded Hollywood pronouncements aired alongside the deep thoughts of Marxist-from-birth academics. For many Democrats, perhaps even a majority, the period between 2016 and 2020 was one, long Janovian primal scream.
They’re still screaming. They will never be satisfied, because those afflicted with derangement syndromes cannot be satisfied. They cannot rest on the laurels of what many conservatives believe are 2020’s ill-gotten gains. Even in “victory,” they understand the core weakness, the moral wrongness, the fatal flaw in their vision for humankind.
Conservatives are cut from a different cloth. Yes, it is painful to watch. Yes, there is stress involved, anger, frustration, blood pressure fluctuations with each doleful news cycle. It is sickening at times.
But there will be no caterwauling at planetary bodies. No existential gnashing of teeth. The piper piping this current tune is a failure. The reviews are in, and they are horrendous. His America-last refrain will be met with a symphony of steely resolve and superior strategy.
And, if recent events are any indication, the Democrats’ sad song will be ultimately overshadowed and drowned out by—yes, it could happen–the man who drove them crazy.
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