In his victory speech, President-elect Donald Trump urged that “It’s time to put the divisions of the past four years behind us. It’s time to unite, and we’re going to try. We’re going to try. We have to try. And it’s going to happen. Success will bring us together.” He has even offered to help the Democrat Party pay off the massive campaign debt that Kamala Harris accrued. Unfortunately, in the current cultural context, this is one of those occasions when the genial passion for unity that animates so presidential and patriotic a figure as Trump is counter-productive, and, indeed, potentially catastrophic.
It should be glaringly obvious that the political Left — in other words, the Democrat Party mafiosi, the Deep State apparatchiks, the rabid legacy media, the rout of decadent academics, the virago feminists, the celebrity cesspool, and a veritable generation of low-intelligence fellow-travelers — are not interested in the dream of reconciliation or the fata morgana of national unity, and never will be. To seek unity with the medullary haters of the Left, the tribe of professional hypocrites and radically disordered minds, is a policy destined to fail.
One cannot reason with a preprogrammed demographic or come to terms with those whom Jack Posobiec called “unhumans.” Argentinian president Javier Milei is even more graphic, trowelling a heap of cloacal epithets on such people. In effect, you cannot change a mind that was never properly formed or classically educated or a mind devoid of any vestige of common sense or practical smarts. A coalition of conservative thinkers and ordinary working families constitutes a winning combination.
In his indispensable book "Political Ponerology: The Science of Evil, Psychopathy, and the Origins of Totalitarianism" (from Greek πονηρός, ponērós, “evil” or “pain”), Polish psychologist Andrzej Lobaczewski embarked on a multi-year study of the relation between political power and psychopathic disorders, coining the term “pathocracy” to portray a system of government “wherein a small pathological minority takes control over a society of normal people.” Under the sway of a charismatic leader — a Lenin, a Stalin, a Hitler, a Mao — this minority eventually swells to occupy the totality of the governing apparatus and begins to influence and absorb even normal people, creating a virtual “epidemic of psychopathology in people who are not, essentially, psychopathic.” We’ve seen this happen in real time as predicted in premonitory fiction. It’s 1984 somewhere.
Steve Taylor, a Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Leeds Beckett University, and Chair of the Transpersonal Psychology Section of the British Psychological Society, basing himself on Lobaczewski’s research, considers Donald Trump such a deep-dyed pathocrat, as any Leftist worth his salt would — this despite the counter-evidence provided by one of the most successful presidencies in recent American history. In his 2023 DisConnected, Taylor argues that we need to develop “more egalitarian and responsible values and institutional structures” so that exploitative and narcissistic personalities “become less socially acceptable and desirable.”
Taylor has got his villains wrong, an occupational hazard common to Leftists. He would be better served turning his accusatory gaze on his own prime minister, the reprehensible Keir Starmer. His caveat applies not to patriotic and risk-taking political figures like Trump, as he absurdly imagines, but to corruptocrat socialists and outright communists associated with the Democrat party in the U.S., the Labour Party in the U.K., and the Liberals in Canada, manipulative and dishonest people with high levels of ruthlessness and utterly deficient in empathy.
As John Hinderaker in Powerline observes, the Left, as exemplified by its leading media proponent The New York Times, lives in “some bizarre universe with superficial resemblances to our own.” The Times denounces Donald Trump for rejecting democratic traditions, endorsing violence, punishing political opponents, and appointing loyal aides(!). These are precisely the demonstrably proven actions practiced by the Democrats along the entire gamut from rigged elections to weaponized agencies to lawfare against innocents to false imprisonment to the promotion of censorship under the rubric of “disinformation.” Hinderaker concludes: “There is no way to reason with people who are this out of touch with reality. You can only beat them.”
The same argument emerges in a conversation with Gen. Michael Flynn on Steve Bannon’s The War Room, which ranged from the Obama plot to take down Donald Trump during his first presidency to the alarming possibility of another assassination attempt before Trump enters the Oval Office in January 2025. Flynn begins by warning that the Democrat administration “is going to hire a bunch of people just like Obama did, stick them into key slots, and they’re going to block and tackle every single day.” Moreover, “had Trump lost the election, he’d be in prison.”
Finally, the threat of assassination still looms “because they have already tried it a couple of times. They’ll try it again between now and inauguration. It’s up to Trump to stay alive. That, to me, is job number one.” Trying to be noble and conciliatory, Flynn insists, is a prelude to disaster. “[T]hese are all things that we can’t sit here and pretend like, well, we’re going to be the nice people.” The menace must be eliminated. “We’ll do it properly, but it must, accountability must happen. We will be effective with the use of the rule of law.”
Trump is famous for crying out “Fight! Fight! Fight!” after he was grazed by an assassin’s bullet. This was, as many have remarked, an iconic and defining moment, a sign of a man possessed of indomitable courage and unshakeable determination, a true leader. But the conflict goes even deeper. Trump must also fight against his better nature, his generosity of spirit. He must take the measure of his enemies, who are legion, and gird for battle against an army of liars, criminals, mountebanks, quislings, fifth columnists, and totalitarian wannabes.
Here is the problem. Trump’s fundamental weakness as a combatant in the political arena is that he is a good man, as his detractors will never admit. He genuinely wishes peace, consensus, and civil accord. He will continue to fight within the parameters of the law to restore prosperity, military strength, rational immigration, effective diplomacy, and national cohesion. But in his desire to heal a broken nation, he must not seek to collaborate with those who are equally determined to complete the act of destruction on which they have embarked. He must understand that they will never relent. He must recognize exactly whom he is dealing with, the Party of the Unhinged wracked with a wasting fever known as Trump Derangement Syndrome and a significant portion of the population, to use Mattias Desmet’s phrase, suffering from “mass formation psychosis.”
It is almost as if we are witnessing a diabolical farce in production. There are people who truly believe that Joe Biden, who gave the nation runaway inflation, open borders, energy dependency, military defeat, surging violence, and international humiliation, “has been a phenomenal president.” There are people who believe that Obama, a protégé of card-carrying communist poet Frank Marshall Davis and a parishioner of America-hating Rev. Jeremiah Wright, was a lightbringer rather than a scourge with a radical calendar and that the cognitively vacuous Kamala Harris was a worthy contender for the presidency. There are people who believe that viciously slandering, bankrupting, indicting, imprisoning, and inflaming tempers to the point of attempting to assassinate the popular leader of a major political party on the cusp of electoral victory is a viable and legitimate political strategy. There are many who believe that a manifestly corrupt judge is a hero of the people. Clearly, between evil and stupidity falls the shadow.
As Flynn counseled, this is no time for being nice or naively pursuing an accommodation with implacable antagonists, defamers, and saboteurs, as well as with imbeciles and lunatics, who will never under any circumstances cease to practice a destabilizing agenda. They must be defeated root and branch, brought under the hammer of the law where appropriate, and dismissed from the positions of authority they have abused if unity is ever to be even partially achieved. From a sensible perspective, there is no alternative.
Vive valeque, Mr. President.
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