Most of us get the big things right: Don’t touch fire, wrestle alligators, or play in traffic. But beneath these necessary survival strategies, we are boundless reservoirs of delusion.
While many of our unmoored beliefs are specific to us – I seem to be the only person who thinks I have a beautiful singing voice – some are universal. Chief among these is the claim: I’m my own worst critic.
Instead, we cut ourselves slack at every turn. I have a million reasons why I fell down on the job and disappointed my pals. You see, it’s like this ... But woe to the other guy who falls short. Come on, man, stop making excuses.
We instinctively make ourselves the hero of our own story, concocting tales to convert our vices into virtue. This dynamic is ever at work in each of us. On the plus side, if we don’t love ourselves, who will?
But delusion can also grip us on a mass scale – it is the great danger of ideology and fuels the madness of crowds.
We are seeing this unfold with terrible consequence as the dominant media betrays the very foundations of journalism – starting with demanding that only certain leaders answer questions – to transfigure Kamala Harris into a combination of Rosa Parks, Franklin Roosevelt, and Beyoncé.
Their partisanship is so manifold and manifest that it has created a cottage industry in conservative media, which creates terabytes of content each day exposing the false narratives and double standards advanced by Democrats and their laptop lackeys. Such debunking is necessary and important. But there’s a bit of delusion at work here, too: Despite all evidence to the contrary the critics somehow believe their fact-checking and truth-telling will pressure the propagandists into changing their ways.
It won’t. They are impervious to challenge. They are beyond shame.
How come? To figure out why they persist in this untoward conduct, daily compromising the values of skepticism, fairness, and bringing truth to power that they say they hold dear, we need to ask: What higher value do they believe they are serving? What do they tell themselves so they can see their corruption as heroic?
The answer is obvious: They sincerely believe that Donald Trump is an existential threat to democracy, an American Hitler. If that’s the case, why would you give him a fair shake or hold his opponents’ feet to the fire?
I know this explanation is not revelatory; the Hitler analogy has been critiqued for years. But I’m not so sure that we have fully reckoned with how deeply a large percentage of the nation is in the grip of this delusion.
Displaying textbook symptoms of the addled, they insist that falsehoods are truths. Despite unimpeachable evidence to the contrary, they continue to maintain that Trump conspired with Vladimir Putin to steal the 2016 election, that he called all Mexicans rapists, praised neo-Nazi marchers at Charlottesville, advised Americans to inject bleach to combat COVID, and promised a “bloodbath” if he loses in November.
They are not lying when they make these claims – they sincerely believe they are expressing truths the rest of us just can’t see. This makes them immune to reason.
Echoing multiple conversations I’ve had with educated and engaged Democrats, a respected plastic surgeon recently told me, “If Trump wins, we will not have any more elections.”
He saw Jan. 6, 2021, as a dress rehearsal for the coming coup – never mind that Trump left office peaceably two weeks later. When I asked him how Trump might pull this off, he said the former president would declare a national emergency and GOP leaders would rally to his call for martial law, rounding up and jailing those who oppose him.
I pushed him again, to explain how all this might work. “Let’s say Trump and his Republican allies truly want to cross that Rubicon,” I said. “They couldn’t do it alone, right? They would probably need the Supreme Court, many state leaders, and the military to come on board. Do you really think the armed forces would support the overthrow of the Constitution?”
He didn’t respond. “Most important,” I said, “he would need the backing of his voters. Do you really believe that half the American people think ending elections and jailing untold numbers of people is fine and dandy?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Okey, dokey,” I said, switching the conversation to my concerns about the New York Yankees’ starting pitching.
His last comment suggested the dangerous depth of the delusion so many Democrats take for reality. They don’t just see Trump, but the other half of America as an existential threat to our Republic. Maybe they will defeat Hitler this November, but what to do with his tens of millions of brown-shirts?
Extreme times will require more extreme measures – more coercion, more censorship, more abrogation of rights in the name of liberty. They will heroically destroy our country in order to save it.
