A friend of mine is the principal partner in a Tucson accounting firm. He told me that when Trump won in 2024, one of the female CPAs in the firm, a Democrat but very good at her job, was so distraught that she had to take leave time. We both found this passing strange*: had Trump lost, my conservative friend and I would not have been pleased, but we would have taken it in stride. The CPA’s behavior is not atypical. We all know lefties who reacted similarly. Why is this? Here’s my theory.
Although leftism is not a religion, pace Dennis Prager and others who do not share my concern for precision in the use of words, it substitutes for religion in the wholly secular psychic economy of leftists. Because leftist politics is the most important thing in their lives, their “ultimate concern” to borrow a phrase from Paul Tillich, in the way that religion is the most important thing in the lives of the truly religious, leftists freak out when their candidates lose. The feel that they are losing everything. If the very meaning of your life is wrapped up in ‘progressive’ politics, and an uncouth America-first braggart of a billionaire, a crude unclubbable gate-crasher, a crass self-promoter, a man with no class, wins all seven swing states and the popular vote to boot, your world comes crashing down. The degree of freak-out and world-collapse will of course vary from individual to individual. An extreme case is that of Rosie O’Donnell who self-deported to the Emerald Isle where she spends her days obsessing over the Orange Man. Poor Rosie thought the grass would be greener there; turns out, however, that the legal weed she enjoyed in LaLaLand (Los Angeles) was not to be had in Ireland.
My theory also helps explain why leftists are so vehement and unhinged (as witness Robert de Niro’s histrionics) in their blind hatred of Trump. If politics is (or rather functions as) your religion, then, since religion presents to us saintly and divine beings such as Jesus Christ meek and mild*** for emulation, lefties thoughtlessly suppose that political figures should satisfy a similar need: they should be polite, conventionally nice people that our sons and daughter should be able to admire and look up to. Leftists, most of then anyway, want a POTUS who plays a quasi-religious role, something like a Sunday school teacher. (And not just leftists; Never-Trumpers do as well.) Now the last such Sunday-school POTUS was James Earl Carter, and you recall what a disaster he was. A good man, a nice man, but a lousy POTUS. Wasn’t he involved hands-on with Habitat for Humanity. Can you imagine Trump being so involved? He’s a builder, but not that kind of builder.
In sum, two main interconnected points:
A. For the secular left — and most leftists are secularists — politics plays in their lives the all-important roles that religion plays in the lives of the truly religious. This explains why they get so excited about politics and why they are so crushed when their ‘progressivism’ suffers setbacks.
B. And because progressive politics is (or rather functions as) their religion, lefties look to politics to satisfy their need for people to look up to and emulate. Since Trump doesn’t fill the bill, they hate him mindlessly and won’t give his credit for the numerous great things he has done for the USA and indeed the whole world. He’s not a ‘nice man’ by cat lady standards. He doesn’t smile like Joey B or clown around like Kamala. He scowls. I call it the Scowl of Minerva.
*It’s an ersatz or substitute religion, where ‘ersatz’ and ‘substitute’ function as alienans adjectives. See here for more on such adjectives.
** The phrase “passing strange” originates from William Shakespeare’s Othello, where Desdemona describes Othello’s dramatic war stories as “strange, passing strange,” meaning extremely strange or very unusual. In Early Modern English, “passing” functioned as an intensifier, equivalent to “exceedingly.” (AI-generated)
*** Agnus dei qui tollit peccata mundi. The lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.
Bill,
This characterization is incomplete.
You represent yourself and attack a particular characterization of leftists you take as total, argumentatively, and then make no comment on a wider non-leftist Trump supporting type that has none of the sophistication or thoughtfulness of you and your commenter corp, without which a fool like Trump (diaper Don—with his long known incontinence and now increasing dementia) would not have been elected.
This is perhaps the weakness of the position of those who hold their nose to agree with some opposing position in our binary politics, and then justify it as merely practical/pragmatic. Eh.
Thinking about this, I lay an analogous charge you accuse milquetoast conservatives of suffering from to you and your commenter corp. You are a minority that have to suck it up and align with those you’d never really socialize or agree with socially or intellectually to get some minimum of effective political agreement, the net result of which is probably not as positive or worth it as you suggest, as much as some trade off you just hold your nose to accept.
The truth is probably more something like that our collective goodness and the positive (that we agree on despite our avowed political positions) persists in spite of all of this.