A\u00a0 friend of mine is the principal partner in an\u00a0 accounting firm.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 \u00a0We 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.\u00a0 The CPA’s behavior is not atypical. We all know lefties who reacted similarly. Why is this? Here’s my theory.<\/p>\n
Although leftism is not a religion, pace<\/em> Dennis Prager and others who do not share my concern for precision in the use of words,\u00a0 it substitutes<\/em> for religion in the wholly secular psychic economy of leftists.\u00a0 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, or at least the most important thing.\u00a0 If the very meaning of your life is wrapped up in ‘progressive’ politics, and an uncouth America-first braggart of a billionaire,\u00a0 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; it turns out, however, that the legal weed she enjoyed in LaLaLand (Los Angeles)\u00a0 was not to be had in Ireland.\u00a0 “In 2008, O’Donnell said that she was not an alcoholic, and had temporarily given up alcohol to lose weight. She wrote on her blog: “‘Cause I was drinking too much, ’cause I didn’t want to any more, ’cause it is hard to lose weight when drinking, ’cause I can never have only one.”[<\/span>177]<\/span><\/a><\/sup>\u00a0She started drinking again following President Trump\u2019s first election victory in 2016, revealing, “I was very, very depressed. I was overeating. I was overdrinking \u2026 I was so depressed.”[<\/span>178]<\/span><\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n My theory also helps explain why leftists are so vehement and unhinged (as witness Robert de Niro’s shameless histrionics) in their blind hatred of\u00a0 Trump.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Leftists, most of then anyway,\u00a0 want a POTUS who plays a quasi-religious role, something like a Sunday school teacher.\u00a0 (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?\u00a0 Can you imagine Trump being so involved? He’s a builder, but not that<\/em> kind of builder.<\/p>\n In sum, two main interconnected points:<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 This explains why they get so excited about politics and why they are so crushed when their ‘progressivism’ suffers setbacks.<\/p>\n B.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Since Trump doesn’t fill the bill, they hate him mindlessly and won’t give him credit for the numerous great things he has done for the USA and indeed the whole world, where Midnight Hammer is an example of the latter.\u00a0 \u00a0He’s not a ‘nice man’ by cat lady standards.\u00a0 He doesn’t look into the camera and smile like the fraudulent and phony Joey B or clown around like Kamala. He scowls. I call it the Scowl of Minerva.<\/p>\n __________________<\/p>\n * It’s an ersatz or substitute religion, where ‘ersatz’ and ‘substitute’ function as alienans<\/em> adjectives. See here<\/a> for more on such adjectives.<\/p>\n ** The phrase\u00a0<\/span>“passing strange”<\/span><\/strong>\u00a0originates from William Shakespeare\u2019s\u00a0<\/span>Othello<\/span><\/em>, where Desdemona describes Othello\u2019s dramatic war stories as \u201cstrange, passing strange,\u201d meaning\u00a0<\/span>extremely strange<\/span><\/strong>\u00a0or\u00a0<\/span>very unusual<\/span><\/strong>.\u00a0<\/span>