{"id":5867,"date":"2017-01-14T13:21:24","date_gmt":"2017-01-14T13:21:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2017\/01\/14\/political-oikophobia-and-trump-derangement-syndrome\/"},"modified":"2017-01-14T13:21:24","modified_gmt":"2017-01-14T13:21:24","slug":"political-oikophobia-and-trump-derangement-syndrome","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2017\/01\/14\/political-oikophobia-and-trump-derangement-syndrome\/","title":{"rendered":"Political Oikophobia and Trump Derangement Syndrome"},"content":{"rendered":"

Oikophobia is an irrational fear of household items, surroundings, and the like.  Political oikophobia is an irrational aversion to one's own country, culture, traditions, and countrymen.  I suggest we call the opposite political oikophilia, an irrational love of one's own country, culture, traditions, and countrymen.  This distinction 'cuts perpendicular' to the xenophobia-xenophilia distinction. Thus,<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Political oikophobia<\/em>: irrational aversion to one's own country, etc.<\/span>
Political oikophilia<\/em>: irrational love of one's own country, etc.<\/span>
Xenophobia<\/em>: an irrational fear of foreigners and the foreign.<\/span>
Xenophilia<\/em>: an irrational love of foeigners and the foreign.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Clearly, one can be an oikophobe without being a xenophile, and an oikophile without being a xenophobe.<\/span><\/p>\n

Trump Derangment Syndrome takes the form of political oikophobia in many.  Glenn Reynolds supplies examples<\/a>. Here is one:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Ned Resnikoff, a \u201csenior editor\u201d at the  liberal website ThinkProgress<\/em><\/a>, wrote on Facebook that he\u2019d called a plumber to fix a clogged drain<\/a>. The plumber showed up, did the job and left, but Resnikoff was left shaken, though with a functioning drain. Wrote Resnikoff, \u201cHe was a perfectly nice guy and a consummate professional. But he was also a middle-aged white man with a Southern accent who seemed unperturbed by this week\u2019s news.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

This created fear: \u201cWhile I had him in the apartment, I couldn\u2019t stop thinking about whether he had voted for Trump, whether he knew my last name is Jewish, and how that knowledge might change the interaction we were having inside my own home.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

When it was all over, Resnikoff reported that he was \u201crattled\u201d at the thought that a Trump supporter might have been in his home. \u201cI couldn\u2019t shake the sense of potential danger.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Here is a second example:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

In fact, another piece on reacting to the election, by Tim Kreider in The Week<\/em>, is titled "I love America. It's Americans I hate.<\/a>" Writes Kreider, \u201cThe public is a swarm of hostile morons, I told her. You don't need to make them understand you; you just need to defeat them, or wait for them die. . . .  A few of us are talking, after a couple drinks, about buying guns; if it comes to a fascist state or civil war, we figure, we don't want the red states to be the only ones armed.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cA vote for Trump,\u201d Kreider continues, \u201cis kind of like a murder.\u201d  Though his piece concludes on a (slightly) more hopeful note, the point is clear:  Americans, at least Trump-voting Americans, are \u201cpathetically dumb and gullible, uncritical consumers of any disinformation that confirms their biases.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

And a third:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

And in a notorious Yale Law Journal<\/em> article, feminist law professor Wendy Brown wrote about an experience in which, after a wilderness hike, she returned to her car to find it wouldn\u2019t start. A man in an NRA hat spent a couple of hours helping her get it going, but rather than display appreciation for this act of unselfishness, Brown wrote that she was lucky she had friends along, as a guy like that was probably a rapist.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Clearly, these three people are topically<\/em> deranged: they lose their mental balance and the boat of brain capsizes into irrationality when the topic of Trump obtrudes.  This is not to say that they cannot negotiate the world sensibly in other ways: they are not globally<\/em> deranged.  Nor is it to say that everyone with objections to Trump the man or Trump's policies and appointments is deranged topically or globally.<\/span><\/p>\n

The phrase 'Trump Derangement Syndrome' refers to a real phenomenon and is justified by this fact.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Oikophobia is an irrational fear of household items, surroundings, and the like.  Political oikophobia is an irrational aversion to one's own country, culture, traditions, and countrymen.  I suggest we call the opposite political oikophilia, an irrational love of one's own country, culture, traditions, and countrymen.  This distinction 'cuts perpendicular' to the xenophobia-xenophilia distinction. Thus, Political … Continue reading “Political Oikophobia and Trump Derangement Syndrome”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[163,56,221,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5867","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-leftism-and-political-correctness","category-politics","category-psychology-and-personality-typology","category-social-and-political-philosophy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5867","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5867"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5867\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5867"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5867"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5867"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}