Madness and Civilization

I was perusing Scott Adams’s (of Dilbert fame) Twitter account because somebody mentioned something he had tweeted, and that guy is now completely bananas. This, for example, is a relatively cogent observation:

“Immigration is [for unspecified reasons] bad, so this completely fabricated story about [legal] immigrants doing horrific things is ‘directionally correct,’ because immigration is bad, so horrifying fabrications about immigrants are in a deeper sense true.” This is a homeless man’s Leo Strauss on meth, but again this is probably less crazy than the average Scott Adams tweet these days (get out of the boat at your own risk).

Which makes me wonder: to what extent is Trump and Trumpism driving people insane, in the way that being inside cults drives people insane, and to what extent is Trump and Trumpism merely creating a vehicle for people with various crazy beliefs to attach those beliefs to a presidential candidate and one of our two major political parties? I would venture to guess that a whole lot of both things are going on, but I have no real sense of what the relative proportions of these things might be.

I do know that anything less than a total unambiguous rejection of Trump quickly leads to various forms of rationalization, that end up treating Trump trying to overthrow the government as being really no different than an arguably suboptimal approach to inflation or industrial policy. See Ross Douthat’s apologia for ethno-nationalist authoritarianism this morning for a good example of how this works among people who are putatively opposed to Trump, but really aren’t when push comes to shove, because acknowledging what Trump represents would upend their entire identities as political conservatives.

As always, you can read the historical precursors to this contemporary process in German.