JULIE BURCHILL: The tyranny of the cry-bully.
Do the grown men and women with Trump Derangement Syndrome not feel shame about displaying their emotions in such a way? No, because they’ve grown up believing that acting in a way that would make Chicken Licken seem chillaxed is somehow proof of their ‘authenticity’. You can see them all over the socials, adults wailing like toddlers in need of a nap and a weighted blankie. They’re shaving their heads and swearing off sex. Some are apparently so scared for their lives that they’re seeking out ‘safe houses’, ‘listening circles’ and ‘therapy ducks’. They talk darkly of mass trans suicides and the death of democracy and repeatedly say, ‘no words’ (which is two words).
Whoopi Goldberg has claimed that Trump intends to make interracial marriages illegal, separate non-white wives from their white husbands and forcibly marry the white men to white women. I don’t know how vice-president-elect JD Vance, proudly uxorious husband to a beautiful woman of Indian heritage, missed that memo.
The most educated, as ever, are the dumbest. Students at Georgetown’s McCourt School of Public Policy were reportedly offered treats like ‘milk and cookies’ and ‘hot cocoa’, as well as Lego toys and ‘colouring and mindfulness exercises’ to take their minds off the election results. The Guardian, that bastion of mental excellence, has been offering free counselling to its journalists.
You can see the most entertaining examples of fit-witism on the excellent Rita Panahi’s Sky News Australia segment, amusingly called ‘Lefties losing it’. You get the impression that this type of behaviour may have started out as performative and a bit keeping-up-with-the-Owen-Joneses (more on him later). But just as fame is a mask that eats the face, emotional incontinence is a poison that eats the brain. It’s possible that these people are suffering from an actual thing called ‘disconfirmed expectancy’, a type of cognitive dissonance produced when new information directly contradicts an individual’s existing beliefs. This causes disciples to double down on the trounced worldview, much as followers of apocalyptic religious cults, disappointed when the aliens fail to land, say it’s going to happen next year instead.
While this is true of the wretched followers, the leaders are good old-fashioned ‘cry-bullies’, a splendid phrase I created nearly a decade ago: ‘This is the age of the cry-bully, a hideous hybrid of victim and victor, weeper and walloper. They are everywhere, these duplicit Pushmi-Pullyus of the personal and the political, from Celebrity Big Brother to the frontline of Islamism.’
The Democrats’ path out of the wilderness, when they went all-in during the last weeks of the election playing the Nazi card, but unlike 1948, didn’t get a “Dewey Defeats Truman” photo at the end, will be fascinating to watch. That they’re still shouting the F-word even after the election hints that it’s going to take them quite a while to learn their lessons for next time.