MAGA On The Couch
Wednesday’s breech of the United States Capitol was so unprecedented, so surprising (it caught the entire DC police force off guard) and so uncharacteristic of the vast majority of Trump supporters, that it was hard to believe that it was actually happening. I, and the vast majority of America’s conservatives and Republicans watched in near disbelief as the mob broke through the barriers, pushed aside the police and then broke through windows and doors gaining entrance to what should have been a sanctuary of democracy.
These actions were contrary to the core values of conservatives, Republicans and right leaning activists throughout the land, myself included. Don’t WE believe in law and order? Don’t WE respect and support the police? Don’t WE abjure the lawlessness displayed by the nearly continuous riots perpetrated by antifa and BLM this past summer? Well, DON’T we?
The answer is that of COURSE we do. Yet, the breech happened. FOUR people are dead. Dozens injured. The nation’s Capitol defaced. COVID virus spread. The good name of the MAGA movement besmirched.
As noted in my last essay, the breech represented an eruption of anger at the fraud ladened catastrophe that some still call an “election.” It was, at its core, RAGE at the process that foisted a senile, doddering, criminal pervert together with an opportunistic socialist side kick, onto a nation that had reaped tremendous benefits from a extremely hardworking maverick of a President that rescued our failing economy, initiated peace in the Middle East (!), rebuilt our military, faced off against the threats from China, Iran and North Korea and managed the COVID crisis (very well, thank you) and its aftermath. Their rage, ladies and gentlemen, was and is LEGITIMATE. Their actions were not.
I think most of us would agree that there are many things about modern life that are maddening. Many things that justify anger. Be that as it may, turning to violence is NOT the way that the vast majority of Republicans, conservatives and even Trump supporters react. Which is why the turn of events on Wednesday was so hard for us to fathom.
One of the earliest schools of psychotherapy was Freudian analysis. In that paradigm, patients undergoing treatment would, with the therapists guidance, try get to the bottom of their fears, anxieties and so forth. Many practitioners found having the patient lie down on a couch helped the process. It’s time, dear readers, to put MAGA on the couch.
The best explanation for the violent behavior by people that normally are upstanding law abiding citizens is to be found in the discipline of crowd psychology. Crowd psychology is a branch of social psychology that investigates the behavior of people in crowds. One of the fundamental questions it tries to answer is the well known phenomena that people in crowds can sometimes act differently, even antithetically, to their beliefs and their normal behavior everywhere else.
One of the most important themes in crowd psychology is that in a crowd, people often feel a loss or unfettering of personal responsibility. People get caught up in what feels to them at the time to be a universality of motivation and action. They become, literally, swept away in the moment. This tendency increases in strength as the size of the crowd grows. In such circumstances, I’m afraid, people, sometimes even good people, can be capable, really, of ANYTHING. Such was the Capitol breech.
While the vast majority of the breech participants were clearly MAGA activists, it also appears that there were a number of antifa activists participating in a so called “false flag” operation, as described by that master leftist strategist Saul Alinsky. A brief search on the internet will disclose interviews with quite a number of people that have attested to the involvement of such agitators (“agitators” What an appropriate a term!). A few proven antifa & BLM matter activists have even ADMITTED such (John Earl Sullivan, a multiply arrested antifa agitator can be seen admitting on video that he was there, but claims he was only there as a “journalist.”). In the restive powder keg that was “Stop The Steal,” it didn’t take much of a spark to set it off.
So, ladies and gentlemen, the diagnosis is “Crowd Psychology.” The treatment is LAW AND ORDER. And the prognosis, with the Inauguration only days away, is uncertain.