Victory or defeat in democratic elections often provokes elation or misery, neither of which, for obvious reasons, is long lasting. Politicians rarely stick to their promises, and even when they try to do so they are often thwarted by circumstances beyond their control or by the surreptitious resistance of bureaucracies. Moreover, even when promised policies are fulfilled, they may have unanticipated harmful consequences. The electorate soon forgets that it had any part in bringing them about.
But the recent victory of Donald Trump stimulated some of the most extraordinary reactions to an election victory that I have ever witnessed. Young people in particular took to the selfie video to express (very publicly) what they intended everyone to think was their despair, a despair that they expected would indicate their moral and political virtue. The extravagance with which they expressed themselves—weeping, wailing, writhing, or even throwing themselves to the ground—was likewise intended to indicate the very depth of their feeling to their audience.
If they had been sentenced to death for the following day, they could hardly have been more emotional, or at least more expressive of emotion, but most of that emotion struck me as bogus, or at least not straightforwardly sincere. It bore the same relation to true feeling as hysterical paralysis does to the physical kind.
Continue reading the piece here at The Epoch Times (paywall)
______________________
Theodore Dalrymple is a contributing editor of City Journal and a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
Photo by Bridgeman via Getty Images