Republicans Must All Have Stockholm Syndrome
How else could they support the man who is holding us hostage?
Photo by Jose Pedro Ortiz on Unsplash
Identifying with the captor isn’t a new thing. It’s a well-documented phenomenon, known as Stockholm Syndrome. That’s when a captive begins to have positive feelings for the captor. Usually, it’s a single captive so today’s situation is unique — one captor (Trump) with millions of hostages (the Republican Party).
Republicans may be fooled by Trump, but the rest of us see him for what he is. Having never bought into his lies the way Republicans have, it’s still possible for us to view Trump with some level of accuracy. Republicans, however, are lost to this phenomenon and are as impossible to reason with as if they’d been brainwashed — which they sort of have.
But why are so many others falling into the trap of projecting a Republican win in the upcoming mid-terms? Everyone keeps predicting Republicans will likely take over Congress in 2022 — since in past elections the party in the WH tends to lose votes in Congress as a result of the mid-terms.
This may be true, historically, but what nobody is saying is that there is nothing about 2022 that mirrors past history.
Polls tell us that most Republicans embrace the Big Lie, but I’ve seen no figures on the number of people who have left the Republican Party since Trump became president — and we have reason to think it may be substantial.
If the percentage of Republicans who believe the Big Lie is always presented out of context — that is without also mentioning the total number of Republicans who are committed to staying with the party and voting Republican — the percentage cited is meaningless.
What is 30% of x when nobody can tell you what x is?
Context in politics is like location in real estate — it’s everything. Yet the media continually leaves it out.
All they can say with certainty is that approximately a third of the party that has no platform, relies on denial to avoid reality, and has put all its hopes on a man who is so stupid he thinks a cognitive test is an IQ test — a third of those people still think Trump is the rightful president. Can anybody really believe this will give them an edge in 2022?
I’ve been hearing a lot of nonsense about Black voters giving up on the Democratic Party as well. Congresswoman Joyce Beatty spoke to this issue on MSNBC a few days ago.
When pushed on the question of what she would say to her constituents after the failure to carve out an exception to the filibuster for voting rights, she turned the tables on the interviewer. Rather than buying into the argument that the Democrats were the problem, Beatty made it very clear that Black voters know exactly who is getting in the way of voting rights and they will not stay home and complain about it, they will force the bums out.
In her words, “It’s not what’s going to happen to us, it’s what’s going to happen to them. That’s what the Senate needs to worry about.”
Beatty’s right. Black people will not be swayed from participating in this democracy because a bunch of racist political elitists are making it harder to vote. And they won’t be voting for the people who are responsible for voter suppression either. That’s because Black people and POC are very aware of context.
Nobody is more invested in seeing democracy succeed than the people who have historically been enslaved, abused, and marginalized. And nobody who has historically been enslaved, abused, and marginalized is confused about who is responsible for it.
There may be a handful of Blacks for Trump, but the majority know their future depends on electing Democrats who respect their rights and will fight for them.
The failure to pass voting rights legislation will not lead Black people to either refuse to vote or to support Republicans. That would be like allowing an arsonist to become Chief of the Fire Department because the Fire Department was only able to put out some of the fires the arsonist started.
If Republicans block everything their constituents want our government to do, why would those same constituents respond by voting out the only party attempting to give them what they want in favor of the very people preventing them from getting what they want— particularly when they know the Biden agenda is filled with programs the American public is overwhelmingly in support of.
I can’t tell if it's arrogance, ignorance, or both, but any pundit, politician, or media expert who thinks we can look at prior mid-terms and base expectations for 2022 on that history isn’t paying attention to the reality around us.
Let’s also not forget that with multiplying threats to Trump himself, in the form of various civil and potentially criminal lawsuits, Trump may well find himself unable to run in 2024.
There may not be a law preventing an indicted politician from running for office, but there is a law preventing someone guilty of insurrection from holding office. The public needs to be reminded of this any time there is talk of Trump running in 2024.
If the temptation to pontificate about what we see coming is too strong to resist, the media should at least be required to put every comment or prediction they feel compelled to make in context.
It’s the least they can do, given it’s their job. I just hope they haven’t forgotten how.