The Midterm Elections: Americans Overcoming Social Madness?

Monday, December 12, 2022 - 1:00pm
CST
Ron Aronson

Our current societal disorder focuses delusion and denial, the inability or unwillingness of large masses of people to distinguish between reality and fantasy, and their willingness to act politically according to this derangement. The best term to describe these Trump-encouraged processes—not wholly dissimilar from those that unfolded in Nazi Germany—is “social madness.” The liars come to believe their lies. For all of them, reality becomes lost, remade by fantasy. This is what Ron Aronson means by social madness. Social madness is characterized by collective denial, delusion, and derangement, and perhaps, as some fear, civil war?