Stockholm Syndrome
…Stockholm syndrome, in which hostages begin to develop positive feelings toward their captors, an effect thought to occur when victims’ initially frightening experiences with their kidnappers are later countered with acts of compassion or camaraderie by those same individuals.
The Stockholm Syndrome: when a person taken hostage develops positive feelings towards their captor. While this psychological state was named in 1973 after a bank robbery turned hostage situation in Sweden, Americans know it best from the Patty Hearst kidnapping.
In 1974, the nineteen year old heir to the Hearst newspaper fortune Patty Hearst was kidnapped by leftist radicals who called themselves the Symbionese Liberation Army. They held her for nineteen months, demanding that her parents donate millions to feed the poor. Her father donated $2 million to a San Francisco food distribution group. Two months after her captivity, now calling herself Tania, she joined her kidnappers in a bank robbery, holding an M-1 Rifle on the customers. She recorded an audiotape for the public, stating that she had become a member of the SLA.
For the next several months, she crisscrossed the nation with her fellow SLA members, participating in multiple crimes. While the majority of the group were killed in a shoot out with police, Hearst and a few others survived and tried to revive the SLA. After participating in a bank robbery where a customer was murdered, Hearst was finally captured in in a San Francisco apartment. On getting booked into jail, she gave her occupation as an “urban guerilla.”
Hearst was ultimately convicted of bank robbery and sentenced to thirty-five years. She served less than two: her sentence was commuted by President Jimmy Carter, and ultimately she was pardoned by Bill Clinton.
As a “Democrat/Resistancer” I watch the leaders of the Republican Party and wonder, have they become victims of the Stockholm Syndrome? There certainly are true believers, the Lewandowskis, Millers and Sanders. And there are those who have found Mr. Trump as someone “clearing the road” for them to lead a similar political life: Jim Justice, the governor of West Virginia, a multi-millionaire who refuses to even live in the capital of the State, is a great example of that.
But what of the “regular” Republican leadership, what happened to them? Mitch McConnell is following his singular course of packing the Federal judiciary with his ideological view, and obviously is willing to pay almost any other price to achieve that goal. But what about the Republicans that seemed “normal”: Lindsey Graham, Rand Paul, Chris Christie, Marco Rubio, Thom Tillis, and all of the rest who have taken an almost sycophantic position to Mr. Trump?
Christie, Graham and Paul all ran against Trump in 2016. They all were pounded mercilessly by Trump criticism, tweet, and insult. Like Patty Hearst when she was first kidnapped, they were faced with political death. Don’t believe me – check the further career of Jeb Bush. So they have made the choice, or maybe they in fact fell into the Stockholm Syndrome. If you listen to those politicians today, agreeing with every political move, justifying every outlandish tweet, and becoming “the President’s Men,” they aren’t pretending to agree with Trump. They are true believers, members of the cult.
Even the much-maligned Jeff Sessions still longs to be part of the “Trump Army,” spouting the Trump rhetoric even after his political neutering by the President.
These “men of the Senate” are willing to give away the power and prerogatives of that body, allowing the President to set precedents that they would never accept from a Democrat. They have allowed Mr. Trump’s perceived political influence to threaten them so much, that they have abandoned long cherished principles, and friends like John McCain, to kowtow to him. Their incredible one-hundred eighty degree turnabout on tariffs is only the latest example.
Anticipation of political death must be so terrifying, that men of power are willing to give up, give in, and join the “SLA” to keep their careers. They need to give up their names: Lindsey, Thom, Marco, Rand, Chris, Jeff: they can all be “Tania” now.
There is a 1990’s movie, made before the Clinton scandals and the extreme polarization of today’s political world. “Dave” with Sigourney Weaver and Kevin Kline, was a story of a President who has a stroke, and his lookalike, Dave, is put in his place. Dave ran a temporary job service in “real life,” and brought that perspective to his illegitimate Presidency.
In the climatic scene – Dave as President speaks to the Congress, and says:
See, there are certain things you should expect from a President. I ought to care more about you than I do about me… I ought to care more about what’s right than I do about what’s popular… I ought to be willing to give this whole thing up for something I believe in… (Dave “the whole truth”)
It’s an old movie, but it’s a message that the “Tania’s” in the Senate ought to hear. It might remind them why they were elected, and what their duty to America should be.
