Now Trump Must Choose Between The Path Of Bush, Or The Path of Reagan

Scott Adams tries to be his best:

I ask Trump supporters not to gloat too much. Be good to your fellow citizens. Be inclusive. Be useful. The country needs you at your best.

People are saying the same thing about Trump, that he must now reach out to leftists, and assure them that he will respect their wishes.

I disagree, and it is not just that I am an angry deplorable looking for vengeance on my ideological opposition (though that would feel nice). If my own amygdala-centric model of psychology is correct, Scott’s proposed action is exactly wrong from a technical, mechanistic perspective.

The reason Trump’s election was so traumatic to the left was because they had been conditioned by Obama’s election to expect victory, and the acquiescence of their opposition. Their amygdalae were unconditioned to stress and hardship. The reason they were so willing to overlook Hillary sending violent, mentally-ill people to Trump rallies to physically hurt the opposition, was because they needed that victory on a deep, psychological level. The reason they would have countenanced fraud was because their amygdalae were not acclimated enough to hardship to be able to tolerate a loss. The whole problem is amygdalae which have been coddled, and which are not capable of enduring hardship.

If Trump, out of the box coddles them, I think, as with George W Bush, they will grow worse as their amygdalae atrophy. By the end of Trump’s first term, they will be like rabid dogs. Literally. At the beginning of Bush’s term they were mildly bad. By the end they were terrible. Now they are even worse than that, and that is the starting point. Trump cannot let their amygdalae atrophy any more, or we will have civil unrest.

The left is not reasonable. They are not logical. They either can get away with leftist shitbaggery, in which case they grow ever more shitbaggy, even to the point of throwing opposition into mass graves at some point, or they will encounter enough pushback to cow them into quiet acquiescence. As Eric Hoffer wrote, they bite the hand that feeds them, or they lick the boot that kicks them.

What Trump should do, is pursue Reagan’s path of constant mockery, in an amusing manner, combined with an amygdala release if they do what ne needs them to do, ie unify with the rest of the country. First he should try to make leftist ideals appear as the fool’s philosophy they are. He should make it embarrassing to be leftist. He must out-group them, and they must feel threatened with public humiliation and shame if they pursue leftism.

Donald’s success will be a big part of that, because success will in-group Donald with the nation. Reagan’s jibes struck so much harder because everyone loved what he had done with the country. So success, and Donald in-grouping himself, must come first. He must present an image of being a leader most of the country loves. But second must come a passive realization in the leftist mind that the nation does not respect leftists, and will turn upon them if their leftism is ever revealed to the broader nation openly. Trump needs to make the word liberalism a laughingstock again, just as Reagan did, and he needs to get everyone laughing at it’s stupidity, cowardice, and weakness.

As Trump makes the embrace of leftism unacceptable from an amygdala perspective, he also needs to psychologically untether average Hillary voters from their ideological moorings, in their own minds. The worst thing that could happen is Trump makes leftism unacceptable, and all of Hillary’s voters see it as a direct attack on them, and who they are as people. That will only solidify the battle lines.

He needs to simultaneously open the door to them believing that either they are not of the “true” left which he is ridiculing, or that their leftism was a mistake. That is, he needs to find a way to implant the idea that their past leftism was not representative of who they are, so they can make the move to the right, and assuage their amygdala, without having the amygdala trigger of believing that they were once inferior.

Reagan had “Reagan Democrats,” a concept of the democrats who felt abandoned by their party. This allowed democrats to abandon the left, and go to a premade safe space that would align them with Reagan. It also allowed those fleeing the democrats to re-in-group themselves with a “stronger” group, which made them feel superior to the liberals that they were leaving behind. Leftism is all about assuaging personal insecurity. You can use that to create behavioral drive.

Combined with Reagan’s constant derision of the left, the “Reagan Democrats” gave liberals an ability to shut off their amygdalae by joining a large group of fellow semi-leftists who believed they had seen the errors of the liberals. Now they were superior to all those silly fools that Reagan and the nation were making fun of, and they no longer had to endure the amygdala-pain of being made fun of as “liberals.”

Of course, that comes with a risk. Reagan Democrats became the neocon chickenhawks, bent on showing how tough they were on the foreign stage by deploying the military all over to chase after the wars they created. Liberals are always bullies. This does not so much remodel leftist brains as it allows the nation to operate as if more K, and be more successful, with less internal strife. But it is just a first step to developing amygdalae – a process that ultimately requires real hardship, for better or worse.

Eventually the neocons found those wars could be profitable (another amygdala-relaxant), and as they grew in number, other leftist urges emerged in the party. Eventually, they merely transplanted their leftism into the conservative movement where it metathesized as the myriad of Cuckservative tumors which only a stout dose of Donald Trump could put into remission. Before Donald, the Republican leadership viewed true conservatives exactly as liberals do – too aggressive, stupid, “xenophobic,” backward thinking, protectionist, and fearful. That is because they were liberals.

So it is a complicated path, combining the stick of ridicule, shame, and humiliation, the carrot of belonging and superiority to others, and a careful control of what is created, lest they try, as rabbits will everywhere, to conclude they should be running things instead of the people who graciously invited them into the party to assuage their neuroses.

Of course if Donald really wanted to turn the nation K, he could do worse than to offer every poor welfarite free airfare to the leftist nation of their choosing, with promises of far greater, and more “fair” welfare benefits, in whatever socialist utopia they will land in. After all, Cuba is a Caribbean paradise. How could facilitating a exodus of the poor to a Caribbean paradise be anything other than angelic?

r and K are Darwinian, after all.

r/K Theory will eventually change the world because of the reviews located here.