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More than 15 years have passed since terrorists knocked down the World Trade Center, killing nearly 3,000 people. And I believe it has taken that long for America to begin to snap out of its version of Stockholm Syndrome and elect a president who doesn’t try to appease our enemies by apologizing for what America represents and dissolving our patriotism in a meaningless ocean of globalism.
"Stockholm Syndome," by the way, is the name given to a phenomenon that gripped hostages taken during a bank robbery in Sweden. The hostages unconsciously adopted the perspectives and demands of their captors, presumably because they intuited that they might not be killed by those who considered them allies—albeit newly-fashioned ones.
I think Barack Obama’s election was fueled, in large measure, by a similar unconscious phenomenon that followed the destruction of the World Trade Center: We hid behind a leader who never seemed, to me, to like us Americans very much—at least not in our desire for individual autonomy, our insistence on the rights guaranteed by our Constitution and our sense that the world would be better off, if more of the world adopted our core values.
Hillary Clinton, in serving with Barack Obama, in touting open borders (if only in private meetings), in refusing to use the words “radical Islamic terrorism” and in accepting large payments from foreign nations to whom she could be indebted, seemed to promise more of the same—a diluting, rather than crystallizing, of our national identity.
I’m not sure that any other candidate could have—at this moment in history—shaken us out of our contempt for our national character, our complacency about losing our fundamental rights and our turning away from our manifest destiny as Americans and America.
Clinton promised a longer run of Stockholm Syndrome—further denial that the America is truly great and that the world relies on our ingenuity and ideals and ideas to fuel freedom here and, everywhere.
Donald Trump won not only because he promised the middle class jobs, but because it turns out the brainwashing of an entire population to deny their core beliefs and sense of self doesn’t work, forever.
The truth about an individual or a people has a stubborn way of declaring itself, even after being suppressed, for decades, or longer.
Our Stockholm Syndrome could have gone on for another four or eight years, or even longer, of course, but not in the face of someone as blatantly, unapologetically American as Donald Trump—a brash, multi-billionaire entrepreneur and celebrity who strode onto the American political stage like John Wayne or Clint Eastwood and reminded us of what he had lost—namely, ourselves.
His outsized persona was powerful enough medicine to cure our Stockholm Syndrome and remind us that we had been taken hostage and told to parrot a pathological, party line of self-loathing.
I’m not sure that any other candidate could have—at this moment in history—shaken us out of our contempt for our national character, our complacency about losing our fundamental rights and our turning away from our manifest destiny as Americans and America.
A country that was lost and wandering has found its way home, again, thanks to an unlikely hero who is hyperbolically American and apologizes to no one for it.
Dr. Keith Ablow is a psychiatrist and member of the Fox News Medical A-Team.
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