Life & Wisdom Quote by John Avlon

Avlon’s line is less a diagnosis than a reprimand: a bid to drag political memory back into the room. By insisting that “Bush Derangement Syndrome” preceded its Obama-era counterpart, he’s policing the timeline of outrage to puncture a comforting myth on both sides - that the other team “started it,” that today’s excesses are uniquely modern or uniquely partisan.

The phrase “Derangement Syndrome” does a lot of work. It smuggles in a clinical metaphor that casts opponents not merely as wrong, but as unwell, irrational, beyond persuasion. That framing is strategic: it delegitimizes the most extreme rhetoric while also subtly sidelining substantive grievances by bundling them with the “Hitler” comparisons and “terrorist” epithets. Avlon’s specific examples are chosen for maximum moral inflation, the kind that turns politics into a permanent emergency and makes compromise look like collaboration.

The subtext is a warning about escalation. If each side can point to the other’s past hyperbole as permission for its own, politics becomes a revenge loop: yesterday’s overreach becomes today’s justification. Context matters here: Avlon emerged as a voice of institutional, anti-extremist centrism in an era when cable news and social media rewarded performative disgust. His intent isn’t to relitigate Bush vs. Obama so much as to argue that the real contagion is rhetorical - and that democracies don’t just erode through policy, but through the normalization of viewing presidents as monsters rather than adversaries.