Someone in my proximate environment is making me and those around me unbearably anxious. He glowers, turns unresponsive, rambles, lies, drives recklessly. He shows up in formal settings in shorts, tennis shoes and a hoodie. He sports dense tattoos; the phrase “I will make you hurt” (from a Nine Inch Nails song), has now been blotted out under a dark band of colour on his arm.
By proximate environment, I mean the halls of American political power; the person I am referring to is a Democratic Senator from Pennsylvania, John Fetterman. There have been questions around his cognition since he suffered an ischemic stroke in May 2022. But after hospitalisations, a self-admission for clinical depression and a car crash involving Fetterman and his wife, he remains in post. Even after a startling exposé in New York Magazine, which quoted former aides to Fetterman describing his “megalomania” and “catatonic” withdrawal, he denies he is experiencing mental difficulties. He simply will not step aside, and no one is able to compel him to step aside.
In an epoch of shattered norms, Fetterman’s refusal to resign is yet another instance of a public figure’s ruptured mentality. In 2023, George Santos, the newly elected Republican congressman from New York, refused to leave his post after revelations he had committed past felonies and fabricated the story of his life. He cheerfully made plans to run again in 2024. Biden’s insistence on remaining in the presidential race despite his clear mental decline followed; meanwhile, Donald Trump was raving on the campaign trail about Al Capone, even as he was seizing the political moment by defending an unglued Biden’s mental health (at the time he feared Kamala Harris’s candidacy). It recalled Chico Marx telling Groucho “there ain’t no sanity clause” as they haggled over a contract. It was, as people say, just like a movie, and it made Fetterman’s denial in the midst of his mental disintegration as inevitable as the next mind-exploding “announcement” from the White House.
Sixty years ago, the anti-psychiatry movement discredited the very notion of mental illness by vilifying psychiatry as a form of social control masquerading as science. Now a version of this thinking has migrated to the political realm. The line between sanity and insanity at the most elevated echelons of power has become barely discernible.
Psychosis has been described as a safe, the combination to which has been lost. America’s two political parties have locked themselves away in hermetically sealed conspiracy theories. The left thinks social norms are a fabrication of power; the right thinks political norms are. Already verging on the psychotic, these ideological counterparts consider evidence of mental illness a mere glitch in personality when it occurs on their side, and a threat to the republic if it happens on the other.
When Fetterman was a dyed-in-the-wool progressive, Republicans decried his tattoos as satanic. Now he has cosied up to Trump and Netanyahu – including by supporting Trump’s blocking of funds from Columbia University over its alleged anti-Semitism issues. There’s even talk of his leaving the Democrats to become an independent in his purple state. Republicans hail him as a hero who has overcome a stroke and clinical depression to stand up to his party. As for his erstwhile defenders, the Democrats, these days they think he needs professional help. “Every time I see him, I’m worried about him,” said one colleague in the Senate.
One fascinating feature of the rise of the American populist right is how it advocates a return to traditional values while making use of postmodern techniques promulgated at the elite universities they both love and loathe. Trump & Co’s vision of immutable gender roles, IQ-based beehive societies and racialist and nationalist hierarchies might be reflections of Trump’s disordered notion of the 19th century. But the conceptual means by which this traditionalist right is attempting to re-establish bygone American myths are right out of a Columbia seminar on poststructuralism: there are no facts, only narratives competing for power. (It’s not a coincidence that one of the new right’s favourite philosophers is Antonio Gramsci.) Such a premise makes for interesting dialogue in an academic setting. It is deranging in everyday life.
Fetterman seems to be, by every rational measure, unstable. But in a mad time, irrationality is difficult to define. The Trump administration claims the tattoos of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the El Salvadoran national it illegally deported to an El Salvadoran prison, prove his membership in the criminal Salvadoran-American gang MS-13. But the photos Trump posted on Truth Social to demonstrate his claim were clearly altered – yet only in the eyes of the Democratic opposition. In such an epistemological stand-off, you can hardly blame Fetterman if he thinks he lies squarely in the mainstream. If Trump can normalise criminality, why not open self-delusion to similar reform? How appropriate it is that the most popular new car colour in America now is called “battleship gray”: the colour of our enveloping cognitive fog, where Fettermans proliferate at the highest levels of government. In this general collapse of behavioural norms, of competing psyches with guns drawn, it’s no wonder the idea of steering a vessel of war through America’s byways exerts such a strong appeal.
[See also: Modernity has killed the private life]
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This article appears in the 14 May 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Why George Osborne still runs Britain