Catharsis: A release of emotional tension, as after an overwhelming experience, that restores or refreshes the spirit.

Real Clear Politics

Michael Shellenberger discusses the feeling of catharsis at seeing Donald Trump defeat the woke scolds who have been rampaging through society for the last 12 years.

“The good news is we’re already on the downward slope moving away from Peak Woke,” he said. “If you had to point to a moment where the lies were at their greatest power, it might have been during the summer of 2020, when the public health experts who had demanded that we shut down the schools said it would be immoral not to join Black Lives Matter protesters in physical real-world events that were no different from the ‘super-spreader’ events they had just a few weeks earlier demanded people be arrested for attending.”

“Peak Censorship came just a few years later when former president Barack Obama gave a Stanford University speech urging government ‘regulation’ of social media platforms.”

MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER: People who voted for Kamala Harris are reacting with shock, anger, and sadness at the election results. They’re asking themselves why so many Latinos, Gen Xers, men and women, not only voted the way they did, but why so many of us feel enormous relief at Trump’s historic victory. But do they really not understand, or do they not want to understand?

After all, over the last decade, many of us who have moved away from the left have been explaining our concerns at length. We didn’t appreciate being told we were bigots for not wanting to defund the police, open the borders, or mandate racial quotas. We didn’t enjoy being called phobic for not wanting doctors to experiment on children with pseudo-scientific transgender medicine, and we didn’t like being labeled conspiracy theorists for asking hard questions about Covid policies, or why the FBI/CIA/DHS were involved in mass censorship.

We’re not suggesting that those were the only reasons most voters or swing voters voted for Trump, the polls indicate the top issues were the economy and migration, but elections are won on the margins and what made the difference between 2020 and 2024 is the defection of so many traditionally Democratic voters to Trump and the Republicans. And many of those who defected were, like us, alienated by the transformation of the Democratic Party into a mob of woke scolds and persecutors.

[…] So, if anybody really wants to understand why so many of us—even if we have our criticisms of Trump—feel relief and vindication at his victory, they need to consider that it has more to do with the repudiation of totalitarianism than with Trump as a person or even his policies.

Woke-ism — whatever you want to call it, progressivism, identity politics, radical leftism — has been rampaging through society for roughly the last decade. Those of us who have been stigmatized and ostracized by it feel like we can finally breathe again.

What we’re experiencing is known as catharsis, which comes from the Greek word for “cleanse” or “purge.” in Greek tragedy, the audience experiences catharsis when it feels a release of negative emotions and a sense of renewal. Many of us who have felt personally persecuted for our views — even in small ways, such as not feeling comfortable expressing our true views and feelings with friends and family — now feel freer to speak our minds. After all, the majority is with us. Our views are normal, mainstream, common sense.