Liberal Tears: For Progressives, A Power Potion And A PoisonLiberal tears are destroying liberals' mental health and the foundations of liberalism -- but in Borderline Personality Disorder Nation, they work
Rod Dreher
Mar 10, 2023
David Brooks has a column today about "progressive sadness" -- meaning, the measurably poor mental health afflicting those on the political Left. Excerpt:
Young liberals were hit especially hard. A 2021 study by Catherine Gimbrone, Lisa M. Bates, Seth J. Prins and Katherine M. Keyes looked at the emotional states of 12th-grade students between 2005 and 2018. Liberal girls experienced a surge in depressive symptoms. Liberal boys weren’t far behind. Conservative boys and girls also suffered from higher rates of depressive symptoms, but not nearly as much as liberals. Sadness was linked to ideology.
Lord knows the right has gone off on its own jarring psychological journey of late, but many on the left began to suffer from what you might call maladaptive sadness. This mind-set had three main features.
First, a catastrophizing mentality. For many, America’s problems came to seem endemic: The American dream is a sham, climate change is so unstoppable, systemic racism is eternal. Making catastrophic pronouncements became a way to display that you were woke to the brutalities of American life. The problem, Matthew Yglesias recently wrote on his Substack, is that catastrophizing doesn’t usually help you solve problems. People who provide therapy to depressive people try to break the cycle of catastrophic thinking so they can more calmly locate and deal with the problems they actually have control over.
I want to think about David's point in that last paragraph in terms of my own writing. The longer you have been reading this blog, the more familiar you will be with my Chicken Little persona. And yet ... the sky really is falling! When I think about the changes that have swept over the United States since I started this blog in August 2011, I find vindication for my general thesis, and it's not even close. As I have often noted here, when people meet me, they are often startled by the fact that I'm not wild-eyed and/or perpetually angry, given what they've read on this blog. Partly that's a professional failure of me as a writer. Partly it's my own temperament (most of the time, I just want to go to the party and drink beer and talk to people and have fun). Partly it's a credit to my faith, and my conviction that no matter how bad things get, God is with us, and therefore our suffering has meaning.
My catastrophizing has everything to do with the fact that my main tribe -- Christians -- are still for the most part living as if everything was fine, or was going to be fine, if they just sat still and waited, or kept voting Republican. I've devoted most of the last decade to countering that dangerous fantasy. It is still a mystery to me why so many people still insist that The Benedict Option is a book about freaking out and heading for the hills; in fact, it's a book about waking up to what's actually happening, and leaning hard into strategies to build resilence, insofar as there is no place to hide (seriously, I say that in the first chapter). My theory is that this is a coping mechanism for Christians who know perfectly well that things are in bad shape for us, but who want to excuse themselves from having to change their own lives or ways of thinking to prepare themselves, their families, and their congregations for the new realities. I've tried to be constructive in my books about what we can and should be doing to build that resilience. I realize that you wouldn't know that from reading this blog alone, because the blog is news-driven, and there's always some new Awful Thing happening somewhere. You might think I blog so much about the Awful Things as clickbait, but that's not true; my TAC salary was not driven by page views. I perseverated on those things in a spirit of, What's It Gonna Take, People?
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And, I believe that we cannot expect change until we begin to disincentivize, structurally, progressive catastrophism. In his Substack essay today, Ed West observes that we have an oversupply of liberal tears because they actually work.
Excerpts:
In their book on politics and anxiety, The Coddling of the American Mind, Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff made the point that modern politics works as reverse cognitive behavioural therapy. If you ever try CBT, you will be told to avoid nine key areas of negative thought, which are:
Emotional Reasoning: letting feelings guide your interpretation of reality.
Catastrophising: focussing on the worst possible outcomes.
Overgeneralising: seeing a big pattern of negatives based on a single incident.
Dichotomous thinking: viewing events or people in all or nothing terms.
Mind reading: assuming you think you know what people are actually thinking
Labelling
Negative filtering
Discounting positives and
Blaming
Anyone who uses Twitter will be familiar with at least six of those, since the sort of social justice politics which has characterised social media since about 2012-13 encourages almost all those negative thought patterns in various forms; it’s hardly surprising that people encouraged to think that fascists are taking over America, or that transphobes threaten their safety, or even that a clumsily-phrased comment was actually a deliberate racial slur, are going to be incredibly miserable.
Political hypochondria is a real phenomenon, the widespread trend of people perceiving the rise of fascism everywhere, just as hypochondriacs see cancer all around (especially if their family has suffered from it). Just as quack doctors spread hypochondria online, political health anxiety grows because it suits a lot of people to cast their opponents as fascists.
Recently I highlighted in this space observations made by a male Blue State friend in a very unhappy marriage that American political and cultural life seems dictated by the standards of Borderline Personality Disorder, which he is having to live with daily. We are all apparently living in BPD Nation. More:
What has made public morality especially dysfunctional since 2013 is that the new sheriffs tend to be from the most mentally ill sections of society — extremely progressive young females, who also happen to be engaged in a moral status game with rivals. So we get rule by the least stable members of the educated classes, a maniacracy.
That perhaps explains some of the correlation between mental illness and how liberal a society is; the more it is ‘dedicated to the value of equality and the more choices it offers for individual self-determination, the higher its rates of functional mental illness’. It is one reason why, as English-speaking countries have become more woke over the course of this young century, they have become less happy.
It's not going to stop on its own. It will have to be stopped. As long as people in charge of institutions who know better than to surrender to the hysterical and the tearful keep doing so, the crisis will continue, and even deepen. But it serves to hollow out their own authority.
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Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/liberal-tears-for-progressives-a-power-potion-and-a-poison/
