Part of the
reason falls to Sommers
and Satel's thesis that the "culture of therapy"
in America has expanded to encompass virtually all aspects of
every day life.
Another part
of the reason is that liberals, who tend to have a world view
more heavily
influenced by emotion, are probably more predisposed to see
therapy as a valuable tool for managing emotions - even those
created by the result of an election. Conservatives, on the other
hand, take a much more narrow view of the legitimate uses of therapy
- and dealing with an election loss is not among them.
But the issue
is really less about how liberals and conservatives view therapy
than about how they view each other politically. As Charles
Krauthammer pointed out nearly three years ago:
"To
understand the workings of American politics, you have to understand
this fundamental law: Conservatives think liberals are stupid.
Liberals think conservatives are evil."
Evidence
of the truth of this statement is everywhere. Howard
Dean tells the Democratic party faithful that politics is
"a struggle of good and evil. And we're the good."
Markos Moulitsas,
proprietor of the influential liberal blog Daily
Kos, has probably used the word "evil" to describe
Republicans and the Bush administration more times in the past
month than the top twenty conservative blogs have used it to describe
liberals in the past five years combined.
From top
to bottom, Democrats tend to frame political debate these days
in the most alarmist, even apocalyptic terms; conservatives want
to poison the water; bulldoze forests and let greedy corporations
rape the environment; make granny choose between food and her
pills; throw women who have abortions in jail; take away day care
and shred the safety net of Social Security; pack the courts with
people who want to take us back to the 16th century and tear down
the wall between church and state to establish an evangelical
theocracy. And that's just the GOP's domestic agenda.
Is it any
wonder some on the left are ridden with such terrible anxiety?
As Linda
Huf, a member of the new
liberal activist support group I wrote about on Monday, explained
"I'm very worried about what's going on in the world. I was
worried during the Vietnam War too. But somehow, today, the evil
seems too big."
Why does
"the evil seem to big?" Because the Democratic party,
with the subtle yet consistent help of the liberal media establishment,
has convinced some of its members that conservatives aren't just
political adversaries with a different point of view, conservatives
are a threat to their very existence. The reason some
liberals need therapy is because they've traumatized themselves
by buying into such demagoguery. - T. Bevan 9:45 am Link
| Email | Send
to a Friend
Monday,
April 25 2005
THERAPY
IS THE BEST WAY - PART I: Christina Hoff Sommers and
Sally Satel are co-authors of a new book titled One
Nation Under Therapy which explores how the burgeoning trauma
and therapy industry is eroding the ethic of self-reliance in
America. I'm sure being the subject of George
Will's column last Sunday was nice, but Sommers and Satel
couldn't have asked for a better piece of publicity than this
comical profile of a new support group for burnt-out left-wing
activists in Los Angeles:
Championing
a particular cause or course of action often can be a lonely
crusade, but these are particularly tough times for liberal
activists.
Red-state
dominance in the last election, the war in Iraq, changes in
environmental policy and the possibility of a more conservative
Supreme Court have left many local activists feeling as blue
as the state they live in.
What
they need, one longtime activist recently decided, is some therapy
— a good old-fashioned support group tailored for the
liberal activist in need of emotional rejuvenation.
Jerry Rubin,
the "L.A. peacenik" who founded the group, said it was
needed to help liberals "develop healthy coping skills."
This is eerily
reminiscent of stories of Democrats who were "emotionally
paralyzed, shocked and devastated” by George W. Bush's win
in November. The condition was dubbed post-election
selection trauma (PEST) by "trauma specialist" Douglas
Schooler and treated with - if you can believe this - "intense
hypnotherapy."
Days later,
after Rush Limbaugh had mockingly offered to provide despondent
Democrats with free therapy on his radio show, Schooler
responded by displaying the exact mentality Sommers and Satel
indict in their book:
“He
[Rush Limbaugh] is not only minimizing PEST, but he’s
bastardizing the entire psychological field and our clinical
expertise.
Many
people have serious emotional pain over this election and it’s
unhealthy to stuff it down inside of you. Therapy is the best
way.”
Needless
to say, many people disagree with the notion that "therapy
is the best way." Many people also don't believe we should
be creating new subcategories of trauma to deal with emotions
created by something as banal as an election. Neal
Boortz explained this view with characteristic bluntness:
These
people are weak. They're emotional cripples. They can't cope
with life without the help and support of their grand caretaker
government. They can't even cope with an election loss. They
sit there with blank expressions, mouths hanging open like a
brook trout, staring off into the distance. These are not the
people that you could depend on when the chips are down. They're
a pathetic indication of things to come, of the "grief
counseling" culture that permeates our society today. There's
a fight at the local government school? Rush in the grief counselors.
Someone accidentally sets off a fire alarm? Grief counselors.
Too many red lights on the way to your canasta game? Grief Counselors.
Talk to other
libertarians and conservatives and you'll find the same visceral
reaction to the ever-expanding, touchy-feely world of therapy:
they will have none of it. There are plenty of explanations for
why this is, but I'm only interested in the subject as it relates
to politics.
I'm out
of time for today, so further discussion will have to wait until
tomorrow. In the meantime, however, if you have observations on
the subject you can send them to through to me here.
- T. Bevan 9:45 am Link
| Email | Send
to a Friend
