Wednesday,
April 27 2005
THERAPY IS THE BEST WAY - PART II: The question at hand
is this: if George W. Bush had lost the election in November would
we be seeing stories about conservatives undergoing therapy to
deal with the disappointment? I don't think we would. So why have
some liberals been so traumatized by politics (specifically the
results of the last two presidential elections) they've resorted
to pyschotherapy
and support
groups?
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
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