While misery loves company, it doesn’t attract much of it.
The Democratic Party’s allies in the press are going gaga over Graham Platner, a Maine oyster fisherman who looks like a burly Morgan Spurlock and sounds like “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, amid his attempt to block Senator Susan Collins from winning a sixth term in the upper chamber of Congress.
It’s not hard to see why. Platner’s gruff affect, his workingman demeanor, and the degree to which these qualities mask his radical progressive policy preferences, are just what the Democratic consultant class ordered. And yet, Democratic activists are probably more enlivened by the candidate’s rhetoric.
In his introductory video, Platner described his domestic political opponents as “the enemy.” This was no metaphor. He explicitly equated the “oligarchy,” the “billionaires,” and “corrupt politicians” with the combatants he fought during combat tours in the U.S. military. “People know that the system is screwing them,” the candidate added. “At least the other side tells people that the system is failing them, that the system doesn’t represent them, that the system was never made for them.”
Platner has a point about the degree to which Donald Trump pushed and his movement responded to populist demagoguery designed to popularize the notion that a nefarious cabal has stolen from you that which was your due. That was a time when the Republican activist class talked itself into despair.
It was not uncommon in that era to hear the loudest of the right’s influencers endorse nihilism. “Burn it all down!” they exclaimed. The GOP’s since-unrivaled majorities in the House and Senate were engaged in “failure theater,” they insisted. Protectionism, central planning, retreat from the world stage – these might not remedy the terminal illness afflicting America, but they would secure whatever remained salvageable amid our inexorable decline into historical oblivion.
You don’t hear this sort of talk much on the right anymore, perhaps because the GOP is not nearly as depressed as it was a decade ago. But that is the language of depression. We can, therefore, conclude that the Democratic Party’s base – its most visible voters with whom state and federal lawmakers have the most contact – are similarly disconsolate.
Axios confirmed that suspicion on Tuesday in a piece highlighting what it calls the Democratic Party’s “MAGA-like makeover.” The outlet notes the degree to which Democrats are deploying gratuitous profanity – an obvious consultant-driven contrivance designed to convey authenticity on the cheap. But who is that for, exactly? Likely, the Democrats who are responding to what studies have determined is the “emotional catharsis” profanity provides those who suffer from “stress, anxiety, and depression.”
It’s not exactly reckless armchair psychologizing to speculate that a movement currently calling on its elected representatives to take a bullet for their cause is in desperate need of catharsis. Unlike the GOP, however, the Democrats’ depression is more pronounced and almost certainly less transient.
The left’s general unhappiness relative to their counterparts on the right has been the subject of psychological study for well over a decade. Indeed, the General Social Survey has found a measurable “happiness” gap between conservatives and liberals for over half a century. The so-called “wellness gap” has widened in recent years. Self-described progressives and liberals consistently report higher rates of depression and are more likely to say they struggle with mental health. These are persistent phenomena that have occasioned more than a few New York Times op-eds. But while the right managed to pull itself out of its mid-2010s slump, the left has succumbed to the doldrums.
Last year, Times columnist Thomas Edsall asked Notre Dame scholar Timothy Judge if the left’s problem wasn’t its own politics – that a barrage of negative reinforcement surrounding the illegitimacy of the American founding, the rise of fascism, the imminence of climatological apocalypse, and so on might have a deleterious effect on a true believer’s mental health. “I do share the perspective that a focus on status, hierarchies, and institutions that reinforce privilege contributes to an external locus of control,” Judge replied. He observed that a conventionally conservative philosophy – one that is antithetical to populist excuse-making and emphasizes the exercise of individual agency to improve our lot in life – is less disempowering than the progressive outlook.
I would only add that a delusion to which Democrats were partial in the Obama years, in which political engagement was hailed as a transcendental exercise that provided meaning and purpose, set the party up for disappointment. Activism and the interpersonal bonds it fosters are rewarding, but politics properly understood is not. It’s a grueling, unsatisfying slog that rapidly disabuses the naïve of their misconceptions.
If you’ve convinced yourself America’s problems are too urgent to bother with incrementalism and compromise, then you’ve convinced yourself that a “system” that incentivizes both and frustrates the ambitions of radicals is an immoral enterprise. You’ve also probably talked yourself out of engaging with it in any practical and effective way. That’s pretty depressing.
And while misery loves company, it doesn’t attract much of it. But as Axios’s dispatch and Graham Platner’s candidacy suggest, Democratic partisans are rather attached to their negative feedback loop. Is it any wonder that the party’s leading lights take Trump’s bait at every opportunity, flamboyantly emoting their way from one bad news cycle to the next? They are responding to incentives from their base, the members of which only want to see their pique mirrored by their representatives. There’s no time for delayed gratification, discretion in picking fights, or anything reflective of strategic thought. These voters want external validation, a change in their environmental conditions that might – might – relieve the existential panic with which they’re wrestling.
One day, the left may conclude that politics does not provide the inner peace they seek. But not today.