Borderline Progressive Disorder

Why young liberals are so depressed compared to young conservatives

The liberal writer Matthew Yglesias looks at new survey data, and asks how come young liberals are so depressed? Yes, he says, there’s a lot going on in the world to be anxious over. However:

But I want to talk about something Goldberg mentions but doesn’t focus on: a 2021 paper by Catherine Gimbrone, Lisa Bates, Seth Prins, and Katherine Keyes titled “The politics of depression: Diverging trends in internalizing symptoms among US adolescents by political beliefs.” The CDC survey doesn’t ask teens about their political beliefs, but Gimbrone et. al. find not only divergence by gender, but divergence by political ideology. Breaking things down by gender and ideology, they find that liberal girls have the highest increase in depressive affect and conservative boys have the least. But liberal boys are more depressed than conservative girls, suggesting an important independent role for political ideology.

I think the discussion around gender and the role of social media is an important one. But I also don’t believe that liberal boys are experiencing more depression than conservative girls because they are disproportionately hung up on Instagram-induced body image issues — I think there’s also something specific to politics going on.

Notice how the depression rate of young liberal females was the first to take off, around 2011. Everybody else followed suit. The Great Awokening is generally understood to have begun around 2012 or 2013. Thesis: the Great Awokening was sparked by liberal females, and continues to be led by them.

Anyway, Yglesias goes on to talk about how progressives have gained power by playing the victim, and catastrophizing over it. And you know what? It works. But Yglesias says the price to be paid here is that young people come to believe their own propaganda. Yglesias quotes the liberal writer Jill Filipovic, from this post of hers:

I am increasingly convinced that there are tremendously negative long-term consequences, especially to young people, coming from this reliance on the language of harm and accusations that things one finds offensive are “deeply problematic” or event violent. Just about everything researchers understand about resilience and mental well-being suggests that people who feel like they are the chief architects of their own life — to mix metaphors, that they captain their own ship, not that they are simply being tossed around by an uncontrollable ocean — are vastly better off than people whose default position is victimization, hurt, and a sense that life simply happens to them and they have no control over their response. That isn’t to say that people who experience victimization or trauma should just muscle through it, or that any individual can bootstraps their way into wellbeing. It is to say, though, that in some circumstances, it is a choice to process feelings of discomfort or even offense through the language of deep emotional, spiritual, or even physical wound, and choosing to do so may make you worse off. Leaning into the language of “harm” creates and reinforces feelings of harm, and while using that language may give a person some short-term power in progressive spaces, it’s pretty bad for most people’s long-term ability to regulate their emotions, to manage inevitable adversity, and to navigate a complicated world.

I was in the grocery store earlier today texting with a friend whose wife has Borderline Personality Disorder, and who has made his life a living hell. My own married life pre-divorce was not much fun, but this guy’s — Lord, you wouldn’t wish that on your worst enemy. He stays because of the kids. I worry that he’s going to drop dead of a heart attack. I was trying to give him some encouragement.

Filipovic’s description jumped out at me because not an hour ago, I was listening (well, reading) my friend tell me about the latest things his wife has done, and it’s 100 percent like this! She is constantly, constantly, the victim, and every little thing that goes wrong is the Twilight Of The Gods. My friend says he and the kids live in an environment where they are constantly walking on eggshells to keep her from exploding.

In the past, he has told me that BPD is a mental illness in which the sufferer feels that her emotions are completely out of control, and that everything is about to fall to pieces. One unconscious strategy they have to regulate their emotions is to pick someone in their life out — a parent, or their partner — and construe that person as the focus of Evil in the world. This is why he can’t do anything right by her. It has nothing to do with what he does or does not do — she has to hate him in order to feel a modicum of stability.

I sent him the Filipovic quote, and asked him if he thinks American liberals and progressives are suffering from a massive case of BPD. He lives in Blue America. Here’s what he said (quoted with permission):

It is a feminine cancer. Note that I say “feminine” and not “female.” I sense there is a basic and important difference, though in the end, does it really matter? It is a mind virus that clusters in liberal/progressive spaces. The Filipovics of our PMC [Professional Managerial Class — RD] cult literally believe that the problems of the world (her world, of course, which is the only world) stem from the persistence and predominance of “the patriarchy.” It’s a variation on “true communism.” But really, the weaponization of trait empathisation and unchecked trait neuroticism has re-invoked the ghost of fallen Eve. We hear much about toxic masculinity, but the Overton window does not include the necessary conversation about toxic femininity. With this unbalanced and unchecked self-referential victim narrative, we are engulfed in suffocating, narcissistic Longhouses. It is as if we have all ceded the day-to-day ordering and running of our world to BPD madwomen, with (yes) hysterical eyes. It is a crazy-space.

After he sent that, we started texting again. He said the thing you have to understand about BPD — the thing he has learned from the research he’s done to help him learn how to cope — is that there’s no cure for it, and there’s no way to negotiate or reason with those who suffer from it. Some people diagnosed with it can learn how to modulate it somewhat, but it’s incurable. I have a friend in the UK who is going through a divorce now from their BPD spouse, who has driven away family and friends rather than admit to having a problem. I brought that up with my US friend, who said that BPD sufferers are terrified to admit that anything is wrong with them, because it feels like annihilation.

We should be careful not to pathologize politics too much, but it really is interesting to think about the parallels here. Let’s assume that young conservatives are like my friend, the husband, and young liberals are like his BPD-having wife. If they are true to form, then the liberals will be freaking out over everything, with no sense of proportion, and will blame the conservatives for all of it. The conservatives will for a while try to reason with the liberals, but eventually they will realize that it’s pointless, that the liberals are not in touch with reality, or at least they are viewing reality entirely through the lens of their extreme emotions. The “argument” is not really between liberals and conservatives, but is rather about the fact that the liberals are in constant panic mode, and don’t know how to calm down, ever — only make everyone around them miserable.

Now, a BPD sufferer is dealing with an organic brain condition, and can’t help herself. There is no respite from her torment, and no respite for those whom she torments. What’s the excuse of young progressive hysterics, male and female? They’re not mentally ill; they’ve simply been trained to know that catastrophizing and freaking out until those in authority give you what you want works. Why should they change?

The answer, if Yglesias is correct, is that they are destroying their mental health, and with it the possibility of a happy life. BPD sufferers have no choice; mentally healthy progressives do. But they have worked themselves up into such a state about politics (cultural and otherwise) that to fail to be on maximum freak-out mode 24/7 is to somehow break faith with the Cause. People like me laugh at these snowflakes for finding every little thing in the world “harmful,” and requiring hand-holding and wubbie-snuggling to get through the day. But the data indicate that there is real personal pain among these people. Why have they been educated into paralysis?

Again: because it works to get you what you want. The cost, though, is not just your own mental health in general, but your sense of agency. Eventually people are going to back away from you, realizing that you are a hopeless case, and that you are going to have to be left to deal with your stuff yourself. They are going to grasp that you are nothing but manipulative. And when the world runs out of people you can control by berating them and threatening to have a hissy fit, what then?

I like to think that the beginning of the backlash against wokeness that we’re now seeing is coming from people finally realizing that there is no appeasing the progressives, and that it’s not worth losing our rights, and our sanity, to even try. About my friend — well, the only answer for him is divorce, or to dig even deeper and suffer. But we can’t divorce each other in America, and if we are going to live together in peace, the progressive hysterics need to run smack into hard reality. When even older liberals like Jill Filipovic realize that we are doing the young leftists no favors by letting them get whatever they want through acting out like children, there may be an emerging consensus that crybullying has run its course.

Hierarchy And Happiness

Here’s a fascinating piece in Scientific American, speculating that the basic division between liberals and conservatives boils down to one thing. Excerpts:

Psychologists have long suspected that a handful of fundamental differences in worldviews might underlie the conservative-liberal rift. Forty years of research has shown that, on average, conservatives see the world as a more dangerous place than liberals. This one core belief seemed to help explain many policy disagreements, such as conservative support of gun ownership, border enforcement and increased spending on police and the military—all of which, one can argue, aim to protect people from a threatening world.

But new research by psychologist Nick Kerry and me at the University of Pennsylvania contradicts that long-standing theory. We find instead that the main difference between the left and right is the belief that the world is inherently hierarchical. Conservatives, our work shows, tend to have higher belief than liberals in a hierarchical world, which is essentially the view that the universe is a place where the lines between categories or concepts matter. A clearer understanding of that difference could help society better bridge political divides.

More:

People high in hierarchical world belief see the world as full of differences that matter because they usually reflect something inherent, real and significant. Such individuals often separate things of greater value from things of less value. You might imagine that, to them, the world looks full of big, bold black lines. The opposite view—held by people low in this belief—tends to perceive differences as superficial and even silly. For individuals with this perspective, the world is mostly dotted lines or shades of gray. (To reiterate, primals concern tendencies only. Even people with a strong hierarchical world belief see some lines as arbitrary.) In our work, this primal was high in conservatives and low in liberals.

Most types of hierarchical thinking that have been studied, such as social dominance orientation, concern preferences about how humans should be organized. But hierarchical world belief relates to how people perceive the world to actually exist—regardless of what they’d like to see. In addition, this primal applies not only to human groups but to everything, including plants, other animals and inanimate objects. For people high in this belief, the universe is the sort of place where lines matter.

This is really something. One of the things I’m learning in my re-enchantment research is that reality itself is imbued with naturally occurring patterns and hierarchies. You can’t always draw a moral from that fact, but if you want to work with Nature — that is, follow the Tao, or the Natural Law — you will respect those patterns, and follow the lines laid down. The late architect Christopher Alexander, author of A Pattern Language, has written that it is not a subjective impression, but an empirical fact, that humans feel more at home, more full of life, in buildings and around architecture that follows certain patterns, and collections of patterns, that reproduce in Nature. This tells us that lines matter. Not arbitrarily drawn lines, but lines drawn guided by the lines that are already given, already drawn.

Take the transgender issue. Nobody can deny that there are some people who feel that they are in truth the opposite sex. How we react to that claim matters. Liberals, generally speaking, say that there are no clear lines between male and female, that it’s all fluid. Conservatives disagree. Liberals do all kinds of violence to law, to language, and to common sense to force people to accept that the clear line between male and female does not exist. But it does exist! True, it is porous and somewhat indistinct; not every man is G.I. Joe, and not every woman is Marilyn Monroe. But the gender binary is written into nature, and to refuse it is to put the future of humanity in danger (to say nothing of one’s own happiness).

I wonder if the finding here in Scientific American has anything to do with the happiness data Yglesias cites. I bet it does. I bet that the 18 year old liberals are far more depressed than 18 year old conservatives not only because they have been encouraged to lean into catastrophizing as a strategy for engaging the world, but also because they have been taught by their elders that the world — in particular their sex and gender — is far more fluid than it actually is. That is an insane amount of stress to put on a kid who is learning how to make his or her way in the world.

I was thinking a while back about my experience of boarding school from 1983-85, living in an all-male dorm. Most of us knew who was gay and who wasn’t, and there was some same-sex experimentation there. Our generation, at least at that school (gifted and talented residential high school), was a lot more tolerant than the one before us, but it wasn’t the case that homosexuality was affirmed, exactly — just tolerated. Trans wasn’t on anybody’s radar. The tension and anxiety that all of us had, learning how to be mature, how to be men and women, how to be emotional, how to be sexual (and how to manage our sexuality), could feel overwhelming at times. I cannot imagine how much more anxiety we would have had to deal with had we been compelled to navigate whether or not we were gay, bisexual, trans, hemi-demi-semi, or whatever the Baskin-Robbins menu of sexual and gender orientations are. No wonder kids are so depressed.

It’s beyond sex and gender, though. When I was 18, the world was a pretty scary place in terms of nuclear war (Cold War, I mean), and AIDS, drugs, and crime. Still, things seemed more fixed and predictable than they do now. The rate of change has definitely sped up; liquid modernity is almost to the point of being steam. When I graduated from journalism school in 1989, it was possible to imagine a lifetime in newspapers. None of us imagined that in eleven years, newspapers would begin their tech-driven death spiral after the invention of this thing called the Internet.

The experience of young people today is that the world really is more fluid and indeterminate than the world of their parents and grandparents. I’m talking about the psychological experience of the world. However, we are not all at the mercy of the currents and the waves. Conservatives — those who believe that lines matter, and that hierarchies are naturally the way of the world — have more inner resources with which to meet the rising chaos of the world, to master it, or at least to ride the waves without capsizing.

I mean, heck, look at me. In the last ten months, I’ve lost a lot, but I’ve not been sunk, because my faith in God, and in the ultimate meaning in all that happens, have kept me going. It’s not been easy, but it has been bearable. Yes, it’s a gift of God’s grace, but the prior belief that God is there, and that He loves me, and that He will help me endure this, and even turn it to good, if I stay faithful and yield to him — all those prior beliefs make me receptive to God’s grace.

I read a book yesterday about enchantment — one I’m going to write about tomorrow, or later in the week — to see how another writer dealt with it. The book, by a female writer, really put me off. It was highly impressionistic, and she noodled on and on about her experiences in the world, and how she didn’t want to see any firm lines, or make any binding commitments. Politics don’t enter into the narrative, but I’d bet you a thousand dollars she’s a liberal. I sympathized with her deep desire for a feeling of connection and higher purpose, but she has made it a lot harder that she will ever discover this, in any meaningful way, because of her prior commitment to keeping things fluid and murky, to preserve her autonomy. No wonder she’s still searching.

It’s an iron law: the more power you want to assert over your own life, the less meaning you can find in it. Just over a year ago, I wrote in this space about the sociologist Hartmut Rosa’s theory of “resonance”. Rosa’s basic point is that the more we try to control the world, the less at home we will feel in it. This is human nature. Rosa writes:

The driving cultural force of that form of life we call “modern” is the idea, the hope and desire, that we can make the world controllable. Yet it is only in encountering the uncontrollable that we really experience the world. Only then do we feel touched, moved, alive.

My hypothesis is this: because we, as late modern human beings, aim to make the world controllable at every level—individual, cultural, institutional, and structural—we invariably encounter the world as a “point of aggressions” or as a series of points of aggression, in other words as a series of objects that we have to know, attain, conquer, master, or exploit. And precisely because of this, “life,” the experience of feeling alive and of truly encountering the world—that which makes resonance possible—always seems to elude us.

Now, if the modern impulse is to bring everything under control, but the young liberal believes that everything is fluid, and that she exists in a world that is intrinsically unstructured, well, can’t you see why that would make one panicked and depressed? She’s thrown into a world in which she is told that it is her task to make meaning, and to draw her own lines, whereas before lines were drawn for one by religion, society, and so forth — and this is an incredibly demanding task, one that most people are not up for.

Young conservatives grow up in the same fluid world, but perhaps their faith that there are some eternal truths and hierarchies built into the shape of reality helps them to navigate with less anxiety than their liberal cohorts. Makes sense to me.

You can take the Primals survey here. I did. It shows that I am generally more pessimistic than average Americans, but have a far stronger belief in ultimate meaning, and the hierarchical nature of reality, than do most Americans. And I think the world is funnier than most Americans do.

Hooray! Old Liberal Defends Liberalism!

Back in the early fall of 2001, the Rev. Al Sharpton led a crusade against Your Working Boy over what he believed was my racist insult to a black pop star’s funeral. I had written a New York Post column about the grandiose Manhattan public obsequies for a fairly minor young black singer who had died in a plane crash. The column was, I now see, in poor taste, but I used it to make a larger point about how we value celebrity too much, and actual accomplishment too little — and our public funerals show that. Sharpton never misses an occasion to accuse anybody of racism, and kicked up a hell of a stir.

Katha Pollitt, the Nation writer and old-school leftist, defended me, sort of. I can’t recall what she thought of my column, if anything, but she attacked Sharpton for wasting his time on a stupid cause — defending a celebrity’s honor — instead of doing the hard work of fighting for actual needy people in the city, of which there were many.

Katha Pollitt

Now she’s come out on offense against the progressive censors bowdlerizing Roald Dahl for the sake of woke sensitivity. Pollitt writes:

Each of these changes might seem small enough, but if you add them up, what you have is a weaker, duller, blander text. Dahl’s delicious dialogue loses its edge of rage. In places, the rhythm is destroyed. (The revised comic poems are a mess.) What gives these politically correct plodders the right to meddle with historical texts approved by their author and known and beloved by millions? Dah died only in 1990; he had plenty of time to rethink his literary choices, and in fact sometimes did so: The Oompa-Loompas in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory started life in 1964 as African pygmies content to work for cocoa beans. Dahl revised that in a 1973 reprint—but it was his decision as the author, not that of some anonymous committee.

In the late 17th century, Nahum Tate rewrote King Lear with a happy ending. In the early 19th century, Henrietta and Thomas Bowdler made Shakespeare safe for women and children by taking out all the sexy bits. History has not been kind to either project. It is my dearest hope that the Inclusivity Ambassadors will meet a similar fate.

By the way, it turns out that the Zoomer loony who led the campaign to rewrite Dahl’s work is a self-described “non-binary, asexual, polyamorous relationship anarchist who is on the autism spectrum.” Bring back asylums!

Politico Newsroom As Asylum

A new book out about how woke millennials took over American journalism discusses how Politico, a high-reputation elite political website, allowed itself to be overrun with sensitivity readers and their ideological nonsense. Excerpts:

At Politico, she describes how a March 2021 piece by Gabby Orr, entitled 'GOP seizes on women's sports as unlikely wedge issue,' attracted criticism and triggered an internal review. 

Athey reports Orr was summoned to a meeting with Politico's Director of Editorial Diversity Initiatives, Robin Turner. He said two colleagues had voiced concerns. 

'During the course of that meeting, Orr was probed about her employment history at the Washington Examiner, a center-right outlet, and asked why the story omitted any transgender voices—though the piece had quoted Kate Oakley, senior counsel at the Human Rights Campaign, an activist organization dedicated to LGBTQ+ issues, extensively. 

'Orr's colleagues also complained that she quoted conservatives, such as American Principles Project director Terry Schilling and former White House policy adviser Stephen Miller, without 'contextualizing' their comments.'

Schilling played down the risk of violence to transgender people, while Miller said the Left's position would drive 'non-ideological voters' to the GOP.

'Orr, her colleagues argued, should have explicitly told readers that those remarks were offensive and transphobic,' writes Athey.

A meeting attendee also took issue with the use of the phrase 'biological women' by interviewees as it was offensive to transgender readers.

The report goes on:

Politico issued a new version of its style guide — rules and standards for writers — in January 2022, according to Amber Athey's new book and included examples of noninclusive words that should be avoided:  

• Man-made 

• Manhunt 

• Crack the whip—unacceptable because of origins in slavery 

• Waiter or waitress—'server' should be used instead 

• Biological gender, biological sex, biological woman, biological female, biological man, or biological male 

• Illegal immigrant or illegal alien 

• Cake walk—'originated during slavery' and thus perpetuates 'racist motifs'

 • In reference to illegal migration: onslaught, tidal wave, flood, inundation, surge, invasion, army, march, sneak and stealth 

• Anchor baby 

• Chain migration—this is a term used by 'immigration hard-liners' 

• Peanut gallery—' The cheapest seats often occupied by Black people and people with low incomes' 

• Third-world countries—too 'derogatory' 

We laugh at this, but I’m thinking about the Polish historian I interview in Live Not By Lies who said that his generation was immunized against the ways the Communist regime used language to create an empire of lies. The post-communist youth, though, have no natural immunity to the way these woke totalitarians use and abuse language to lie. Keep in mind that Politico is not a Roald Dahl book, but a publication that caters to Washington elites.

‘No Catholicism, Please, This Is A Canadian Catholic School’

How bad are things in Canada? Josh Alexander, a Catholic high school student, was arrested for stating in his class, during a discussion about gender, that there are only two genders.

Josh Alexander, Catholic persecuted by his Catholic school

Jonathon Van Maren writes about Alexander, his brother Nick, and friend Monty Walker, defending sanity in a Catholic school where, according to Josh Alexander, “for every crucifix on the wall, there’s also a Pride flag. And there’s a lot of gender ideology and encouragement of gender dysphoria.” Excerpt:

His older brother Nick says that it is time for young people to stand up. “When you look out into the world, and you see the wave of indoctrination, the perverted actions, the iron grip of tyranny closing around us, especially as a Christian, I think we have an obligation to stand up and stand defiant to what is morally wrong, and what’s harmful to those around us and to future generations.”

Walker agreed: “Going out there and seeing how much evil there is in the world, seeing how people act out there, there has to be a force of good. My Christian beliefs have taught me what to do and how to act. And it’s just going out there and doing this morally right. It’s not really that complicated to me.”

That sort of moral clarity is difficult to come by these days, particularly in Canada. Consider: a student was suspended and then arrested for expressing a view held by nearly all conservative politicians in this country. Yet, none have spoken up in defence of Alexander. None have condemned his treatment. Many, I’ll bet, would desperately like to not be asked about it. Very few Conservative politicians—and certainly no leaders that I’m aware of—would have the guts to step up to a microphone and say clearly: “There are only two genders.” Not because they don’t believe it, mind you. Because the transgender movement’s cultural victory has met virtually no resistance aside from a handful of scrappers like these teens, and Canada’s political parties have transitioned.

And you know what that means. The surgeons remove quite a bit during the process.

These three young men live not by lies. I bet they’re not depressed either, despite all the garbage they’re having to deal with. Watch a recent interview with Josh on EWTN:

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