Why do Republican politicians and their fans/enablers expend so much energy trying so hard to make themselves feel so miserable?
Between the problems with healthcare.gov and Ted Cruz's constant pronouncements that everything from traffic jams to spoiled leftovers to lousy officiating is "because of Obamacare," the Internet is just exploding with validations of disaster and misery and hate and fear and resentment and all those other emotions that Republican politics is increasingly based on.
We've all known for some time, and I've written here extensively, about the paracosm in which GOP politicians and their fans/enablers live. What I'm concerned about now is their mental health, but in a different respect. Maybe emotional health is a better term.
Since 2009 the GOP and its fans/enablers have made a concerted, relentless and aggressive effort to make themselves feel as bad, as miserable, as angry and outraged as possible about as many things as possible. All we've heard from them since that time is how bad everything is, how everything is going to hell in a handbasket, how they feel scared and threatened and put-upon and angry and resentful and outraged and surrounded on all sides by evil and by people bent on oppressing them, controlling them, enslaving them, taking things from them, forcing things upon them, destroying everything they know and love, how abject disaster is always just around the corner if not already in progress. It's a sort of aggressive, relentless, unyielding state of misery and unhappiness, and it never lets up for a second.
Why do they feel this way? Losing an election is one thing; having to account for one's own unqualified and unequivocal support for one of history's most disastrous presidencies, and for a political party that hasn't made a prediction about anything important that turned out to be right since January 17, 1961, is another. But of course they won't acknowledge that. Instead they'll give you a whole narrative filled with 35,000-foot-high-level abstractions about "big government" and "freedom" and what-not, gross distortions and mischaracterizations of reality, whatever justification they think they need, reverse-engineering the world to make them feel exactly how they want to feel. Time after time I read and listen to this rhetoric and think to myself, WTF are you talking about? What world are you living in? This aggressive and relentless misery, resentment, fear and loathing is just grotesquely out of proportion to anything that is actually happening or that anyone could reasonably believe. Some of the things they say and claim to believe, there's simply no reason to believe it unless you really, truly, desperately want to believe it.
I don't want to make a list or give a slew of examples of what I mean; just go to any Obamacare-related comment thread on Huffington Post or listen to anything Ted Cruz or Sarah Palin says on a daily basis. If the ACA succeeds, millions of people who couldn't get health care before will be able to get it, and the rest of us will get more for our money. If it fails, none of that will happen. Why do they prefer the latter outcome? Why would they rather see things get worse instead of better? Why do they want people -- including themselves -- to be hurt instead of helped?
The point I'm trying to make here is that these non-stop negative feelings are self-induced. They are trying to make themselves miserable by going out of their way to see and understand things in a way that makes them feel the worst possible way about them.
For crying out loud, WHY? That's the question I find myself asking now. After putting up with it for five years, I'm at the point now where I have to ask, Why try so hard to make yourself feel so miserable about everything, all the time? Is it just to validate your voting preference, your allegiance to the GOP? Really? Feeling 100% justified in voting Republican is more important to you than your own mental and emotional health? What do you owe the Republican party that you're willing to sacrifice your own well-being to advance their political goals?
I just don't get it. It's starting to get me depressed. It's why I can't even sample the right-wing media anymore, because all I see and hear over there is misery and unhappiness and anger and fear and loathing and self-congratulation and resentment. Misery sells, I know. Making your audience feel like the heroes of their own private mythology, sells. But this can't be good for anyone. As badly as they want and need to feel this way, I don't think it does them any good.