The Psychology Of Being In A MinorityHow the Biden left is hurting and disempowering non-majority Americans.
The last two Democratic presidents have one thing in common: they have both given commencement speeches at Morehouse College, an HBCU for black men, whose alumni include Martin Luther King Jr. But the two speeches are worlds apart. One reason for this, of course, is that Obama was himself a black man, and so had more leeway to offer some hard truths than Biden did. But even taking that into account, the moderation and uplift of Obama contrast so vividly with Biden’s fatalistic leftism. Obama encouraged Morehouse men to reach high:
Here’s Biden on where America is on race a little more than a decade later:
Here’s Obama:
And here comes Biden with the excuses:
Obama calls on the graduates to seize the day, overcome the residual racism in this country, fix their own problems, resist cynicism, and join America’s progress. Biden tells them that all they can do is “bear witness” to the horror of “white supremacy” and fight against “systemic racism.” (And of course the vast, vast majority of black men “killed on the streets” are not killed by cops, as Biden sickeningly implies.) Leave aside for the moment the question of which president is more accurate in telling America’s racial story — and focus instead on the psychological impact of both messages. Obama evokes personal energy, taking command of your own life, living up to your own responsibilities, acting to make the world better for you and others. Biden’s evokes passivity, helplessness, “bearing witness” to racism, and despair about the eternal nature of America’s racial evil. Yes, Biden included some boilerplate about the brightness of the futures of the Morehouse grads; but every policy he mentioned was something government had done or could do: mainly channeling money to black universities, and practicing constant race discrimination against Asians, Jews, and whites, in order to give blacks an advantage. There was nothing wrong with black America, he seemed to imply, that white Democrats can’t solve by discriminating in favor of them. This message is empirically wrong, I’d say. But more importantly, it is psychological poison. It disempowers minorities, robs us of agency, encourages fatalism, and stirs endless resentment. Even if it were true that America were an eternal white supremacist nation, as Biden seems to think, believing that will sap you of optimism, self-confidence, direction, and self-esteem. Which will perpetuate everything you say you oppose. This vision of America has been imposed most thoroughly on the generations educated in the last decade, especially since 2020. And we can see the results: a huge increase in depression, anxiety, and mental illness among the young, especially the young women who form the core of the social justice cult. Everyone under 30 is more depressed than in the past, but leftist women, and “non-binary” Americans, are in a class of their own. From Greg Lukianoff’s latest essay:
This makes a huge amount of intuitive sense. Wokeness tells you the world is evil and hates you. It tells young women that they are permanent victims of patriarchy, even as they now way outnumber men in higher education, and have never had such levels of income, status, and success in the workplace. It tells minorities that majorities are always to be suspected, and always wish to annihilate you. Wokeness also tells young gays and trans people that they are under “unprecedented attack.” Unprecedented? Seven decades after the Lavender Scare, three decades after the AIDS plague ended, eight years after Obergefell, and three years after Bostock, HRC announced last year: “We have officially declared a state of emergency for LGBTQ+ people in the United States for the first time.” For those of us who lived through AIDS, and won the civil rights we had long wanted, this isn’t just absurd; it’s offensive. And when it comes to race, perhaps no passage captures the fatalism of the successor ideology as well as Ta-Nehisi Coates addressing his young black son:
Marinate in the idea that you have no control over anything but resistance to your own eternal oppression and — guess what? — your mental health will understandably suffer. Lukianoff again:
Believing you have agency to change your life — what I always took to be a defining character of American democracy — gives you direction and energy; it allows you to see beyond your own self-pity toward helping others; it helps you moderate the ups and downs of life; it gives you a sense of control over your destiny, things you can do to improve your life. I believe this not simply as an abstract idea, but because it has been the story of my own life. I have almost always been a minority in every part of my life. I was an English Catholic among Protestants and atheists; I was a gay man among Catholics; I was deemed a naive subversive by the religious right and an Aunty Tom by the queer left; I was an immigrant among Americans; I am a conservative among gays; I am a gay man among conservatives; I was openly HIV-positive when almost no one else was (and was threatened with deportation solely because of my HIV status for two decades); for 15 years, I was for marriage equality before almost anyone else was. I may be cis, white, and “privileged,” but I do know something about the psychological challenges of being in a minority. And at every step of the way, I could have seen myself as a victim — of anti-Catholicism, xenophobia, homophobia, HIV-phobia, right and left intolerance — with little control over my life. And I would not have been entirely wrong. I had some truly grim moments when it felt as if the world had conspired to make my own complicated, authentic life impossible. But I soon realized that capitulating to those odds was a psychological dead-end, could consume and define me, and lead to resentment and bitterness, and self-fulfilling failure. So I learned to internalize the great Eleanor Roosevelt’s dictum that “no one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” That’s also why I argued for placing marriage at the center of gay rights — because it was something positive we could actually do, live out, and prove ourselves with. And what actually is the alternative anyway? A lifetime of grievance, anger, and empty performative “activism” that does nothing but perpetuate its own marginalization and make you miserable. The happiness gap between right and left is growing for all these reasons. And the misery seems disproportionately young and female — the demographic that has succumbed most completely to the cult. (If you check out the anti-Israel protests, it’s extremely pronounced.) Lukianoff’s data are echoed in a recent Finnish study that found that the more someone agreed with the statement “Other people or structures are more responsible for my well-being than I myself am,” the more likely they were to be unhappy: “People on the left endorsed this item (around 2 on a scale of 0 to 4) far more than people on the right (around 0.5).” And women were far more likely to hold this sense of powerlessness than men; and among women, “female liberal adolescents [were] experiencing the largest increases in depressive symptoms.” I suspect that the trans explosion in this very demographic is related to this: indoctrinated into believing that being a woman is to be oppressed, to be merely “a hole,” some came to believe that becoming a man was one way out. What a tragic end for feminism: injecting yourself with testosterone because the patriarchy always wins. And once you become ever more attuned to and aware of how society is rigged against you — the definition of becoming “woke” — you can see it everywhere. Nick Haslam, a professor of psychology, argued in his 2020 paper “Harm Inflation” that the cultural left has increasingly “broadened [the meaning of ‘trauma’] to include adverse life events of decreasing severity and those experienced vicariously rather than directly”; and that “‘abuse’ extended from physical acts to verbal and emotional slights.” What Biden did at Morehouse, and what his administration has done in every way imaginable, is to uphold this view of the world. From its crude race and sex discrimination to its support for critical queer theory and transing kids, it is spreading a message that not only holds minorities back; it tells them that the country they live in — the freest and most diverse in human history — is defined by hatred of the black, brown, gay, queer, and trans populations, and was really founded in 1619 to oppress, and not in 1776 to liberate. My entire adult lifetime has proven this wrong with respect to gay men and lesbians. The transformation of American culture, society, and law on this question shows how ready Americans are for change, if they are engaged respectfully and reasonably and in good faith. And it is simply absurd to describe the country that elected a black man twice for president, and whose immigrants are overwhelmingly non-white, as somehow a form of “white supremacy.” It is therefore in no way surprising to me that, for members of minorities like me who do not share this dark worldview, the Democratic Party is increasingly seen as out of touch, disempowering, and condescending. And it will be the most startling proof of this if Donald Trump wins an Electoral College landslide, largely because a rising percentage of minority voters — sick of woke pessimism, fatalism, and despair — want to start afresh and control their own destiny. We minority members are doing what we always have in this blessedly tolerant and open country. We are getting on with our lives with confidence and personal optimism. And for all the attempts to hold us back, on right and left, we’re winning. (Note to readers: This is an excerpt of The Weekly Dish. If you’re already a subscriber, click here to read the full version. This week’s issue also includes: my chat with Bill Maher about his career, and debating various topics, namely religion; dissents and assents over my latest column on gays and lesbians; a bunch of pod dissents over the episode with Oren Cass; nine notable quotes for the week in news; 21 pieces on Substack we recommend on a variety of topics; a Hathos Alert of Maher and Trump from the early ‘90s; a Mental Health Break of ASMR cooking; and, of course, the results of the View From Your Window contest — with a new challenge. Subscribe for the full Dish experience!) From a longtime subscriber:
Another longtime subscriber, Bill Maher, said on the Dishcast this week:
New On The Dishcast: Bill Maher
Bill needs no introduction, but he’s been the formidable host of HBO’s Real Time for 21 years now, and before that he hosted Politically Incorrect, which ran from 1993 to 2002. He has a new book out, What This Comedian Said Will Shock You — a collection of his best editorials on Real Time. Also check out his podcast, “Club Random,” which he recently expanded into a pod network, Club Random Studios. Bill manages to do all of that and still perform standup on the road — schedule here. Listen to the episode here. There you can find two clips of our convo — on Bill not caving to political correctness after 9/11, and the two of us debating the credibility of the Gospels. That link also takes you to a ton of commentary on last week’s episode with Oren Cass on Republicans turning left on economics. We also hear from readers on my proposed “Independence Day for gays and lesbians,” and I respond throughout. Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy (the first 102 are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: Nellie Bowles on the woke revolution, Noah Smith on the economy, George Will on Trump and conservatism, Lionel Shriver on her new novel, Elizabeth Corey on Oakeshott, Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy on animal cruelty; and the great Van Jones! Please send any guest recommendations, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com. A listener writes:
Dissents Of The WeekA reader writes:
Read my response here, along with another dissent. Many more dissents — over my conversation last week with Oren Cass — are over on the pod page. As always, keep the criticism coming: dish@andrewsullivan.com. In The ‘StacksThis is a feature in the paid version of the Dish spotlighting about 20 of our favorite pieces from other Substackers every week. This week’s selection covers subjects such as the upcoming UK election, Trump’s veepstakes, and Biden’s climate wins. Below are a few examples:
You can also browse all the substacks we follow and read on a regular basis here — a combination of our favorite writers and new ones we’re checking out. It’s a blogroll of sorts. If you have any recommendations for “In the ‘Stacks,” especially ones from emerging writers, please let us know: dish@andrewsullivan.com. The View From Your Window Contest
Where do you think it’s located? Email your guess to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Please put the location — city and/or state first, then country — in the subject line. Proximity counts if no one gets the exact spot. Bonus points for fun facts and stories. The deadline for entries is Wednesday night at midnight (PST). The winner gets the choice of a VFYW book or two annual Dish subscriptions. If you are not a subscriber, please indicate that status in your entry and we will give you a free month subscription if we select your entry for the contest results (example here if you’re new to the contest). Happy sleuthing! The results for this week’s window are coming in a separate email to paid subscribers later today. Here’s a followup on last week’s contest:
Another followup comes from “your average super-sleuth in NYC”:
From a newcomer to the contest:
See you next Friday. Invite your friends and earn rewardsIf you enjoy The Weekly Dish, share it with your friends and earn rewards when they subscribe.
|
