snjoseph's Journal: Tough Love Is in the Air

The Nation is running a piece by Kathryn Schulz examining why so many liberals use the language of relationship break-ups to describe their despair over the election debacle.

By the time I got MoveOn.org's message, I'd gotten scores of others, and they generally read like this: "My heart aches," "This feels like a breakup," "I'm utterly broken-hearted," "I don't remember feeling like this since my wife left me" and (my favorite), "The atmosphere in my office today feels like everyone was dumped on the way into work."

Schulz asks, "why, in the aftermath of last week's elections, did so many progressives turn to the metaphor of heartbreak?"

Now, the easy answer is: because the sort of folks who like MoveOn.org and the Nation are mostly navel-gazing post-hippies who can't speak about anything without using the language of adolescence. That's the easy answer--although, strangely, Schulz doesn't seem to consider it--but I don't think that alone gets it.

Schulz decides that it's because liberals really love America, and they're sad because America, apparently, doesn't love them back. She then engages in a dithyramb to America too embarrassing to even quote. Personally I find it sickening to lavish praise on what is easily the weirdest, least sustainable, most externally violent, and most internally predatory society on the planet. In any event, I consider it quite unnecessary. Only an idiot would claim that liberalism in power has been any less rapacious than conservatism in imperial piracy on the service of capital.

The real reason liberals use relationship language is because their attachment to the Democratic Party is like an abusive relationship.