Conservatives are obsessed with their inferior status.

The media’s against them

The academic world is against them.

Therapists are against them.

“Word people” are against them.

So what’s the source of all this paranoia?

I would argue it’s the news media. Anyone who takes the minimal time to do some addition will quickly see that among all major newspapers and television news in America, the number of conservative commentators significantly outnumbers the number of liberals.

Turn to a random newspaper or TV program in America and you are significantly more likely to hear or read a conservative giving his or her views than you are to hear or read a liberal.

So there is a sense that the conservative view is the standard American viewpoint. It IS the mainstream.

But straight news reporting doesn’t toe the conservative line. News journalism calls for the kind of objectivity neoneo describes as also necessary for therapy. The journalist isn’t supposed to be making judgments about the news, just reporting it.

This is why straight news seems to conservatives to have a “liberal” bias. They expect judgments, i.e. condemnation of the things they think are bad and praise for things they think are good. When they don’t get that, they think it’s bias.

But why does that make them paranoid?

It creates among conservatives a sense that their ideology is “under seige.” They are led to believe their views are mainstream–just look at all the commentators out there repeating RNC talking points every day. But at the same time, the real straight news tells a different story.

So, when a conservative pipes up at, say, a dinner party, they’re outraged when a liberal challenges their view. Conservatives are inured to the idea that ripping liberals has no cost and requires no logical or substantive backup. When it’s brought to their attention that it does, they’re stunned and, as neoneo demonstrates, offended.

Read this blog and you will see the same thing. Conservative commenters here are stunned, flabbergasted, amazed that anyone could possibly take a liberal position. Many express outright disgust that anyone could possibly hold a view opposite to theirs.

Why the dismay, the outrage?

They thought they would be like Rush Limbaugh, or Bill O’Reilly or Brit Hume or Sean Hannity or any one of the scores of conservative commentators in the mainstream media who opine without concern that they will face any scrutiny whatsoever from an ideological opponent.

You gotta love the blogosphere.

March 3rd, 2007 at 12:00 am
“There’s also an interesting category of “things” that are intangible but still have the hard and unforgiving attributes of thingness (like computer code)..are these more like word-people or thing-people?”

I think they tend to be thing based… because computers have leway but are in many ways inflexible. You must adhere to their logic and way of doing things or what your trying to do won’t work… I’m a computer guy and my observations on the field are there are many conservatives and libertarians (re: over represented)… also, hearing users complain that ‘the computer doesn’t work’ because they won’t use it properly… drives us nuts… This carries over into politics… hearing people like Mike Moore fans quote his unfactual bs creates the same effect… they believe bs because they ‘want it to be so / or true’ even though it is not…

Sigh. Boy do you. I could tell some hair-raising stories. . . .

(In contrast to my previous therapist, who was such a Park Slope lefty that she couldn’t keep from arguing with me.)

My anecdote alone doesn’t make a statistic, but for whatever it’s worth I certainly think I’d have been more likely to try therapy in recent years, if not for the expectation that any therapist I selected would more likely than not turn out to be of a leftish persuasion and consequently unsympathetic to my frustrations (which I think largely derive from living in ideologically hostile territory). I did test the waters once a couple of years ago, but after several sessions of awkward dancing around the problem that couldn’t quite be talked about I decided it just wasn’t going to work. Fortunately, I’ve managed to find on my own that blogging, reading, and finding one’s own compatriots and place in the world of ideas seems to be some of the best therapy that money can’t buy.

On the flip side of this issue, I’m curious about the notion of victimhood and surrounding attitudes that ShrinkWrapped brought up. To what extent does the necessity of getting patients to give up the mantle of victimhood, so that they can take charge of their lives and make progress, tend to come into conflict with notions of resentment or entitlement or blame to which more leftish patients (and therapists too) might cling strongly? Do left-liberal patients also sometimes avoid therapy, because of the process’ insistence, on some level, that the patient abandon the blame game and focus on and take responsibility for the things that he or she is able to change?

In considering your series on change, I’ve also been wondering whether therapists find it very meaningful or useful to distinguish the notion of “finding out who I really was all along” from other, more clear-cut kinds of change (e.g. patient broke away from a strong preference or ingrained pattern of behavior in a way that can be readily observed). The question holds interest for me because I think to a significant extent I’ve been finding that my core beliefs haven’t really changed all that much. In hindsight, I think I spent years in a bubble, as a classical liberal who hadn’t been aware of the fundamental and significant differences between his worldviews and those of other “liberals”. (I also think to some extent contemporary liberalism has also drifted farther, or at least more vocally, to the left during that time.) It took a startling exposure to left-liberalism in college, followed by a still more startling persistence of antiliberal and anti-American attitudes following the 9/11 attacks, to alert me to those differences.

ps – Thank you once again for your inspiring example! I hope to get my own modest “change” series underway this week.

Have you read “Life At The Bottom”, by Theodore Dalrymple?

It would seem like a book that would be of interest to you.