Good-bye, Therapist in Chief

It was not about the politics. It was not about the economy. It was not about social harmony. It was not about foreign policy, war and peace or competing in the world. The Obama administration was all about therapy. With thanks to the commenter who sent me the link, I offer Brendan O’Neill’s remarkable analysis of Barack Obama as our therapist-in-chief. What could be more apt and more apposite for this blog.

O’Neill explains that the Obama presidency made politics into therapy. In a time when no one believes in God, when atheism is afoot throughout the land, Obama offered a religious experience, a spiritual uplift, the kind that many people seek in therapy.

What Obama did counts less, O’Neill writes, than how he made us feel. One notes that political leaders who make a living stirring up emotion are normally called demagogues.

Their followers do not care about what happened or about concrete accomplishments. They are convinced that they will eventually gain access to the Kingdom of Heaven. All that matters is whether you and I will be there or will be consigned to the other place.

If you were wondering why the nation is so divided and why so many people are emotionally unhinged by Donald Trump, one reason lies in the fact that Obama taught them to emote but not to think. Obama did not teach them how to get along in the world, how to compete in the world, how to function in the world. He taught them how to feel, deeply and longingly. And he taught them how to tell stories about it all.

O’Neill writes:

No, the extraordinariness of Obama’s presidency lay in its replacement of politics with therapy. Its transformation of the president from a politician who does things for people into a person who makes people feel things. Its turning of the commander-in-chief into therapist-in-chief. Its confirmation that politics is no longer about wealth and things and the concrete stuff of daily and national life, but is about self-esteem, cultural images, being a ‘catalyst for psychological change’, as one appraisal of Obama puts it. The Obama era was striking because it confirmed the decommissioning of the political citizen, and of politics itself, and its replacement by an empire of emotion in which leaders speak and the citizenry feels and nothing much else happens.

Now, our proudly secular media is treating Obama as a saint.

O’Neill explains:

The response of the media and much of the political set to Obama’s leaving has been intensely emotional. Not since Princess Diana died have respectable newspapers been so stuffed with gushing photo-spreads and memorials and over-the-top comparisons (Di was a secular Virgin Mother; Obama is an amalgamate of Lincoln, Gandhi and King). Observers and the Twitterati are expressing a sense of loss entirely out of proportion to a politician leaving office, which is a regular occurrence in the adult realm of politics. That’s because they’re losing more than a politician. They’re losing a healer (of history’s wounds); a voice of ‘wisdom and grace’, as every gushing editorial describes him; a man who applied ‘balm’ to our personal and political ‘traumas’, as one observer sees it; someone who in recent months had become ‘therapist for those suffering from Trump anxiety’, in the words of the Guardian. The turning of Obama, of the institution of president, from commander of a nation into shaper of feelings, into provider of historical medicine and guarantor of self-esteem, means his leaving is experienced as a profound loss, a mourning. It opens a psychological gap. Some observers claim they feel genuinely ill. The usurping of politics by therapy, and of the citizen by the patient, is complete.

A healer is a saint. A healer is a redeemer. A healer is a savior. A healer works magic and miracles. He offers spiritual solace and makes you forget about what is wrong with the world. At the least, he teaches you to blame anyone but him for what is wrong with the world.

In O’Neill’s words:

Obama, it has been made clear, is not to be judged by such earthly matters as industry or liberty or war and peace, but rather by how he made people feel; by what one author has described as ‘the profound shift in the American psyche’ he brought about. Obama’s impact is mental, not political; curative, not concrete. Even newspaper pieces on his legacy that include discussion of Obamacare and his decisions on the Middle East swiftly move back to the realm of character and emotion, to his grace and style and wisdom. His legacy is judged psychologically rather than politically.

This is not news. The media has been talking up Obama as therapist from the beginning. O’Neill has collected some comments:

Back in 2008, in the run-up to his election, the Chicago Sun-Times said the most important thing about Obama was the emotion he evoked in sections of the populace. And it refused to be defensive about this: ‘Yes, this newspaper is endorsing a man because of how he makes us feel [my italics], because of the hope he evokes within us’. With Obama, feeling and imagery have always trumped achievement.

How did we get to this place? Think back to 2008. With America in the midst of a financial crisis and the world facing the threat of Islamic terrorism, many people were happy to believe that we were getting what we deserved, that we were being punished for our sins, and that by electing Obama we could atone for our sins and be freed from the world’s troubles and travails. Obama’s magical presence would solve all of our problems:

As the left-wing author Sasha Abramsky put it in 2009, ‘simply by virtue of who he is’, Obama can bring about ‘psychological shifts in how America understands itself’. Never mind what this politician says or does; it’s who he is that counts, and it counts in terms of changing psychology, not infrastructure.

And also:

Under Obama, history came to be discussed as a wound, a trauma, and it was Obama’s job to heal it. Obama was discussed as ‘the balm that would finally salve the festering wounds’ of American history, in particular slavery and Jim Crow. He was the ‘salve for [the] racist scars’ of history, as John Wilson put it in Barack Obama: The Improbable Quest. From this perspective, history is a kind of curse, a source of horror and sorrow, and Obama is here to cure it, and end it. This speaks profoundly to the Obama era’s replacement of social change with mental mending — the political, historic actions of man are judged too dangerous, causing centuries-long PTSD, and Obamaism is about keeping such actions in check. 

We as a nation just spent eight years in bad therapy. We detached from reality in order to get in touch with our feelings. Once the spell was broken, some people recognized that they had been conned. Others could not cope with the loss. They are crying out in pain.

Still, O’Neill writes, no one is allowed to judge Obama in terms of what he did or did not accomplish:

This is striking; clearly what matters is not whether Obama tangibly improved African-American people’s lives or really, physically expanded social opportunity, but that he cultivated new images of African-Americans — that is, his own image — and created a perception of opportunity. Because politics isn’t now about things; it’s about feeling.

Of course, anyone who dares criticize Obama will be denounced as racist. And thus, will be seen as an obstacle to the healing presence of Obama:

Raise criticisms of Obama’s actions in the Middle East and his supporters will say ‘he inherited this, it’s not his fault’. The rush to protect Obama from the normal thrust of political critique leads to his sometimes being absolved of agency, as if nothing is really his doing — it simply happens, around him.

If Obama was a god, he could never be responsible for anything bad that happened on his watch. And yet, if it was all an illusion, what Shakespeare called an “insubstantial pageant,” losing it has thrown many people into a moral crisis. Naturally, many of them have sought out the healing words of great spiritual leaders like Madonna and Ashley Judd.  It's like finishing therapy and discovering that you have spent all that time and all that money only to find yourself back where you were when you began.

The notion that a Donald Trump can erase the Obama presidency by an act of his executive pen horrifies those who chose to live the fiction. They are more than unhappy at the prospect of the Obama presidency fading into insignificance, leaving, as the bard put it, “not a rack behind.”

What better coda for the Obama presidency than this:

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,

As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind.