Friday, February 3, 2023

Partisan Resentment

It’s a growing list. The list, that is, of what is going to compromise your mental health and make you slightly daft.

The latest addition to the list-- you will be happy to learn-- is political antagonism. That is, if you define yourself by your membership in a political party, even a political faction, and if you choose your friends and enemies according to their loyalty to said faction, you are more likely to have mental health problems.

Living a life of permanent drama, being at war with half of the country, dividing fellow citizens into friends and enemies-- is bad for you. You do much better to respect differences of opinion and to learn how to work together.


So, down with partisan resentment. PsyPost has the story:


Since the 1980’s people have been much less likely to rate members of the opposite party as reasonable, intelligent people. In addition, people are more likely to say they have no interest in befriending or dating someone from the other party.


Feeling emotionally polarized on one end of the political spectrum, feeling resentment against those on the other side, and actively avoiding relationships with members of the opposite party is likely to be a stressful endeavor. Since this is so, researcher Micah Nelson attempted to unravel the relationship between affective polarization and health.


We  live in a polarized country. We are suffering political polarization-- witness the tantrums thrown by the Squad yesterday when Congress removed notable anti-Semite, Ilhan Omar, from the House Foreign Affairs committee.


When you watch such childish antics in the American Congress, don’t you suspect, somewhere in your mind’s recesses, that these people are suffering from terminal stupidity, and that they would not know how to function as legislators if their lives depended on it?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I think the same people would have given the jews in Germany in the 30's the same advice. The problem is that in the world today and more specifically in our country today there is a party, a group of people in a party that intends to destroy American and in the process they will destroy you. Should we just "get along" with them?

The open borders, for example, is no accident. These are your replacements coming over the borders. And it's going to get worse. 7 million in two years and it will get worse. And everyone of these people once they establish residence, a green card or some form of legal ability to stay here will be able to bring in any number of relatives without limit. THIS is no accident.