Was the Women's March Mass Therapy?

As the armies of the American left, in particular the media, rise up to declare war on Donald Trump—in  a way they never imagined declaring war against Islamic terrorism—David Brooks recommends sobriety.

By his lights the Women’s March last Saturday was an important cultural event, but it is still not a movement.  As currently constituted, he says, it cannot be “an effective opposition” to the Trump administration.

Of course, millions of women marched against Trump. Yet, the issues they were defending had been repudiated by American voters. Not so much in the presidential election, but in every other election during the Age of Obama. As Nate Silver noted, with Barack Obama Democrats won the presidency but lost the country.

What were the issues that could ground an opposition movement? Better yet, did the March really address the problems that people are concerned about today? Brooks explains:

Of course, many marchers came with broad anti-Trump agendas, but they were marching under the conventional structure in which the central issues were clear. As The Washington Post reported, they were “reproductive rights, equal pay, affordable health care, action on climate change.”

These are all important matters, and they tend to be voting issues for many upper-middle-class voters in university towns and coastal cities. But this is 2017. Ethnic populism is rising around the world. The crucial problems today concern the way technology and globalization are decimating jobs and tearing the social fabric; the way migration is redefining nation-states; the way the post-World War II order is increasingly being rejected as a means to keep the peace.

So, the marchers were claiming action on climate change and Donald Trump was assembling a group of labor union leaders—Hillary Clinton supporters all—and promising to take executive actions that will offer their workers new construction jobs?

Who will win that round?

Social movements, Brooks continues, require organization. They require political parties to turn their raw energy into policy. Such is not the case with the Women’s March. For Brooks it was a cri de coeur, a protest against the new political order, but, lacking a political basis, it was mostly therapy.

He writes:

Without the discipline of party politics, social movements devolve into mere feeling, especially in our age of expressive individualism. People march and feel good and think they have accomplished something. They have a social experience with a lot of people and fool themselves into thinking they are members of a coherent and demanding community. Such movements descend to the language of mass therapy.

Yes, indeed, mass group therapy. I believe that Brooks was too polite to say it, but when therapy is merely about feeling and when it fails to direct people toward consequential action it is not just therapy, it is bad therapy.

Like Prof. Mark Lilla, Brooks declares that the Democratic Party should abandon identity politics. It has failed for years now. In the person of Hillary Clinton it failed again. It is not likely to come back. It is certainly not going to return in the guise of a woman from Idaho, by name of Sarah Boynton Brown,  who wants the Democratic National Committee to shut down white people.

In Brooks’s words:

Finally, identity politics is too small for this moment. On Friday, Trump offered a version of unabashed populist nationalism. On Saturday, the anti-Trump forces could have offered a red, white and blue alternative patriotism, a modern, forward-looking patriotism based on pluralism, dynamism, growth, racial and gender equality and global engagement.

Instead, the marches offered the pink hats, an anti-Trump movement built, oddly, around Planned Parenthood, and lots of signs with the word “pussy” in them. The definition of America is up for grabs. Our fundamental institutions have been exposed as shockingly hollow. But the marches couldn’t escape the language and tropes of identity politics.

He continues, remarking the incoherence of a movement that is trying to agglomerate a mass of incoherent and conflicting messages:

Identity-based political movements always seem to descend into internal rivalries about who is most oppressed and who should get pride of place. Sure enough, the controversy before and after the march was over the various roles of white feminists, women of color, anti-abortion feminists and various other out-groups.

The biggest problem with identity politics is that its categories don’t explain what is going on now. Trump carried a majority of white women. He won the votes of a shocking number of Hispanics.

The central challenge today is not how to celebrate difference. The central threat is not the patriarchy. The central challenge is to rebind a functioning polity and to modernize a binding American idea.

As if to prove Brooks’s point, the March organizers banned a pro-life feminist group from Texas, while embracing anti-Semites like Linda Sarsour… a March organizer.

Bethany Mandel has researched Sarsour for The Forward. Her conclusions are not encouraging:

One of the key organizers of the event and a featured speaker, Linda Sarsour, director of the Arab American Association of New York, bills herself as “an award-winning, Brooklyn-born Palestinian-American-Muslim racial justice and civil rights activist, community organizer, social media maverick, and mother of three. Sarsour has been at the forefront of major social justice campaigns both locally in New York City and nationally.”

It sounds good… until you remove the veils of propaganda. Mendel discovered that the truth—you know, the facts—disprove the assertion.

She quoted Andrea Peyser’s article from the New York Post:

Sarsour contends that Israel and American supporters of the Jewish state are responsible for slaughter in the Mideast….Her outrageous online assaults sank to a depressing level this month, when [she] tweeted a picture of a small Palestinian boy standing before Israeli soldiers clutching rocks in both hands. She added the words, “The definition of courage.”

Of course, Sarsour wants everyone to be living under Sharia Law… because it treats women so well.

The Forward explains:

When a Jewish Queens City Councilman, Rory Lancman, pushed back against Sarsour’s statements on Twitter, Sarsour deemed him a “Zionist troll.”

After the March, one of Sarsour’s first impulses was to champion the paid maternity leave policy in, of all places, Saudi Arabia, while downplaying that little issue of women not being allowed to drive.

The Jerusalem Post’s Lahav Harkov, herself on maternity leave, asked Sarsour why, if this the only metric by which to judge a country, why Sarsour doesn’t give Israel, which offers 14 weeks of leave, more praise. A tweet from last year from Sarsour surfaced after the March as well, championing the benefits of Sharia law.

“You’ll know when you’re living under Sharia Law,” she wrote, “if suddenly all your loans & credit cards become interest free. Sound nice, doesn’t it?”

Obviously, there is more. Notoriously anti-Semitic groups like the Council for American Islamic Relations sponsored the March. For the record, CAIR has consistently opposed late-term abortion. The United Arab Emirates has declared it to be a terror group. Noted Communist Angela Davis was there to defend the Palestinian Cause.

And yet, a pro-life feminist group from Texas was considered beyond the pale.

Who Saved the American Economy?

Now that our world is awash in a newfound passion for facts, it will be useful to examine the claim that President Barack Obama saved the American economy and prevented another Great Depression.

Holman Jenkins addressed the issue in the Wall Street Journal. For those who believe in facts and especially who believe that facts might actually disprove some of the claims about the Obama presidency, it’s a sobering exercise.

Who is claiming that Obama saved the economy? For one, Jenkins writes, Harvard economist Kenneth Rogoff is, and Rogoff is not some political hack or media polemicist.

Jenkins quotes Rogoff:

Harvard economist Kenneth Rogoff claimed on NPR this week that Mr. Obama “pulled us out of a very deep abyss,” though Mr. Rogoff also allowed that President Bush deserves “a little credit here.”

How did the American government tackle the economic crisis?

One way was through TARP:

The Troubled Asset Relief Program may have been the least of the rescue measures, but it was the highest risk, because the people’s bipartisan representatives were required to put their imprimatur on unpopular bailouts. Nonetheless, TARP was enacted Oct. 3, 2008, almost four months before President Obama took office.

What about bailing out banks? Jenkins lists the actions taken:

On March 16, 2008, the Federal Reserve arranged a fire sale of Bear Stearns. Between Sept. 19 and Oct. 26, numerous other institutions were bailed out; the money-fund industry and commercial paper market were propped up; bank depositors were favored with a big extension of deposit insurance.

And saving the automobile industry:

On Dec. 19, as a final act, the Bush administration directed $17.4 billion in TARP funds to keep General Motors and Chrysler afloat so the Obama administration wouldn’t be confronted with their liquidation on its first day in office.

The Obama administration took over the narrative and granted itself credit for ending the crisis and precipitating the recovery. What exactly did it do?

Jenkins summarizes:

When he finally arrived, his contribution consisted of fudgy bank “stress tests,” less to establish confidence in the banks than to establish confidence in the new administration, under lefty pressure at the time to reinflame the crisis by nationalizing the industry.

He gave us a $787 billion pork-barrel “stimulus,” an exercise in hand-waving which ever since has figured prominently in the efforts of Obama publicists to create confusion about what ended the crisis.

Jenkins is not saying that the Bush administration or the Federal Reserve did a good job. They apparently botched the Lehman Bros. collapse. In so doing they unleashed a global financial panic:

As all now agree, it was Lehman, not the washing through of modest subprime losses, that turned a regional U.S. housing downturn into a global financial panic. In his memoirs, Fed chief Ben Bernanke protests that the Fed knew exactly what a catastrophe Lehman’s unmanaged collapse would be, but its hands were legally tied at the time.

He concludes:

Let it be said that, in the kind of omission that damns a presidency in the eyes of the cognoscenti, it was President Bush who should have and could have stepped up and provided his appointees political cover to spare the world the Lehman meltdown.

The Wisdom of Miss Manners

For those of you who despair—as I do—at the fatuousness of what passes for advice in today’s media, here are a few words of wisdom from the incomparable Miss Manners.

Consider it the quotation of the day:

People who disdain etiquette often think that brutal frankness is an adequate substitute.

Who Created Our Age of Contempt?

In yesterday’s New York Times philosopher Karen Stohr analyzed of the corrosive power of contempt in public life. Unfortunately, she took a partisan approach, calling out Donald Trump, in particular, for offensive and vulgar gestures. 

Stohr was correct to see that the American president sets the moral tone for the nation, but she neglected to mention the Age of Contempt was produced by Trump’s predecessor. Trump has not been in the public eye long enough to have produced a significant cultural shift. True enough, to the chagrin of many, he has been using the language of contempt and ridicule. But, he was also counterpunching.

When Stohr compared the contempt demonstrated by a president to that of a protester carrying a sign, she failed to note that we did not see a lone protester carrying a sign last Saturday. We saw millions of protesters carrying millions of signs. And she did not mention that our new president has been showered with contempt by members of the press. The press is not just a lone voice crying out in the wilderness… to coin a phrase.

Stohr said correctly that we are living in an Age of Contempt. And yet, she did not note who has been in charge for these last eight years. Once she highlighted the power of the presidency—fairly, I add—she should have mentioned that we have suffered through eight years of a president who showed limitless contempt for Congress, for his political opponents and also for the prime minister of Israel.

Barack Obama’s Democratic Party has also been displaying boundless contempt for white males and for white police officers. Currently, the Democratic Party—or, what’s left of it—continues its crusade against white males. It's what you would expect from a political party that glorifies Jeremiah Wright's protege.

When Obama chose to reform the immigration system with an executive order-- on the grounds that if Congress did not do what he wanted, he would do it himself-- he was showing contempt for the members of Congress. When he decided to govern by executive order he was dismissing the other branches of government. When Obama declared that the treaty he signed with Iran was not a treaty, but a deal, he was showing contempt for the constitutional authority to advise and consent vested in the United States Senate. When his IRS chose to discriminate against Tea Party organizations, it was showing contempt. When his Justice Department blamed black-on-black crime on white police officers, it was showing contempt. All of these acts were dismissive and contemptuous.

If the Democratic Party, in the persons of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton had not been spewing contempt these many years, Donald Trump would not be in the White House today. In an atmosphere of contempt, Trump chose to fight fire with fire. Many of us did not like it. Many of us found it corrosive. But, Trump was not the source. The person responsible for the Age of Contempt was Barack Obama.

With that small caveat in mind, Stohr’s article is excellent. She points out that contempt corrodes civility and national unity. In an Age of Contempt people feel free to express raw feeling. They have no real interest in engaging other people. Stohr notes wisely that when you are angry with another person, you are engaging with him. When you treat him with contempt you are dismissing him.

We live in an age where raw feelings are valued. (Cf. Richard Rorty) Doesn’t that sound like a therapy culture? Stohr writes:

Gone are the days when contempt for political rivals and their supporters was mostly communicated behind closed doors, in low tones not meant to be overheard. Whatever veneer of unseemliness we associated with contemptuous public speech has been stripped away. We are left with everyone’s raw feelings, on all sides of the political spectrum, exposed and expressed in contexts ranging from social media and public protests to confrontational signage and clothing.

She adds:

Widespread public contempt has the potential to undermine the moral basis of all human relationships and, indeed, of human community itself.

Stohr explains Kant’s belief that a community can only remain stable if people refrain from expressing their private feelings and thoughts in public. Here, if you think as I think you will recall that Freudian psychoanalysis promoted the therapeutic value of speaking whatever was crossing your mind, without regard for the damage it might do.

If you want to undermine human community, become a practicing Freudian.

Stohr writes:

It wasn’t that Kant didn’t value truthfulness and sincerity in our interactions with others; he did. He realized, however, that the stability and progress of moral and political community depends on our being able to restrain ourselves from expressing publicly whatever we happen to be thinking or feeling. This is especially pressing when our inner thoughts and attitudes reflect contempt for our fellow human beings

Stohr makes the salient point that contempt is dismissive. It does not engage with people and deprives them of moral agency. She writes:

A fundamental feature of contempt is that it is globalist, meaning that it is directed at the entire person, rather than just some aspect of that person. It is thus unlike other negative attitudes, like anger. If I express anger toward you, I am engaging with you. If I express contempt toward you, I am dismissing you. The distinction is crucial.

As I said, Obama dismissed Republicans from the onset of his administration. As it happens, the new Trump administration has been reaching out to political opponents. And it has nominated cabinet members who are apolitical.

In Stohr’s analysis:

Contempt functions by shifting the targeted person from a participant relationship to an objective relationship. It aims to alter someone’s status by diminishing their agency. This is how contempt accomplishes its dehumanizing work — by marking its target as unworthy of engagement and thus not a full member of the human community.

As I said, Stohr errs in blaming it all on Trump. Clearly, Trump showed serious contempt for many of his opponents, and he did show contempt for the media. She errs because her blaming Trump functions to exonerate those who bear the most responsibility for the current state of our culture:

Trump and his supporters are responsible for much of our current glut of contempt, but they are hardly the only perpetrators of it. Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” comment qualifies as contempt, although her subsequent expression of regret undid some of its effects. Opponents of Trump have also directed plenty of contempt at both Trump himself — as we saw in some of the signs brandished at Saturday’s marches across the country — and at the people who voted for him, particularly rural voters without much education. Contempt has been injected into our public space from all sides.

Stohr wants to indict the current president:

Trump’s standard method of responding to critics includes denigrating their appearance, denying their intelligence and calling them total failures. He thus treats them as objects to be scorned and dismissed, rather than as fellow human beings worthy of basic respect. This is what makes it contempt and not merely colorfully expressed criticism.

In fairness, Barack Obama rarely practiced the same level of public vulgarity, but he was simply more subtle. He hid his cards better than Trump. Yet, if the president himself is as important as Stohr says, Obama deserves much of the blame for having created a cultural climate in which certain segments of the population are treated with contempt.

Stohr is right to hold Trump accountable for his behavior, and she is right to emphasize the importance of the president. But, she is wrong to ignore the role of former president Obama:

Even if we grant that Trump deserves contempt for his attitudes and behaviors, his powerful social position insulates him from the worst of contempt’s effects. It is simply not possible to disregard or diminish the agency of the president of the United States. This means that contempt is not a particularly useful weapon in the battle against bigotry or misogyny. The socially vulnerable cannot wield it effectively precisely because of their social vulnerability.

But, who are the most conspicuous victims of liberal and Democratic contempt? The basket of deplorables, the bitter clingers, the people in flyover country. Or is it the Tea Party or any organization that called itself patriotic.

Donald Trump’s constituents had been diminished and dismissed by the Obama presidency and by the swells who inhabit America’s coastal regions. After all, what could be more dismissive than Hillary Clinton’s failure even to go to Wisconsin? The deplorables responded by voting for a candidate who returned contempt with contempt.

Effectively, they were following Stohr’s recommendation. They turned out to vote—not to protest, not to burn limousines, not to defame— for someone they believed would stand up “strong and loud” against those who had treated them with contempt:

In an environment where contempt is an acceptable language of communication, those who already lack social power stand to lose the most by being its targets. The only real defense against contempt is the consistent, strong and loud insistence that each one of us be regarded as a full participant in our shared political life, entitled to hold all others accountable for how we are treated.

"Obamandias"

An anonymous commenter posted this poem in the comments section of a prior post. It is based on Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem: Ozymandias. It is too good not to share. With my thanks to Anon.

OBAMANDIAS

I met a blogger from a Beltway land, who said
Two cracked and polished screens of glass
Lie in a Rose Garden. Near them, in an Oval office
Half stunned, a shattered redeemer sits, whose lies
And upturned nose, and sneer of cold disdain
Tell that this Messiah ill his nation's spirit read
Which yet survive, clingd to time honored things
The hands that prayed for her and the sons who bled
And on the prompter these words inscribed
"My name is Obamandias, Bringer of Hope
Look upon my Change, ye righties, and despair"
Nothing besides remains. Round the wreck
Of that colossal Self, unbounded and malign
The vain and empty dream didst fritter away 

Is There Method in the Madness?

Donald Trump has never been a foreign policy thinker. Never having been in government his knowledge of the complexities of foreign policy is, at best, lacking.

And yet, he has presented a vision of a future American foreign policy. He has not fleshed out the vision. And he is not very good at providing a persuasive rationale for the new direction. Since Trump’s vision departs radically from much of the conventional foreign policy wisdom, his detractors have taxed him with incoherence and madness.

Now, George Friedman has examined the Trump vision to see whether it makes sense. (via Maggie’s Farm) Friedman was the founder of the Stratfor think tank and foreign policy shop. He is currently the proprietor of the Geopolitical Futures site. He is widely recognized as a non-partisan student of the field. He provides objective and fact-based analysis. Truth be told, he’s the only Friedman I read.

One understands that Friedman is not offering his own views or his own foreign policy vision. He is looking for the coherence behind Trump’s views. He does not just seek, as Picasso said, he finds.

In Friedman’s terms:

Trump’s core strategic argument is that the United States is overextended. The core reason for this overextension is that the United States has substituted a system of multilateral relationships for a careful analysis of the national interest. In this reading, Washington is entangled in complex relationships that place risks and burdens on the United States to come to the aid of some countries. However, its commitments are not matched by those countries in capability, nor in intent.

American foreign policy has allowed American interests to be shortchanged. The relationships have been one-sided. America gives more than it receives in return.

Friedman says that Trump sees the NATO alliance as one-sided:

The United States has been involved in wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere in the Islamic world. NATO has not provided decisive strategic support to these efforts. Many have provided what support they could or what support they wanted, but that level of support was far below the abilities of NATO members.

NATO members have allowed Washington to bear the brunt of the military burden, while refusing to aid America in its wars against Islamic terrorism. It is their right, by treaty, not to come to America’s aid. From that Trump has concluded that our best interests have not been served by the treaty in its current form.

Friedman argues:

Europe is well beyond where it was when NATO was founded, when it was incapable of collective defense without the United States. NATO members have taken for granted that Washington will bear the primary burden for defense, measured not only in terms of dollars spent, but also in the development of military capabilities.

He continues:

Their reasonable argument that the 28-member alliance makes no commitment to out-of-area engagements not undertaken under Article 5 raises the question of what, then, NATO’s value is to the United States. In sum, NATO lacks significant strategic capabilities, and the alliance is defined in such a way that its members can and do elect to avoid those conflicts that matter most to America.

Is America being exploited and used by European nations? Friedman suggests that one might well draw such a conclusion:

The United States is liable for the defense of Europe. Europe is not liable for defending American interests, which today lie outside of Europe. Trump believes this relationship must be mutually renegotiated. If the Europeans are unwilling to renegotiate, the United States should exit NATO and develop bilateral relations with countries that are capable and are prepared to work with the United States in areas of its national interest in return for guarantees from Washington.

As for free trade, Friedman argues that it cannot merely be defended as an abstract ideal. It needs to serve the best interests of the United States. It’s one thing to say that we believe in free trade. It’s quite another to say that we have not negotiated our trade deals well, in our national interest. Free trade cannot be the mask for a welfare program.

Friedman summarizes the Trump vision:

It is not clear that the current international trade regime has benefited the United States. International trade is not an end in itself; it must serve the interests of each party. At this point in history, the primary economic need in the United States is to create trade relations that build jobs in the United States. The previous goal of aggregate growth of an economy without regard to societal consequences is no longer acceptable. The terms under which most international trade agreements have been structured are now therefore unacceptable….

Large multilateral free-trade agreements are therefore far too complex to fine-tune to the American interest. They need to be avoided in favor of bilateral treaties, or of smaller ones such as NAFTA, that can be reshaped to serve the current American interest. In these negotiations, the United States, producing about 25 percent of the world’s GDP, holds the strong hand. The United States’ primary concern must be the same as that of other countries: trade relations that are beneficial to it, and not an abstract commitment to free trade.

This is not quite the same thing as being against free trade. Friedman does not envision what would happen if we entered into a trade war. One assumes that he believes that Trump would never enter into such self-defeating actions.

And, Trump takes Islamic terrorism seriously. Friedman analyzes Trump’s position:

ISIS poses a terrorist threat that has been minimized by some but is regarded by Trump as an intolerable menace for two reasons. First, as 9/11 demonstrated, attacks can be escalated. Second, the psychological burden of terrorism is enormous. The terrorist threat cannot be defeated without overwhelming power being brought to bear on the Middle East. Living with terrorism indefinitely is not an option. Therefore, the United States and its allies must bring overwhelming force to bear.

Echoing the views of Stephen Cohen and Henry Kissinger and rejecting the rants of the new Russia hawks—the senator who called Vladimir Putin a war criminal comes to mind-- Friedman suggests that there is room for cooperation between the United States and Russia, on several fronts:

Trump sees U.S. and Russian interests as coinciding. Washington and Moscow could agree on the neutralization of Ukraine: Kyiv would have economic and political ties with the West, but Ukraine would not be part of any alliance system, nor would it be a base for Western forces. The United States wants a buffer to protect allies in Eastern Europe, but beyond that it has no overriding interest in Ukraine. Russia wants a degree of autonomy in Eastern Ukraine and retention of its interests in Crimea, where it has treaty rights in Sevastopol anyway. The Ukrainian issue can be managed in the context of joint anti-Islamist operations. Trump is of course aware of economic problems in Russia, and he sees therein a lever to achieve his goal.

Friedman notes that if NATO members are unwilling to commit to the fight against ISIS and other Islamic terrorists, Trump will try to form alliances with other nations, like Russia.

He concludes:

Trump is proposing a redefinition of U.S. foreign policies based on current realities, not those of 40 years ago. It is a foreign policy in which American strength is maximized in order to achieve American ends.

Whether he will pursue this once in office, or whether it is a good policy, is not the key point; that there is a very real policy embedded in his statements is. It is also not a foolish one. U.S. policy has been reflexively committed to arrangements that are three-quarters of a century old. The world has changed, but the shape of U.S. policy has not. Translating this into reality will be, for Trump, another matter. 

Should She Quit?

What time is it?

It’s time to glance again at what passes for wisdom in today’s therapy world. For that we turn to New York Magazine’s “Ask Polly” column. You would think that such a fine magazine could find someone who could even pretend to know something about the field, but, alas, such is not the case.

As it happens, with today's case, we are probably dealing with a millennial, a bundle of emotions and questions of indeterminate gender, age, sexual orientation and talent. The letter writer dubs herself: Window on the Void.

I am assuming that WOV is a woman, because I cannot imagine that any male could have written the letter. She writing from the depths of her despair, because she gave up a job she did not like to pursue a graduate degree in an indeterminate subject. Now, the program’s rigors have caused her life to implode. She asks a relevant question: Should she quit?

None of us can answer the question because we do not know how old she is, what her life goals are, where she is, what she is studying in graduate school and whether there are any jobs in her field.

In other words, we know none of the relevant facts of the case. Therefore we do not know whether or not her despair is a function of reality or is a bad habit.

We do not know what to say when WOV asks whether she should continue to pursue her degree. She tells us that she has lost two romantic partners, but that tells us very little. Does she want to marry… with a man or a woman or neither? Does she want children… with or without a partner of indeterminate gender?

More saliently, we do not know whether WOV has any talent to do the work in her field. You cannot know whether to soldier on or whether to try a different career path if you do not know whether you are any good at what you are doing. If she is studying philosophy and stands to become a serious thinker, it’s one thing. If she is studying neurobiology and has no talent for science, it’s a different story.

As it happens WOV does have a therapist. She has been put on medication. She must have read Polly before and knows that Polly always recommends therapy. So, WOV has a therapist and naturally the therapist is not sufficiently competent to help her to decide an important issue. Obviously, this feeds her anxiety and depression.

So, WOV writes in to a newspaper columnist who is not a therapist and who knows less than nothing about the field. Talk about the blind leading the blind. And what does Polly offer: she tells WOV to try having her meds adjusted!  How does Polly, who has no medical training, come off giving anyone advice about medication? 

Besides, doesn't this sound like a therapist and a columnist not taking a woman's question seriously?

Of course, Polly has no more of an idea of what is going on in this case than we do, but she is happy to offer up a mindless pep talk, to the effect that this woman, who is seriously depressed about her life, ought to stop asking questions and should work harder.

As long as you do not know whether WOV is any good at the work she is doing, you cannot say. Polly should know better. Unfortunately, she does not.

WOV has absorbed enough psychobabble to believe that the only relevant question is whether or not she really, really wants to be doing what she is doing.

She writes:

I have been in therapy for a while and started taking meds a few months ago. So far, neither has helped much. How can I keep hanging on to what I have when I feel existentially exhausted? How do I avoid losing everything I’ve worked for before I have a chance to appreciate (and actually want) it?

Polly does not really know what to say, so she tells WOV to stop asking the question. In what surely must count as one of the most lame analogies ever promoted by someone who is supposedly giving advice, Polly describes the human brain as so much Jello, with a few morsels of fruit thrown in, for taste.

No kidding:

Relying on your bad brain to solve this problem, mostly by asking big, important questions like “Should I really finish grad school?” and “Is this career meant for a lazy sack of shit like me?,” is destined to send your brain spinning in circles, buzzing and throwing off sparks until you’re panicked but no closer to an answer than when you started.

It’s time to let your brain off the hook. Let’s imagine it as a Jell-O mold, melon-flavored with little red grapes jiggling and glistening throughout. Let it just sit there and jiggle, looking pretty. Give your sweet melon-flavored brain some credit for doing nothing. “You don’t have to work hard right now,” you can say. “Be gorgeous and empty for once.” Let your brain stop adding and subtracting and just lie like a glistening melon-hued jellyfish in the middle of the beach.

As though that were not enough:

And once your brain is an inert gelatinous blob, listen: You’re going to be fine. You’ve made it this far. You have entered a period of questioning, that’s all. You are plagued by big, looming questions and small, chafing questions and irrational self-doubt and slow, sinking depression. It’s hard to separate these things from each other.

One does not understand how major publications publish such stuff. WOV is suffering because she is trying to ask a life-changing question and no one will even help her to address the issue. Her therapist has her on medication and Polly tells her to imagine that her brain is Jello. Now, that will surely inspire confidence. In effect, WOV needs help asking these relevant and pertinent questions.

But, Polly thinks that she knows the answer because she thinks that WOV’s situation is like hers or her husband’s. In the therapy world, there's a word for people who relate everything to their personal experience. It's narcissism. Again, Polly believes that is all about how much WOV wants or does not want to be doing what she is doing:

You’re just exhausted because you’ve moved a ton, and you’ve been through a lot, and you want a break. You want to know that you’re in the right place. You want to believe. You want to feel good about the big picture. You want to be loved and supported. You want to live somewhere you like. You want close friends who tell you to keep going, you can do it, you’re the best.

We do not know why WOV is exhausted. Polly doesn’t either. But, she pretends to offer advice. Not knowing any of the relevant details, addressing only a muddle of emotion, Polly steps forth:

I would not decide to quit school right now if I were you. In fact, I wouldn’t make any big decisions while you’re feeling discouraged and depressed. I would adjust your meds, work out more if that tends to help, turn off your brain, and do your fucking work without questioning it. If you ask me, this is not your big moment to redefine everything you want and need in your life. This is your big moment to get ’er done.

I don’t know the answer here. Polly doesn’t know the answer. No one knows why WOV is depressed and anxious. The only thing we do know is that neither her therapist nor Polly is willing to help her to make a decision. In itself, that is depressing.