Overcoming the Politics of Catastrophe

Why those of us who are not melting down over Trump have an obligation to speak up.

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In the wake of Trump’s election, many on the left are melting down. Therapy visits skyrocketed: Fortune reports that, “On Wednesday [November 6], nationwide mental health bookings on Zocdoc, a virtual platform, jumped by 22% between the hours of 6 and 8 am alone.” Videos capturing the emotional breakdowns of leftists have gone viral on X (formerly Twitter) and TikTok.

Christina Applegate summed up the general tenor of the too-online left’s reaction in a post on X that amassed over 173,000 likes before she deleted it: “Why? Give me your reasons why????? My child is sobbing because her rights as a woman may be taken away. Why?And if you disagree, please unfollow me.”

These meltdowns are painful to watch. The paroxysms of terror that many on the left experience amount to a form of self-torture. It is hard to observe pain and inner turmoil so intense that they visibly erupt in videos of individuals screaming incoherently.

But these reactions also pose a risk to democracy. Psychologically speaking, it’s a small step from “I find this outcome unbearable” to “this outcome must be prevented at any cost.” And while the election denial on the left is nowhere near as severe as on the right, it is growing—particularly among those most distraught by Trump’s victory. In a post on X that garnered 134,000 likes, The Progressive Guy wrote:

For these folks, the outcome of the election is so unbearable that anything—including conspiracy theories and election denialism—is preferable to admitting the painful truth that Trump won. 

So, what can we—the millions who dislike Trump and did not vote for him, yet who also do not believe his election heralds the End Times—do about this situation? How can we prevent so many on the left from experiencing these meltdowns, which would benefit not only their mental health (many of them are our friends or neighbors) but also the health of our great republic?

To answer this question, we must first understand why so many on the left are currently experiencing emotional crises.

A major reason is the shift toward a consensus culture. We are becoming less likely to speak out about our personal convictions. Increasingly, we base our opinions—or at the very least what we express—on the views of those around us. A study published by Collabra analyzed changes in respondents’ desire to stand out from the crowd (for instance, by publicly stating beliefs that they knew they would have to defend) from 2000 to 2020. The authors found that, over the past two decades, respondents increasingly scored higher in “not wanting to defend their beliefs in public forums” and in “caring more about what others think about them.”

This desire for consensus is higher among the far-left than other groups. Social Justice Fundamentalists (Tim Urban’s excellent term for woke folks) are notorious for cutting people out of their lives for even minor heresies. Yarrow Eady, a queer activist, described the suffocating norms within these groups: “Groupthink becomes the modus operandi. When I was part of groups like this, everyone was on exactly the same page about a suspiciously large range of issues.” Why? Because “Every minor heresy inches you further away from the group.” In these circles, the quest for consensus can quash even the mildest forms of dissent.

This all gets further exacerbated by the fact that those who are melting down—while clearly a minority even among the left—disproportionately influence the left’s interpretation of events like Trump’s election. The viral circulation of videos featuring individuals screaming and sobbing over Trump’s victory skews perceptions of normalcy. Although these videos represent only a small fraction of leftists, repeated exposure can mislead our lizard brains into believing that such extreme reactions are common.

The Victim Olympics also plays a role. In some leftist circles, emotional pain is viewed and wielded as a trump card. As a result, the voices of those who catastrophize are given more weight. Instead of trying to quell their fears, some leftist spaces validate and reinforce them. Even therapist organizations have been caught doing this. For example, a major hospital in New York instructed its psychology externs that psychologists must “Understand that some patients—particularly BIPOC, queer individuals, immigrants, women, and survivors of sexual assault—may feel compelled to cut off relationships with individuals who voted in ways that undermine their survival.” “This,” the hospital cautions, “is a legitimate, self-protective response, not a reaction to be pathologized.”

However, when you have a consensus culture where consensus is formed by the sickest among us, the result is what psychologists call “co-dysregulation.” Here’s how trauma counselor Luis Mojica puts it: 

When you see people coming together like with the election results and they're perpetuating each other's fear, we call this co-dysregulation. This is when my tension and activation [i.e. anxiety] meets your tension and activation and together we get super activated and we start to dysregulate each other.

If you put ten people who are all catastrophizing about the same issue in a room together, each person will become more frightened than they would be if they were alone. Their fears intensify as they echo off one another, with each participant validating the others’ fears and offering “reasons” (rationalizations) for why the other participants should be even more afraid. In such environments, fear shared is fear doubled.

Indeed, data supports this phenomenon. In The Anxious Generation, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt summarized a study showing that negative emotions, such as depression and anxiety, tend to cluster. He notes, “When a woman became depressed, it increased the odds of depression in her close friends (male and female) by 142%.” Essentially, emotions are contagious.

This dyamic is particularly dangerous in groups that already experience higher rates of mental illness. According to Pew, over 50 percent of liberal women aged 18 to 29 report having been diagnosed with a mental health condition. Similarly, over 30 percent of liberal men in the same age group report diagnoses. In contrast, the rates for conservative men and women are just over 10 percent and 20 percent, respectively.

So if the meltdowns of some on the left are a function of consensus culture being dominated and poisoned by mental illness and the contagion of negative emotions, what can the rest of us do to help?

We believe one key is to speak up. If we dislike Trump and didn’t vote for him, but nonetheless choose to weather his election with equanimity, we need to say so. We need to articulate the reasons for whatever courage and optimism we may feel. 

How can this help?

For one thing, having the courage of our convictions helps us sleep better. When we speak up for what we see as the truth, we feel more at peace. We stand up straighter at work. We avoid the damage to our souls that comes with lying about something important to fit in.

But speaking up might also be the best thing we can do for our friends and family members who are stuck in depression and catastrophizing. When we speak up, we can shift the consensus. The same social scientists who studied the contagiousness of negative emotions conducted a follow-up study examining the spread of positive emotions. Haidt summarized their findings:

They [the study authors] found that happiness tends to occur in clusters. This was not just because happy people seek each other out. Rather, when one person became happier, it increased the odds that their existing friends would become happier too. Amazingly, it also had an influence on their friends’ friends, and sometimes even on their friends’ friends’ friends. Happiness is contagious; it spreads through social networks.

Fear is contagious, but so is courage. When we speak up with our conviction that the sky isn’t falling because the wrong person got elected, we can shift the left’s consensus away from catastrophizing and toward reasonableness. We can provide a living example that, for those of us who do not support him, terror is not the only possible response to Trump’s election; equanimity and emotional resilience are also on the table.

If we can remind everyone on the left of this crucial fact, and rebuild a social norm of responding to adverse electoral news with equanimity instead of meltdowns, than we have the potential to do immense good—not just for our grieving friends and family, but for our republic as well.

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