I have, for the most part, stopped reading Dr. X's blog. I have a lot of respect for Dr. X, and he's welcome to comment here if he wishes. But it's just hard for me to read what he has to write. In particular, I'm referring to his frequent criticisms of Trump and his penchant for diagnosing Trump and his supporters.
I find my own reaction strange. I consider myself an opponent of Trump. And to my knowledge, nothing Dr. X says is factually wrong. Neither do I find (most of) what Dr. X's moral judgments against Trump to be wrong. And when I disagree with Dr. X, I still believe his judgments are within the pale of what is reasonable. And frankly, Dr. X does a service by documenting the shenanigans of a group of people who are so dangerous and wrong. Somebody has to do it.
I even concede that Dr. X's extra-clinical diagnoses of Trump and Trump supporters are "within the pale." We all have the duty to discern motivations and character in our politicians and those who enter the public sphere. There's no principled reason for me to criticize a mental health professional for bringing their expertise to the table. Nobody complains when I talk about Trump's place in U.S. History.
To be sure, my concession is grudging. I still think Dr. X too seldom actually demonstrates the bases for his diagnoses. He too seldom (if at all) grapples in any significant way with the conflict between his role as a mental health professional and his willingness to diagnose (or strongly hint that he's diagnosing even if he doesn't use the word "diagnose"). Or if he does grapple with it, he rarely shows how he does so.
Of course, I'm basing my accusations based on a very small number of his
posts that I have actually read. But still, I concede the point.
Concessions notwithstanding, I believe I'm quite right to demur about the effectiveness of such diagnoses and, more broadly, about the effectiveness of pointing out "the bad things Trump and his supporters do." It becomes a bludgeon in the culture war. They reaffirm the convictions of a group of people who didn't need convincing. They tend to turn others in any number of ways. How many belong in each group and how bad the effect is, I don't know, beyond anecdote and my own personal feelings.
Speaking of my feelings, I feel defensive whenever I read Dr. X's posts. Not only defensive, but punchy. So much so that I often want to lob a very critical comment. Sometimes I do (and to my recollection, Dr. X has always published my comments, no matter how critical).
That's not Dr. X's fault. My defensiveness is probably some combination of a choice and a feeling that has almost nothing to do with him. I feel the same way about a number of comedians (for example, Seth Myers) or commentators (for example, Rachel Maddow), and that feeling has almost nothing to do with them.
The "almost" in "almost nothing" does a lot of work there. There probably is something personal going on, even though I've never met Dr. X in person, and I've certainly never interacted with Myers or Maddow aside from watching a couple of their shows. There's a certain snide or smug attitude that I have a hard time explaining. Or at least there's something that strikes me as snide as well as a usually but not always defensible belief that snideness and smugness are bad.
Strangely, I don't feel that way about all anti-Trump commentators. Will Truman at Ordinary Times, for example, doesn't elicit that reaction from me. I'm not sure why, exactly. There are probably others, whose names escape me at the moment. I do remember watching a comedian on TV (I forget his name) who gave a very Trump-critical standup routine, and I liked it, without getting in a huff about it.
I'm tempted to say there's something that goes beyond reason here, to say that reason and my sense of right and wrong tell me one thing while my own inclination tells me another. And yes, Whatever visceral inclinations I have are important and probably more important than reason and right and wrong here.
But that's not the whole story. I do think there's something wrong in the diagnosing and perpetual cataloging of the sins of Donald Trump and his supporters. There seems to me something wrong in snideness and smugness that goes beyond whether it's effective or not. Reason and right and wrong enter the picture in a weird way I have trouble pinning down.
I'm picking on Dr. X here, but again, it's not really about him. He owes me nothing and he owes the blogosphere nothing. I personally prefer he do more posts on mental health issues that go beyond extra-clinical diagnoses. But he can and ought to write pretty much whatever he wants.
He is welcome to comment, but I'll tell him (and anyone else reading) that I'll be busy for the next couple weeks and probably won't have time to respond until sometime in January.)
