It occurs to me that what Rachel Maddow has been selling is anti-depressants. As long as the Left can remain angry, it can stave off the sadness it feels.
And this is an existential sadness. It certainly was amplified, or thrown into the light of day by the election of Trump–which they were told daily was not possible for a bit over a year–but in the end wherever you see persistent anger, continual anger, daily anger, you can infer sadness underlying it.
Depression, as one example, no doubt infuses the Daily Cause. I would hazard a guess Kosmo himself has been on and off anti-depressants for years.
Anyone who provides a daily reason for anger provides simultaneously an anti-depressant. And given that we are as a nation seemingly addicted to outrage–do we not, far too often, look for the latest atrocity in our news feed, and feel gratified when it is there?–does out political climate AS A WHOLE not perhaps mask mass sadness, mass confusion, and mass depression? The pharmaceutical and suicide numbers would bear that out.
Here is a principle: if you cannot find meaning outside of politics, then the resulting politics will necessarily drive you mad.
I proposed maybe ten years ago that Culture can be treated heuristically as consisting in four tasks: the creation and distribution of meaning, of truth, of power, and of wealth. Broadly speaking, Philosophy (Philosaffineia), Science, Political “science” (craft may be a better word: political craftsmanship, with our Constitution perhaps constituting the most masterful example of the acme of the carpenters trade), and Economics.
Political craftsmanship was never intended to give people a reason to live. It presupposes it. It presupposes, in fact, MANY and plural reasons to live, at least in the Liberal way of ordering things. The goal is to balance as harmoniously as possible many competing agendas, and the tendency ALL human beings have to become addicted to power. The goal is to enact Power, which is to say a State of some form, but to also DISTRIBUTE the power, such that it is never quite within any one person or groups hands.
Now the idea that there are many valid purposes for life stems from the Philosophical/Philosaffineic System. Logically, meaning comes before anything. Why seek the Truth? Why have science at all? Why try to share power? Why seek to make wealth distribution equal, or fair?
As I have said before, Socialism is a moral system seeking an economic system, but because what it needs to happen is not based on accurate human psychology, it necessary becomes a political and power system. They have to tell people what they want, because the people aren’t as smart, they believe, as their aspiring masters. That people naturally do not want masters in most cases where they have tasted the alternative, is something they wrongly assume will pass with time.
You really can’t separate Communism from Nihilism. Historically, in Russia, the Nihilists BECAME the Communists. They were the same people, with roughly the same beliefs. Marx just gave them new words to paper over old feelings.
And that Nihilism in turn was a feeling, a feeling of disconnection, of hopelessness, of powerlessness. It was, if not enabled, greatly amplified by the felt need, in attacking the Tsar, to also attack the God and Church which justified his power. You create the power to change an abusive system on the one hand, but on the other you eliminate all genuine purpose in so doing. If there is no God, why do you even care? This is a question the philosophers and writers of the 19th and 20th century tried desperately to answer, and regarding which they largely failed.
Atheism, in my view, is an inherently unstable structure. This is not to say there are not outstanding people who are atheists. I firmly believe there are, and that there are many of them. But when you are building thought structures, small flaws amplify over time, across generations, across nations. An atheistic world would look much like Europe, where they are not having children, and have seemingly largely given up on the future. Merkel has no children. Macron has no children. May has no children. And in effect, by conscious policy or not, all three leaders seemingly are facilitating the Islamization of Europe. As Mark Steyn pointed out some ten years ago now, demographics alone ensure Sharia in most of Europe within 20-30 years, and in my view much sooner, because the Europeans have largely given up on defending their own civilization.
This is what atheism gets you: tired, passive, and unable to defend in the end any civilization based on any notion of God.