With the transformation of society from authoritarian to anti-authoritarian that started around 1960, the floodgates that were holding back the great destructive secondary layer drives of humanity for thousands of years gave way and the full force of the emotional plague inundated the Western world like a tsunami. Spreading its infection into every corner of human life including, in particular, political life in America, it continues it’s devastation unnoticed by almost everyone.
Politician’s knee-jerk response to this cataclysmic event depended entirely on their socio-political character structure. Those on the extreme left, the communists, immediately saw it as an opportunity to take political advantage of the situation. Taking well-meaning liberals along with them, they pretended to be one of them and became pseudo-liberals. They rode on the wave of social destruction that was taking place in the following years, added their leftist “solutions” to the devastation and passed off these changes as ” social progress” to a gullible public. On the other hand, conservatives in both political parties (Democratic as well as Republican) fought to resist the social destructiveness, but because they had no idea of the nature of the evil that they were fighting and because their only way of opposing the plague was through political means, their attempts were in vain.
The defeat of the Democratic Party’s standard-bearer Hubert Humphrey to Richard Nixon in 1968 marked the “beginning of the end” for the conservative faction of that party, many of whom went on to become “neoconservatives”. Meanwhile, the traditional political role of the Democratic Party consisting of true liberals was rapidly fading as it became under the control of the pseudo-liberal contingent.
In reaction to the communist threat in the 1950s and to the global outbreak of the emotional plague in the 1960’s, the conservative movement slowly began to organize in America from different sources, mainly from those who had belonged to the Republican Party and became the Conservative Party. Most recently, the Tea Party movement, founded in 2009, has proven a large outlet for conservatism. Their stated political goals include adherence to the U.S. Constitution, lower taxes, and the opposition to the federal government’s encroachment into areas that are outside of its province such as health care.
Depending on where they are to the right of the socio-political spectrum, conservatives have varying degrees of undistorted core contact. Because they only deal on a superficial, political level with the emotional plague’s many symptoms, the conservative movement’s effectiveness in opposing its spread has been limited. Unfortunately, focusing on the symptoms and not the underlying disease itself inevitably turns the rational effort at containment of the plague into “politics as usual,” an endless ideological battle between the opposing political forces of the left and the right. The net result is one victory after another for the forces of the emotional plague.
Neither Left Nor Right
The Emotional Plague
Charles Konia, M.D. 