Mark Halperin, Sean Trende, And A Coming Mental Health Crisis

In the video clip above, Mark Halperin tells Tucker Carlson that the impending Trump victory on November 5 "will be the cause of the greatest mental health crisis in the history of the country". That's sayng a lot. Let's think a moment about what a big mental health crisis actually looks like.

It's instructive to do a YouTube search on "narcissism", a vaguely defined term that covers a range from ordinary self-centered boastfulness to full-blown Narcissistic Personality Disorder. The YouTube search will reveal that there's an enormous cottage industry of narcissistic victim therapists ranging from licensed counselors and PhD psychologists to uncredentialed "life coaches" who offer advice to people who've encountered "narcissists" in their families, in marriages and dating relationships, at work, in church, at recreatioon, and just about everywhere else.

Many people who hear the term "narcissist" can bring up highly manipulative, dishonest, and unscrupulous people in their own experience who've caused damage in their own lives. The YouTube phenomenon says to me that the number of people who feel they've been victimized by "narcissists" is enormous. A former pastor at our Roman Catholic parish sometimes referred to an "epidemic of narcissism" in his homilies. According to the Cleveland Clinic,

Experts aren’t sure how common NPD [Narcissistic Personality Disorder] is. According to research data, between 0.5% and 5% of people in the U.S. may have it. Between 50% and 75% of cases affect men and people assigned male at birth (AMAB).

However, many people hide narcissistic beliefs or behaviors (informally known as “covert narcissism”). Because of that, it’s hard to estimate how many people truly have NPD.

Except that Narcissistic Personality Disorder requires a diagnosis from a qualified mental health professional, but narcissists don't seek out qualified mental health professionals. According to Dr Ramani Durvasula, a PhD psychologist who posts frequently about narcissism on YouTube,

It’s unlikely that this type of person will walk into a therapist’s office, let alone heed their advice.

“They have to be aware that they have caused harm to other people,” she says. “A very, very, very small percentage of narcissists are ever gonna get there.”

On one hand, a person can have harmful narcissitic traits without being diagnosed with NPD, while on the other, neither people who are narcissistic but not narcissistic enough to have NPD nor people with full-blown NPD are likely to wander into a mental health professional's office, so estimates that "between 0.5% and 5% of people in the U.S. may have it" are simply meaningless. Judging simply from the prevalence of self-announced narcissistic victim therapists on YouTube, the extent of the narcissism epidemic is probably far greater.

So how does this compare with Mark Halperin's warning of an impending "greatest mental health crisis in the history of the country"? Compared to the epidemic of narcissism, it's insignificant. Nevertheless, he has a point. To look at this, I want to examine the latest exercise by that avatar of obtuseness, Sean Trende: In Retrospect, I Still Think They Were Bad Veep Selections.

Let’s recall that there are a handful of things that a pick can do. It can shore up a wavering portion of the party base, as Mike Pence did for Donald Trump in 2016. It can reinforce a message, as Al Gore did for Bill Clinton in 1992. Or it can help deliver a state, as LBJ likely did for JFK in 1960.

Walz still doesn’t seem to have delivered any of this. The polling in Minnesota is roughly where it was prior to the Walz pick. This means that Harris-Walz will carry the state, but Democrats were already poised to do that. Republicans haven’t won Minnesota since 1972. If they win it this cycle, the election is already over.

Well and good, this is the conventional wisdom, for which Trende is well known. But how does he apply the conventional wisdom to J D Vance?

What about Vance? He seems to have done his job, debating Walz skillfully and carrying the MAGA flag. But he also doesn’t seem to have energized voters beyond the party faithful. Post-assassination attempts, I don’t think GOP turnout could be juiced any further. If anything, some of the baggage gathered from his 2022 Senate race turned some voters away.

. . . Vance’s debate performance was impressive, and suggested that he might fulfill Trump’s presumed intentions for him: to be the MAGA heir-apparent after Trump is gone. He may prove to be the elusive “Trumpism without Trump” candidate. But for that to matter, Trump has to win the election. And Vance likely didn’t help make that happen.

Trende wrote this on October 16, only two days ago, apparently convinced the race is still a tossup, and he's saying that good as Vance is, he hasn't moved the needle. Except that the needle has moved, Trende's own RCP average now has Trump leading in all the battleground states, and Trump looked nothing if not presidential at last night's Al Smith Dinner, with his oppenent ceding the field entirely.

Vance's job wasn't to move the needle. Trump likes Vance because Vance is moving the Overton window, which I've pointed out here, or to put it a little differently, he's shifting the paradigm.

He goes up against the schoolmarmish lady journalists who insist that no normal person believes the 2020 election was stolen, and he says "I'm normal, and I think it was stolen." Or they insist that Venezuelan criminal gangs taking over US apartment buildings isn't important, because only "a handful" were taken over, and he castigates them indignantly for minimizing the problem -- "Do you hear yourself?"

He's challenging the corporate public narrative, and the problem is that he and Trump are in fact doing it with some degree of success. Mark Halperin is probably correct that the corporate public narrative, which is self-serving, is probably not good for the country's overall mental health, and an adjustment in the direction of sanity will probably throw some less stable people off balance. At the same time, those less stable people who've been relying on the corporate public narrative almost certainly picked it up at their colleges and universities, which says something about the population that will have a mental health crisis when Trump wins the election.

At least they'll have the money to spend on therapy -- but as far as what the real mental health crises facing the country are, I think Halperin badly misses the point. the greatest mental health crisis in the history of the country"