The Democrats have apparently discovered the fountain of youth. Rage. Speaking last week, Senator Bernie Sanders, a crazed elderly loon, recently spotted wandering around the country, shouting about wealth and equality while closing on a second vacation home, stated, quote, you should be angry. Take your anger out on the right people. Mayor Eric Garcetti of Los Angeles speaking to Politico, explained, quote, if we only turn that anger inward, I fear we become the permanent party of opposition. Over the next couple months, we'd better get our act together. The Democrats are late to the game. During the 2016 election cycle, Republicans expressed their anger routinely and richly. Trump himself cultivated that anger. As Ian Tuttle rightly wrote at National Review in 2015, quote, many conservatives are having their Howard

Beal moment. They're mad as hell and they don't want to sit down and take it anymore. Now,

anger is nothing new in politics. Anger has dominated political discourse since the days of Moses.

Ask him how he felt about a stiff-necked people seemingly ready to throw him overboard every

few weeks. And some anger is, of course, justified. If you're

angry at corruption in D.C., you have every right to be. If you're angry at a heedless Leviathan

grasping at your wages, that anger is justified. Even if you channel that emotion in the wrong

direction, we can at least understand the anger. But something new has happened to American politics

in the last few years. Politicians have realized that the

simplest path to power is to humor everyone's anger. If you take someone's anger away from them,

you've emotionally castrated them. More important, you run the risk of driving them into the

arms of someone who will feed their anger, an anger that will now turn on you for the sin of

having discounted that anger in the first place. This is deeply unhealthy. One of

the great lies of psychology, dominant since the era of Freud, is that coddling emotions

leads to more emotional fulfillment. Actually, coddling emotions leads to emotional unhealthiness.

It even leads us to wallow in our emotions. Anger feels good, and it feels even better when

someone tells you you're not wrong to be angry in the first place. If you crave emotional payoff and if those

around you are taught to cause it your emotions, you're likely to engage more and more often

in emotionally overwrought behavior. Bad psychologists indulge their client's emotional states.

Good psychologists ask whether those emotional states are justified. As social

psychologist Jonathan Haidt, among other states, cognitive behavioral therapy, a technique used to treat

those with emotional disorders, is generally as effective as antidepressants for anxiety and depression.

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