Today's Republicanism needs psychiatric help (#1132)

Where did they go wrong? Can so many of the Republican voters be so angry and hateful toward others that they would sacrifice their own best interests in order to exact some painful revenge on all of us? America used to be the society of vision and created opportunity for that vision. What we have now is not vision but a society yearning to apply retribution to ourselves as a solution to our problems. What is the psychiatric term for inflicting pain on oneself or others in order to find relief? I have spent way too many hours trying to talk with some folks who can only see a retracting of our society back to a place where progress, compromise and modernity are an evil in themselves. What does that tell us about too many folks who would choose to lose a quality of life in order to punish others they don't even know? A complex of thought that has confusing logic to it. Many hours with a therapist may well unearth some common themes for the act of cutting one's face off in order to spite one's nose. Over-kill and backward. Instead of searching for solutions based on where we are, these obtuse folks would rather destroy where we are in order to rearrange and build a society that does not reflect free-will or equality, peace nor justice. It is as if they have given up on knowledge and would rather confine thought to some very basic rules, leaving us as a group of herded humans with no passion for intelligence. The greatest threat to Democracy are those who cannot or will not accept that we all have the right and the ability to define our own lives without being told that we don't. When others, who have given up on intelligence and knowledge, expect the rest of us to do so as well, we then have a duty to protect our Democracy from those who would destroy it.