Very illuminating Op-Ed piece by Frank Rich in today's New York Times about the current angry, revenge-seeking mood sweeping the country. Mr. Rich advises President Obama to get ahead of that "tsunami of populist rage" lest he be swept by it too.
I've been wondering lately about that much-maligned remark Phil Gramm made last summer about how the country is suffering from a "mental recession". What outraged many people (on top of his other remark that we were "a nation of whiners") was the fact that the infamous deregulator seemed to imply we weren't really in a recession, that it was all in our minds, that we were imagining things. That implication was proven dead wrong last December when the NBER officially declared the US had been in a recession since December 2007.
But what if Phil Gramm were partly right? What if we are ALSO in a mental recession? A recession in the economy, especially if it's ferocious like the current one, is bound to provoke a psychological depression. And if that collective depressed mood is strong and durable enough it, in turn, in a vicious cycle, can make the recession worse, maybe turn it into a depression in the economy. It is no coincidence that the feared d-word (depression) is used in both the economic and the psychological sense.
Maybe this collective anger directed towards bankers and politicians is just one symptom, one manifestation of the current collective depressed mood. As long as it doesn't subside, it will be hard for any kind of stimulus and/or bank rescue plan to get traction. Depressed people and, one can musingly generalize, depressed nations or economies are very hard to cure because, among other things, they don't really want to be cured. Their very depression makes them wallow in their misery, oblivious to what's good for them, indifferent to what's going on around them except maybe when the world around them is crumbling. That situation can, perversely but fleetingly, alleviate their somber mood.
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