The Scrapbook will admit to a certain fascination with Bill and Hillary Clinton. We’ve read and enjoyed—if enjoyed is the right word—all their mammoth autobiographical works. The latest addition, by the former first lady, senator, and secretary of state, is titled What Happened. It seeks to recount and explain her loss to Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election.
We won’t assess What Happened here (the eminent Noemie Emery will do that in next week’s issue). But we do want to bring attention to a few short sentences early in the book, where Clinton recounts the sadness and lassitude she felt after her shocking November loss. “Friends advised me on the power of Xanax and raved about their amazing therapists,” she writes. “Doctors told me they’d never prescribed so many antidepressants in their lives. But that wasn’t for me. Never has been.”
The image of sophisticated urban progressives seeking out therapy and medication in the aftermath of Hillary Clinton’s loss is a touching one. But we seem to remember this happening before. After John Kerry’s loss to George W. Bush in 2004, the liberal socialite Tina Brown, then a columnist for the Washington Post, reported a dramatic increase in the demand for therapy among her liberal New York friends. A psychiatrist friend told Brown that Kerry’s loss had “plunged many of her patients into near-catatonic distress.”
“In my whole 40 years of practice here,” the psychiatrist said, “I have never heard patients as bereft by a result as this.”
We hope our progressive friends have managed to get through this latest crisis. It wasn’t easy for us, either. We can’t help pointing out, though, that it’s an awfully brittle worldview that shatters after every unpropitious election.
