When Politics Becomes Group Therapy

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NOTE: I don’t usually feel comfortable writing about myself. I prefer to write about topics that interest me, but from a third-person perspective. However, there are times when I find myself at the center of a story worth sharing, and it pushes me to write from a first-person perspective. This is one of those times.

I recently joined an online Reddit group called r/Conservative to gain insight into what conservatives discuss among themselves. I also wanted to participate, presenting facts where I thought someone needed correction, or to engage with others to better understand their viewpoints. Since I’m running as a Democrat for a state legislative office, I believe it’s important to understand everyone, not just those in my circle. Unfortunately, that turned out to be a mistake. After I left a few comments, I was booted from the forum.

When I inquired why I’d been booted, the moderator of r/Conservative told me to “read the room.” So I spent some time reading the room. That’s when I realized I had stumbled into a political online group that wasn’t really about politics at all. It was about belonging. The moderator’s message wasn’t rude, but it had a tone of absolute finality. There would be no second chances, no warnings. He made it clear that r/Conservative was a space for conservatives to talk to conservatives, not for a Democratic candidate like me to engage in conversation. “If this was r/Chevy and you came in talking about Fords,” he wrote, “it ain't gonna fly.” In other words, the purpose wasn’t debate or persuasion. It was affirmation.

I should have known better. Had I spent the time to read a few hundred comments in the first place, I would have arrived at the inevitable conclusion: the group is not a forum; it’s a group therapy session. It’s a place where members could soothe the discomfort of living in a world that rarely echoes their own views. On its own, that isn’t inherently bad. Every political camp (yes, even Democrats) has corners of the internet where people vent and find validation. The problem comes when those corners seal themselves off so completely that validation feels like truth.

Nowhere was this more evident than in a recent discussion thread I came across in r/Conservative. (I can still read the comments; I just can’t submit comments in this forum.) The thread started with a complaint that the hostage release between Israel and Hamas wasn’t “all over Reddit.” Apparently, the person who started the thread was dismayed that more credit wasn’t being heaped upon Donald Trump. The thread illustrates how shared emotions can displace reality. In dozens of comments, users insisted that Donald Trump had brokered peace and that the media conspired to hide it. None of the comments offered evidence. The premise itself was never questioned. Instead, each reply built upon the previous one’s indignation: “They’d rather the hostages die than give Trump any credit.” “Reddit is a far-left echo chamber.” “The CCP won’t allow it.” It was as if outrage had become a collective performance, a chorus rehearsed so often that the melody no longer mattered. The pile of emotion was so thick that nobody noticed the lack of evidence. In a sense, extreme emotional energy rendered the premise self-evident.

There’s no doubt that this kind of emotional reinforcement feels good. When people nod in agreement, it releases a small burst of dopamine—the same neurological reward that comes from food, laughter, or affection. Multiply that by thousands of online interactions, and outrage becomes a powerful addiction. These online “rooms” are not designed to reward curiosity; they reward conformity. The quickest way to belong is to feel what everyone else feels and share your thoughts about it. Facts don’t matter. The only thing that matters is the story, which doesn’t even need to be true.

It’s easy to scoff at this behavior from afar, but every political tribe has its own version. The left has echo chambers, too, where moral certainty drowns nuance, and disagreement is treated as betrayal. What distinguishes the worst of these spaces is not ideology but insulation; these groups actively resist the friction that comes from honest disagreement. Without that friction, emotion becomes untethered from evidence, and grievance hardens into identity. The world fractures, and each shard is convinced of its own righteousness.

What struck me most about my own ban wasn’t hostility—it was the calmness. The moderator’s tone was procedural, as though explaining a zoning violation. There was no curiosity, no sense of loss for a potential dialogue. I had violated the emotional boundaries of the room, and in a space built for comfort, discomfort cannot be tolerated. My appeal, in which I chronicled my personal interactions with local Republicans in my attempt to reach out, might as well have been written in another language. I wasn’t being punished for being disrespectful; I was being excluded for breaking the unspoken rule: don’t question the feeling.

That rule—don’t question the feeling—now governs much of our political life. It’s why partisans interpret compromise as weakness, and why misinformation spreads faster than corrections. In digital tribes, emotion is currency, and the highest form of currency is moral outrage. When a group believes its emotions are self-evident truths, it no longer seeks to understand the world; instead, it forges the world around its feelings. History has shown that this kind of emotional absolutism can drive people toward acts they might have condemned under normal circumstances. Online anger becomes real-world animosity, and the distance between rhetoric and action collapses. These days, people speak openly about civil war. It’s not just idle rhetoric; it’s a warning: Danger ahead.

There was a time when the internet promised connection through difference. Unfortunately, it often delivers the opposite: islands of certainty surrounded by seas of contempt.

The remedy isn’t silence or withdrawal; it’s engagement. Not the performative kind, but the kind that listens with the intent to understand. It’s the reason I still speak on conservative radio, attend Republican events, and sit down with my Republican opponents over lunch. I learn something every time. That kind of listening doesn’t erase disagreement; it humanizes it, and that’s the first step toward lowering the temperature. I believe it’s the only way forward in a world hurling toward self-destruction.

In the end, “reading the room” might be exactly what we all need to do—just not in the way the moderator meant it. We must read the emotional temperature of both our online and offline rooms, notice when they’re overheated, and open the windows before the air becomes toxic. If democracy depends on anything, it’s our willingness to stay in the room together, even when the conversation gets uncomfortable, and commit to working together to find common ground. It means being honest, respectful, and willing to listen to those who disagree with us, treating them as equals in our shared pursuit of a more perfect union.

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