As reported in The New York Times (“Mamdani, Mofongo, and Rum: Democratic Squabbles Fade Away, for Now,” November 9, 2025), chants of “Tax the Rich” rose as Governor Kathy Hochul addressed the SOMOS conference in San Juan, Puerto Rico. “I hear you,” she said. “I’m the type of person, the more you push me, the more I’m not going to do what you want.”

It was not the first time she had faced that phrase. Less than two weeks earlier, at an October 26th rally in Queens, Hochul was interrupted by the same chant. The next day, she told reporters she thought the crowd had been shouting “Let’s go Bills” and said she loved the energy, according to multiple press accounts.

By the time she arrived in San Juan, the context had shifted. SOMOS, where newly elected New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani was co-hosting events after his November 4th victory, was meant to project unity. Instead, it revealed a crack in the façade. The repetition is telling. In October, Hochul denied hearing the demand. By November, she heard it and rejected it outright. Her shift from avoidance to defiance traces an emotional arc familiar to anyone who has sat through excruciating sessions of therapy. First comes the refusal to acknowledge what is being said. Then, once the words break through, comes the punishment for saying them. Hochul’s behavior reveals something more profound than strategy: a fear of losing control, of being embarrassed, of being cornered by truths she cannot manage.

She cannot outmaneuver what she refuses to feel. What we avoid does not disappear; it moves underground, shaping decisions in secret. Unfelt fear becomes the urge to control. Unacknowledged guilt becomes the urge to punish. Repressed vulnerability turns into arrogance. In psychological terms, what is unintegrated becomes projected. Hochul projected her discomfort onto the people.

There is something intimate in the moment when power loses its composure. It is not the press conference or the policy memo that tells you what a leader believes. It is the sigh, the clipped tone, the flash of irritation when “the people” forget their place. In that instant, Hochul’s mask slipped, and we glimpsed her nervous system at work inside the institution that grants her power. We saw that her control is rooted in fear, and her strength is a mere costume.

Every structure of authority relies on the illusion of calm mastery. But when composure breaks, irritation reveals how fragile that illusion really is. That flicker of defensiveness tells us what no policy paper can: power depends on being believed. 

When we the people forget our place, we are not forgetting; we are remembering that power is contingent. Our insistence reintroduces equality into a relationship built on deference. Hochul’s deferential power was startled by her proximity to the voice of the people, and she recoiled like a deer in headlights.

That is why these moments feel so strangely intimate. When we erase the space that people in power need to feel in control, their confidence begins to crack. The calm image they rely on (and spend a lot of money on) starts to slip, and what lies beneath is visible: fear, defensiveness, the need to protect their authority. Hochul reacted because the proximity to this truth—that we need to tax the rich—felt dangerous to her position. That is the moment when power stops being abstract and becomes human.

When Hochul said, “I hear you, the more you push me, the more I am not going to do what you want,” she did not simply lose her temper. She revealed the anxious-avoidant dance of a democracy in distress. As Esther Perel writes in Mating in Captivity, intimacy falters when one partner’s need for closeness threatens the other’s need for control. Power, like the avoidant lover, mistakes desire for intrusion. Democracy, forever seeking connection, is punished for wanting too much.

Hochul’s repetition of anger and denial exposes the panic of someone who fears losing control. There is a tremor beneath her words, a sense that she is not speaking freely but performing under supervision. Each phrase feels cleared through an invisible authority. That is the tragedy of power that has internalized obedience: it forgets how to think for itself. She sounds less like the leader of a state than the emissary of its donors, waiting to get in trouble if she says the wrong thing.

Mamdani, by contrast, embodies what makes socialism feel dangerous to establishment Democrats. Most socialists cannot be bought. They are not performing for capital; they are negotiating with conscience. When Mamdani’s supporters chant “Tax the Rich,” they do so with moral clarity. Their urgency is structural, not personal. Hochul’s fear of that clarity, her instinct to turn the chant into a joke and then into a threat, shows how fragile power becomes when confronted by conviction that cannot be purchased or pacified.

Perel might recognize this as a form of eroticized distance, a pattern she observes in couples who fear intimacy but crave its charge. Instead of acknowledging the tension, one partner converts it into banter or performance, re-establishing control through charm. Hochul’s “Let’s go, Bills” line works the same way. It is flirtation as a defense, humor as armor. The chant became too intimate for her to metabolize, so she retranslated it into a language that felt safe, even provincial. By hearing cheers instead of critique, she turned the public’s moral demand into background noise, protecting herself not only from being truly heard but from hearing her people, and from the danger that listening might jeopardize her position.

Perel writes that couples trapped in defensive loops need space to restore curiosity and to look at each other with wonder rather than fear. Intimacy dies when partners stop being curious about one another. Defensive loops and patterns of blame and withdrawal are fueled by fear. Curiosity helps each partner recognize the humanity in the other. It turns conflict into revelation, showing that the tension lives not only between them but within each of them.

The same principle applies to power. Dissent is the nervous system of democracy. Protest and moral urgency are diagnostic signals of a society in distress. Just as a partner’s complaint reveals relational imbalance, citizens’ demands reveal systemic pain. When leaders interpret those signals as aggression, they mistake the body politic’s distress for an attack. The public is not shouting for the sake of chaos; it is crying out like an organism in pain.

When leaders like Hochul recoil from that signal, they mistake pain for disobedience. In therapy, pain is material; it is meant to be explored. In politics, pain is often treated as a danger to power. The very process that could lead to growth—listening, reflection, discomfort—is labeled disorder. Power’s self-protection overrides its self-awareness.

Imagine Hochul’s line in a couple’s session: “The more you push me, the more I am not going to do what you want.” A therapist would recognize defensiveness, a learned response to pressure. They might ask, What do you feel inside of your body when someone pushes you? Where did you learn that pressure means danger? Those questions invite history and introspection, turning reactivity into inquiry.

In that room, irritation would be a clue. But in politics, leaders are rarely granted that kind of reflective space. Governance prizes confidence over curiosity, but without introspection, irritation hardens into ideology. Unprocessed emotion becomes policy. Avoidance becomes austerity. Pride becomes paralysis. This is how democracies rot, in the pride of people who refuse to feel wrong.

Emotional immaturity scales. Defensiveness manifests as fiscal restraint. The individual’s rigidity becomes the nation’s gridlock. Power’s emotional immaturity has consequences. The refusal to be pushed becomes the refusal to evolve.

Therapy teaches that growth requires pressure. The same lesson applies to civic life. Maturity, whether personal or political, depends on the ability to tolerate discomfort without retaliation. When leaders cannot withstand challenge, democracy itself stops developing.

In the private world, that breaks relationships. In the public one, it breaks faith. Faith means collective trust, the belief that the social contract is reciprocal. Just as a partner withdraws when trust erodes, citizens disengage when leadership confuses accountability with hostility. Before institutions fail visibly, they fail emotionally. Citizens stop believing their voices matter, and leaders stop thinking they need to listen.

For Hochul, the chant of “Tax the Rich” became an intimacy too close to bear. A public chant, collective and embodied, forced her into closeness with those she governs. It compelled her to hear a demand spoken in unison, collapsing the safe distance on which her leadership depends. The proximity felt invasive to her fragile authority. She was irritated by the sudden reminder that her power depends on separation. When the people become audible and visible as a single, breathing force, they breach the boundary that allows leaders to imagine themselves as separate, objective, or above us all.

Democracy depends on precisely that proximity, citizens and leaders inhabiting a shared emotional and ethical field. True representation demands intimacy, the willingness of those in power to be affected, to hear the pulse of collective need without defensiveness. Distance breeds abstraction, and abstraction breeds cruelty. For democracy to live, leaders must be close enough to feel both gratitude and grievance. The chant, in this sense, is democracy breathing.

Fragile power, authority built on ego or image rather than trust, cannot survive intimacy. It depends on separation to preserve the illusion of control. Real closeness requires vulnerability, reflection, and shared accountability, the very traits authoritarian reflexes repress. When confronted with intimacy, fragile power recoils. It reads ‘connection’ as a threat, ‘transparency’ as inevitable humiliation, and ‘public voice’ as insubordination. Hochul’s comments show us the real fragility of her power.

We like to imagine democracy as rational, procedural, and adult. In truth, it is a relationship, constantly negotiating between love and fear. The people bring longing, urgency, disappointment. Power brings pride, boundaries, and walls of self-protection. When one stops listening and the other stops asking, the marriage enters crisis.

Perel would tell any couple that survival requires differentiation, each partner holding their own identity without controlling the other. Democracy demands the same. The people must insist on their needs. Power must learn to hear those needs without collapsing into defensiveness. Otherwise, both partners remain locked in captivity, bound by history and estranged by fear.

Hochul may believe she was asserting strength. What she was really asserting was fragility. Therapy teaches that irritation is information; it means the wound has been touched. The chant did its job. It found the nerve.

But the work of democracy, like the work of love, begins after the nerve is hit. It begins in the breath that follows, in the moment we choose not to retreat. Power’s task is to stay in that room, to listen without retaliating, to recognize that being pushed is not the same as being overthrown. 

Until power learns that lesson—to breathe through discomfort and tolerate pressure without punishment—we will remain in a politics of captivity, where authority mistakes control for safety and the people mistake silence for peace. No one, neither the anxious nor the avoidant, ruler nor ruled, can thrive in that kind of love.

Democracy, at its best, is a long, difficult intimacy. It asks both partners to grow, to listen, and to risk being changed by the other. When power finally learns to stay in the room as an equal among the people, we might discover what freedom really sounds like: not consensus, but a conversation that never ends.