I was at a conference last week, and I attended a panel where one of the panelists--the always thought-provoking Liz Bruenig of the New York Times--said something that crystallized a lot of what I've been thinking: the current political situation has sparked a new set of emotions--or maybe simply has made prominent a heretofore not-so-prominent set of emotions--and hosts and cultivates in us a collection of feelings that are, to put it gently, not actually very healthy for us as humans nor suitable for the body politic.

This made me go back to two pieces written last year that speak to this.  

One, written by two social scientists, explores the way in which people are responding affectively to the news about politics these days.

What they noted was a powerful sense of claustrophobia, fear, and captivity:

we were immediately struck by their emotional reactions to stories about Trump. There is scarce literature that explores the emotional dimension of reading the news. Our study indicated that voters on both sides of the aisle felt “inundated” by three particular emotions: anger, frustration and an overall feeling of being overwhelmed.

This is interesting to me.  Why would people so differently positioned on the issues share the same emotional affects about those issues?  I don't have an answer.

Claire Malone, a journalist at FiveThirtyEight, has some interesting thoughts on this.

She notes similar signs of both despair and anomie:

Last year, the Public Religion Research Institute found that 69 percent of Americans felt sad, angry or fearful when they thought about what’s going on in the country today. But only 19 percent of people had gotten in touch with an elected official in the last year, just 14 percent had volunteered and a paltry 12 percent had attended a community meeting, like a school board or city council meeting. For all the sadness some Americans feel, and for all our tuned in-ness to politics, we don’t seem to be doing much politically proactive day-to-day.…

But then, she suggests the problem is not a lack of engagement, but rather a problem with what is there to be engaged with:

there’s also no innate virtue in political engagement; I won’t plead with Americans to get “more political.” A friend of mine once said that she thought of journalism as helping people understand the world around them in a deeper way. It might just be that people understand American politics just fine — we have the numbers to show that they’re paying attention — it’s just that they don’t like what they see.

This seems right to me.  People are well-informed, very well-informed these days.  But the experience of what they're informed about makes them feel both powerless and outraged.

Malone makes a key point:

I think America’s ennui, its pervasive, high-information sadness, has something to do with the blurring line between what is a “political issue” and what is a “moral issue.”

…

Perhaps people choose not to engage with politics because they know that partisanship’s brittle paradigm will shatter when it takes on the heft of a moral load. It isn’t equipped to handle the problems that plague our consciences. Maybe America is right to feel sad.   

This is interesting to me as well.  Our politics is so nasty because it seems to be primarily not about boring politics, but about emotionally charged matters.  We didn't have to do this to ourselves; we made our politics a stand-in for our emotional lives.  Or is that inevitable?