Donald Trump won the election. The Republicans won the House and the Senate. Six of the nine Supreme Court Justices are conservative. America, it seems, will be reconstructed in the image of the far-Right. Quite decisively, the Democrats lost. There were successful moments—Democrats like Senator-elect Elissa Slotkin in Michigan and Senator Jacky Rosen in Nevada, succeeded in states where Trump ultimately won—-but in the grand scheme of things, these were mere consolation prizes.
After the election, I found myself oscillating between militant hope and utter despair.
In the wake of this discouraging outcome, what do we do now? Donate, perhaps? Volunteer? Get involved in local politics? Community groups?
There seems to be a significant gap between what we hope to do and what we actually do. We must consider the best ways to reflect on politics so that we continue to pay attention and react. We must learn to balance the mundane moments of life—to-do lists and errands and relationships, etc—with the never-ending barrage of politics.
It often feels like completing the tasks of life are at odds with spending time on political action, or even just thinking about politics. According to the Pew Research Center, nearly two-thirds of Americans (65%) say that they always or often feel exhausted when thinking about politics. Participants reported feeling less exhaustion when they engage less. Americans are happier when we don’t think about politics. In part, I believe politics is so exhausting because it deals precisely with what is not in front of us, and what may never be. Politics exist in the conceptual sphere—when we vote, we don’t often vote for policies—we vote for different conceptions of the future. While politicians speak about policies, they focus on selling visions. Citizens rarely vote for Trump, for example, because of a specific economic proposal. They vote for his broader claims of helping the layman thrive.
The Trump campaign leans into this exhaustion and leverages it for its own advantage. “By overwhelming people with the sheer volume and vulgarity of his antics, Trump and his team are trying to burn out the part of our brains that can discern truth from fiction, right from wrong, good from evil,” writes Tom Nichols in an Atlantic article titled “Don’t Let Trump Exhaust You.” Trump’s campaign is intentionally designed with too much information for our brains to handle, leading to intellectual shut-down and a comfortable numbness.
Trump’s most ubiquitous slogan, Make America Great Again, plays into this strategy. His slogan is a promise to return to something familiar, something known, something concrete. It’s a reference to how people believe life under Trump was better than it is now, a reference to his presidency delivering a better quality of life than Biden’s. In 2016, the campaign used the phrase to invoke the 1950s and 60s, as well as Reagan-era rhetoric. When Reagan used the phrase “Let’s Make America Great Again” during his 1980 bid for the presidency, he, too, harkened back to a postwar era when America was on a global high, riding off of the economic reverberations of victory. It is much easier to conceptualize something that has already existed than to take a leap and believe in something that could be.
This was an aspect of Harris’ downfall. The Democrats would often evoke a hopeful, utopian future, which, I think, is a slippery thing to get behind. They presented real policy—there is an 87 page pdf of their economic plan—but were unable to package it as concrete, as something viable. Democrats have too much faith in the ability of each citizen to individually scrutinize each issue and digest complicated information, given the many other responsibilities of life. It is essential for Democrats to rebrand policy visions to be more digestible for all.
Given the trouble citizens have interacting with future- and detail-oriented campaigns, the question still stands: How do we disentangle ourselves from the political exhaustion and overcome the political burnout we are currently experiencing?
Perhaps we can’t. Perhaps life and politics are indistinguishable. They cannot be separate, because politics govern life and how we go out about it. But, if we spend too much time thinking about all the suffering in the world, or even thinking about our own suffering, things seem pretty dire.
I don’t want to be hopeful right now. Hope is hard. Hope is that slippery thing that Harris tried to sell to America. That failed. Yet, we can’t fully disregard hope—doing so is part of how so many of us get stuck in this perpetual cycle of political burnout.