1 - Anxiety in Democratic Life

Summary

Passion is a sort of fever of the mind, which ever leaves us weaker than it found us.

William Penn (1909), Fruits of Solitude

Anxiety is the hand maiden of creativity.

T. S. Elliot

Emotions matter in politics – enthusiastic supporters return politicians to office, angry citizens march in the streets, a fearful public demands protection from the government. Yet, in much of Western political thought, emotions are either ignored or derided as destructive to democracy. Until recently, scholarship in political science paid little sustained attention to how emotions such as anxiety affect political life, focusing instead on the cognitive and rational aspects of politics. We explore the emotional life of politics in this book, with particular emphasis on how political anxieties affect public life. When the world is scary, when politics is passionate, when the citizenry is anxious, does this politics resemble politics under more serene conditions? If politicians use threatening appeals to motivate and persuade citizens, how does the public respond?

Throughout this book, we show that political anxiety triggers engagement in politics and that it does so in ways that are potentially both promising and damaging for democracy. Using four substantive policy areas (public health, immigration, terrorism, and climate change), we demonstrate that anxiety triggers learning, but it also prioritizes attention to threatening information. Anxiety can push citizens toward trusting the government in times of crisis, but this can leave people open to manipulation. We also find that political anxiety increases support for protective and potentially anti-democratic policies. Anxiety about politics triggers coping strategies in the political world, where these strategies are often shaped by partisan agendas.

This book provides a fuller picture of anxiety in politics and gets us closer to reconciling the current normative appreciation of anxiety with the political uses of anxiety. Emotions like anxiety may benefit citizens by increasing attention and making political choices easier, but we doubt that political elites and the news media evoke fear in order to create better citizens. Democratic citizenship in an anxious world can be a deeper, more informed citizenship. Without a full spectrum of voices from partisan political elites, though, anxious citizens in search of protection from threats to their health and way of life may support charlatans or madmen who offer bodily protection while destroying the body politic.