Thread by @whstancil

No, evaluating your party’s leaders as doing a poor job, and being willing to say so, does not actually indicate mental health conditions.

However, it connects to something else I’ve thought about a lot: how mentally draining it is to not trust leaders.

https://twitter.com/2020gtoy/status/1320944363384393729?s=21

I’ve wondered if this is the root of the low-level panic a lot of Democrats feel, the constant attention suck that is Trump and politics, the doomscrolling: it feels like nobody is in charge and if we don’t pay close attention to every problem, every problem will get worse.

I’ve said this before but it’s simply exhausting - truly, physically exhausting - to know that not only will all manner of horrors occur between now and next week, every single week, but that even the people in government purportedly on our side will likely do nothing about them.

Ultimately that’s a big part of what we want from government, right? Peace of mind. The idea that the smartest and most resolute minds are hard at work doing everything in their power to solve the toughest problems, so we can go about our lives and sleep at night.

Obviously Trump’s admin couldn’t provide that - in fact, sort of the opposite. And say what you will about the current iteration of the Democratic Party, but it can’t provide that peace of mind either. Its answer to every problem was to say WE should solve it, by voting.

This isn’t the same thing as saying “We need our leaders to always succeed.” Obviously most understand they won’t. The exhaustion comes from the fear that they’re, by and large, not trying. That when Plan A fails, they won’t move to Plan B, much less Plan C. That they’ll give up.

If elected leaders refuse to see Trump and the things he’s unleashed as necessitating unyielding resistance through all possible means, that displaces the responsibility to act on to millions of random nobodies like me and you, who have little or no power to do anything about it.

In the end the Trump years have been defined by a terrible inversion of leadership: the powerless crushed by the weight of the world’s terrifying woes, while the powerful seem, at best, mildly troubled, giving smiling TV interviews and demurring from dramatic action.