Read an Excerpt from “The Sad Citizen: How Politics Is Depressing and Why It Matters”
From rising polarization to climate change, today’s politics are leaving many Western democracies in the throes of malaise. In The Sad Citizen, Christopher Ojeda draws on wide-ranging data from the United States and beyond to explain how politics is depressing, why this matters, and what we can do about it. Integrating insights from political science, sociology, psychology, and other fields, The Sad Citizen exposes the unhappy underbelly of contemporary politics and offers fresh ideas to strengthen democracy and help citizens cope with the stress of politics.
In the following excerpt, Ojeda explores how less mobilizing emotions, such as sadness and disappointment, have affected voter behaviors in the past and what this might mean for the future of democratic functioning.
President Biden’s ratings were low going into the midterm elections of 2022. He suffered from generic partisan negativity, the slow pandemic recovery, the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the failed social spending bill. A CBS poll found that 49 percent of Americans were “disappointed” with Biden’s performance. Ross Douthat at the New York Times dubbed 2021 “The Year of American Disappointment.” Democrats seemed to be hit especially hard. The Cook Political Report described Democratic voters as disappointed, tired, and exhausted (Walter 2022). Nearly two years into the Biden presidency, it seemed like little had changed. Trumpism was alive and flourishing in the Republican Party, and the conservative majority on the Supreme Court continued, unimpeded, to reshape American law. This disappointment didn’t bode well for Biden or the Democratic party. With only fifty seats in the Senate, Democrats couldn’t afford any losses.
As the midterm election season got underway, Republican senator Rick Scott of Florida released an eleven-point plan for the Republican Party. Scott proposed finishing the wall on the Mexican border and naming it for former president Donald Trump, scrubbing questions about ethnicity from government forms, imposing term limits on federal employees and members of Congress, and making all Americans pay taxes regardless of income. Pundits were stunned. News outlets on the left and right reported that Scott had upended Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell and his plan to win back the Senate. One headline from the Wall Street Journal read, “Mitch McConnell Rebukes Rick Scott for Tax Proposal,” while the Washington Post wrote, “Rick Scott walks away. Then McConnell dresses him down.” McConnell claimed he opposed Scott’s tax plan, telling reporters, “We will not have as part of our agenda a bill that raises taxes on half the American people” (Hounshell and Askarinam 2022).
No doubt McConnell was annoyed by the proposed tax hike, an idea that is eternally unpopular with Americans and antithetical to conservative values. However, I suspect he would have been annoyed with Scott’s eleven-point plan even if it didn’t include a tax hike. The key here is disappointment. Biden’s poor performance was disappointing the left, so McConnell wanted to keep the spotlight on the president. McConnell’s electoral strategy was to do and say as little as possible in the run-up to the midterm. When asked by a reporter what the Republican Party would do if it won the Senate, McConnell didn’t talk about lowering taxes but instead quipped, “That is a very good question. And I’ll let you know when we take it back” (C-SPAN 2022). McConnell understood that drawing attention to any policy priorities—whether he agreed with them or not—risked turning Democratic disappointment into anxiety over a Republican Congress, a feeling that would propel them to vote in the upcoming midterm election. In other words, his strategy was not to win voters with his ideas but to keep Democrats away from the voting booth by letting their disappointment fester.
In a surprising twist, however, Republicans underperformed in the midterm, barely eking out a win in the House and leaving Democrats in control of the Senate. Republicans were now the disappointed ones. Appearing on Fox News a few days after the election, Senator Scott told Sean Hannity, “Here’s what happened to us. Election Day, our voters didn’t show up. We didn’t get enough voters. It was a complete disappointment.” He went on to add, “I think we didn’t have enough of a positive message. We said everything about how bad the Biden agenda was. It’s bad, the Democrats are radical, but we have to have a plan of what we stand for” (Folmar 2022).
The performance of Biden, the maneuvering of McConnell, and the electoral loss of Republicans capture a certain truth about the political world: politics makes many people depressed, and depression is demobilizing. Emotions are central to politics, but depression hasn’t received much attention from either political actors or political scientists. This omission may be surprising, particularly today, given that the country seems to be in the grip of a national malaise, but depression is usually less visible than other political emotions. Where anger draws new people into the political arena and fires them up (think of “Lock her up!” chants at early Donald Trump campaign rallies or “Not my president!” chants at the Women’s March on Washington following Trump’s election), depression leads to retreat rather than outward political expression.
The invisibility of depression doesn’t make it any less important than emotions like anger, anxiety, or fear. Depression shapes the way citizens think about and engage with the political process, often with the consequence of exacerbating political and social inequality. Women, the poor, young people, and LGBTQ persons are both underrepresented in politics and, in many cases, more depressed. While anyone can feel depressed by politics, it’s no coincidence that the most powerless groups in society are the ones who experience depression most intensely: politics is most depressing to those who lack power, and depression in turn creates barriers to exercising political power. This is what I think of as the political cycle of depression.
The performance of Biden, the maneuvering of McConnell, and the electoral loss of Republicans capture a certain truth about the political world: politics makes many people depressed, and depression is demobilizing.
Depression also deserves attention in its own right. My home field of political science generally studies emotions as inputs into the political process, but I am just as interested in depression as an output, or product, of politics. Throughout the book, I take a broad and nonclinical view of depression, thinking of it as a family of emotions that include disappointment, sadness, despair, grief, and melancholy. These feelings vary in intensity and duration—ranging from mild disappointment to full-blown major depressive disorder—but they all meaningfully affect people’s lives and their ability to engage in politics and other activities. By clarifying how politics produces depression, I hope to help ordinary citizens, psychologists, psychiatrists, and other mental health professionals better understand how to appropriately cope with these difficult and unpleasant feelings.
How politics shapes depression and how depression shapes politics are intertwined problems. I study them together in the context of modern Western democracies, and what I’ve found is that democracy and depression are sometimes at odds with one another. Elections are a staple of democracy but necessarily produce losses that can be depressing. Echo chambers can inflame polarization, spread misinformation, and undermine democracy but can also be a source of comfort. Following the news upholds norms of democratic citizenship but can be distressing. What should we do when what is good for democracy is bad for our mental well-being, and vice versa? This question recurs throughout the book, and while I don’t have all the answers, I try to point us toward a “politics without disruption” in the conclusion. More importantly, however, my hope is to generate interest in this important topic, knowing that more smart people thinking about these problems will give us a better shot at solving them.
Excerpted from The Sad Citizen, by Christopher Ojeda, published by the University of Chicago Press. © 2025 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.
Christopher Ojeda is assistant professor of political science at the University of California, Merced and a research affiliate at the University of California’s Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation. His research has been featured in CNN, NPR, PBS, Slate, and Vox.
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