1. Kind of normal. I'm interested in the personality theory of politics -- namely, that people's political leanings are determined by the types of people they are. Well, according to that theory, there's an authoritarian personality, which is determined primarily by very low openness to experience. high conscientiousness (i.e. diligence in following rules), and very high on antagonism (which means low agreeableness). And the liberal personalities have their own types.
Well, educated liberals are generally high on neuroticism. That's what makes them successful. Lawyers are famously neurotic, as you surely know. Good ones, anyway. Professors are often neurotic. These are related to success because neurotic people can often channel their anxieties into productive pursuits. But they are still neurotic, meaning high anxiety.
2. But it's also a fear response. There's just so much at stake in this election. And I don't think you identify with it.
Let me offer my diagnosis of CONTIFA: it's not unflattering. Basically, you appreciate the dangers of Trump. You've come to understand why it's important, in our day and age, to be anti-MAGA. You've understood that being a good person is usually inconsistent with MAGA. That is to say, you've intellectualized your politics. As someone who intellectualizes almost everything, I am not offering this as a critique at all.
It's just different from how a lot of long-time liberals think. Sometimes you see people on the board, when feeling pessimistic, say things like, "it won't hurt me, so I guess I can soldier on," etc. That's a form of reassuring thinking. It's being phrased in a pro-social way, and it's a good sentiment, but it's not my sentiment. You'll almost never see that from me, because that makes me feel worse.
It hurts me even more to know that people like me will not be targeted but the vulnerable populations will. That is, I've tried to live my life, from the very beginning of my autonomy, to help people, especially vulnerable people. I'm not always that successful because reasons that don't need to be mentioned here, but anyway that's my ideal. It literally makes me sick to my stomach sometimes thinking about the communities ravaged by hurricanes or typhoons or droughts and wild fires and realizing that Trump's election will basically lock humanity into a warming cycle that will reproduce these things many times over. That there will be people who starve when the farmland gets pulled into the sea. I might or might not be around when the shit really hits the fan, but it makes me really upset anyway.
All of that is to say that people like me really *feel* the impending doom of Trump. It's not intellectualized. And again, that's weird for me to type because in 99 out of 100 cases, I'm the one who intellectualizes more than my interlocutors. But it seems, not here. And so this is naturally going to make me on edge.
Now, because I intellectualize, I'm pretty good at burying my anxieties beneath analysis. That's why I'm not freaking out here. But I suspect that there are a lot of people who *feel* the same way I do, but don't intellectualize as much as my weird ass does, and that's the recipe for the freakouts.
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