How to Cure Your MAGA Blues
Stop scrolling and start serving.
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Read about me and my return to writing here.
My mood was as dark and raw as the pre-dawn city street that carried me to work on Thursday, the third full day of Donald Trump’s presidency, a morning so frostbiting cold they closed schools throughout Metro Detroit. I had a bad case of the MAGA blues.
Half of you know the symptoms. Fear. Frustration. Anxiety. A gnawing helplessness. The other half of you will laugh at the wintry irony and call me a snowflake. Regardless, I needed a pick-me-up.
It came in the form of a Morning Joe interview broadcast live on SirusXM radio. “It does seem like there are a lot of reasons to be a little stressed out today,” said Mika Brzezinski, the left-of-center co-host. “It could be about the weather, climate change — also maybe the election.” She quoted a study finding that more than 7 in 10 American adults consider the future of our nation a “significant source of stress.” Count me among them.
With that, she introduced Arthur Brooks, a well-regarded politico, professor and author of 13 books, most of them about finding happiness and meaning in life. “How can people process, perhaps, the feelings they’re having at this moment?” she asked.
He replied:
“Well people are having a lot of negative reaction to it and they’re doing a lot of counter-productive things like ruminating on the election. How could it have turned out differently? Personalizing the election. Catastrophizing the election. The truth is if we look at it just in historical terms, if you didn’t like what happened in November, your time will come soon enough. I mean, these things just go back and forth, and soon enough you’ll be feeling victorious and the other side will be down in the dumps.”
A bit glib for my taste. I was, after all, personalizing and catastrophizing the election on my way to work. But Brooks pivoted quickly to the core question of his academic work: Why is happiness in the United States on a years-long decline?
“A big part of it is we’re actually not tending to our happiness hygiene — the habits in our local communities and our families and the people around us. We’re paying too much attention to what’s going on far away. If you pay attention and personalize things that are far away from you, woe be on to you. If you pay attention to what’s close to you, you’ll have an opportunity to change things that will enrich your life.”
“This is what I tell people all the time: Remember what matters. What matters is not what you see on TV … What matters is your faith, your family life, your friendships, the meaning that you get from the work that you do every day to earn your daily bread. These are the things that really matter. When we lose track (of that and) we’re paying attention to national elections, of course we’re getting depressed.”
Here I was driving to a conference filled with friends and colleagues, for work I do with joy every day, at the start of a day that will bring my family together for dinner, and I’m fixated on politics in faraway Washington. After a quarter century covering the White House and national politics for The Associated Press and The Atlantic, I know as well as Brooks that both political parties have a strategic interest in making me angry and scared; that’s how you motivate voters to vote. I also know as well as Brooks that the media is complicit; pushing emotional buttons is the best way to drive clicks and revenue to a news outlet.
To be clear, Brooks was not telling us to check out of politics. He wants us to dive in — just not as passively aggressively as we have since the rise of social media.
“One of the biggest problems we have today … is that people who would have been involved as good citizens in their local communities — volunteering, paying attention, getting involved in local politics — are substituting a new behavior, which is being as informed as possible about national politics. Being outraged at the TV — at prime-time talking about politics — is not a substitute for citizenship. It’s just isn’t.”
“And good citizenship is the responsibility of all of us, and by the way, (it) brings happiness. Just paying attention and being outraged is not citizenship and will not bring happiness.”
I’m not talking about checking out. I’m talking about checking in to what really matters and getting involved with the things you can affect.”
My mind reeled. I turned off the radio, shut off the car, and walked into the Detroit Policy Conference, an annual gathering of Michigan civic leaders. The first friend I saw is the former Chair of the state’s largest children’s foundation. The second is the education specialist at the Autism Alliance of Michigan, a non-profit serving families like mine touched by neurodiversity. I proudly serve on its board. The third friend I approached is the head of one of Detroit’s most prominent companies, a leader wrestling on several level with the downturn in civic engagement.
It dawned on me. Happiness is here for me on this morning: A job I love, friends, family, and a community of people trying to make our community better. And yet, I couldn’t help talking about national politics at the Detroit conference. I even skirted away from the crowds to check my cell phone for updates on the Trump administration.
What I found on my phone was a gift, a Substack story by Reed Galen, a veteran of the George W. Bush administration who I’ve known for years. Damn if he’s not fighting the MAGA blues, too. A leader in the 2024 Never Trump movement, Galen writes about the joy he’s finding in local politics, specifically fighting a deal his county council made with a “large, rapacious developer.”
My suggestion is to put down the social media, reduce your news consumption, and get involved in your community. If there’s a straight political effort going on, like the one I’m participating in, that’s great. But it doesn’t have to be. Find something that helps you reconnect with your neighbors, your community, and brings you the fulfillment of a hard job well-done, while being in the moment, rather than screaming into the wind.
I promise you’ll find, as I have, it will make all the difference in how you feel at the end of the day.
He’s happy. You can be, too, if you stop doom scrolling and start serving your community.