Since election season has arrived, we thought we’d take moment to look at how politics figures in the everyday lives of EDLM volunteer writers. Of course, the core idea for our project is to document ordinary experiences that are usually overlooked or transitory—the routine activity or the fleeting emotion. Politics generally does not fit that category, since campaigns, debates, and elections are the stuff of headline news, the kind of big thing that gets written up by journalists and recorded in history books. (For more on this distinction between the everyday and the “event,” see this recent blog entry).
In the broadest strokes, it appears that for some of our diarists, politics occupies a substantial place in their daily lives, at least at the moment. The commingling of the political and the mundane has been very evident in the archive of the everyday that EDLM’s volunteer writers have has been creating over the past several years. This is hardly a surprising observation. It’s not hard to find commentary about how engaged Americans are with politics right now and how much the Presidency of Donald Trump has generated mental and emotional stress for many. There’s even something mental health experts have called Trump Anxiety Disorder. We’ve also taken note of the way politics has fed unease: a September, 2018 entry for this blog reported that “political anxiety is common, if not pervasive, in the diaries.”
EDLM tracks the topics raised in the diaries we collect. Politics is significant, discussed in 64 of the 254 diaries we’ve received through May of 2020. Of course, it depends on how you look at it. Politics clearly matters to the daily lives of a notable fraction of our diarists. On the other hand, it pales in comparison to topics such as food (mentioned in 187 diaries) or sleep (177). It’s roughly on par with references to sports or religion. Strikingly, the diarists who participated in the earliest phase of EDLM, contributing accounts of their days during February and March of 2016, took little note of politics. Only three even mentioned it, once each, and just one expressed an emotion: a sense of alarm about “the status of our country.” Diaries produced since 2017 have supplied most of the references to politics, a pattern that coincides with Trump’s presidency.
When politics comes up in these diaries, it’s usually a source of disquiet. Sometimes we see complaints about specific policies or candidates, but as often as not it’s an expression of a more generalized unease. “There’s a constant knot in my stomach thinking about the election,” Diarist A07 declares. Another (C45) “can’t even begin to express my feelings after watching just a little of [the] national news.” A third (C47) reports discussing the possibility of a civil war erupting at election time with their therapist. Writing in May 2019, Diarist D50, declares, “there will be no mention of the day’s political news, which is as dismal and insalubrious as ever,” oblique testimony to both the pervasive nature of the political and its unsettling character.
Discussions of political fears among EDLM diarists are hardly evidence of a trend. Our volunteers don’t in any way constitute a representative sample of America, or even of Muncie. They tend to be more educated, middle-class and, well, liberal than average. And it’s worth mentioning twice that there are more diaries in our archive without references to politics that there are with them. What is noteworthy here is the way that, for some at least, political feeling has not only approached a fever pitch but has inserted itself into the routine parts of people’s daily lives in what seems to be an unusually intense manner.
We’re about to add the latest round of diaries, completed in September, to our archive. Not surprisingly, they suggest an even more emotionally salient engagement with politics as the election approaches. We’ll dip into those and consider how our current political moment is intruding upon and, for some, even consuming our everyday lives in an upcoming blog post.