The Party of Psychological Distress

By Noah Rothman

Monday, March 23, 2026

 

As Axios reporters Alex Thompson and Holly Otterbein amusingly put it, the Democratic Party’s 2028 presidential aspirants are kicking off their respective campaigns in a “striking way.” Their introductory pitch to potential Democratic primary voters leans heavily into the “childhood traumas” they experienced, including “childhood resentments, family chaos, and fighting with their parents.”

 

Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro wrote extensively about his “unhappy childhood home” in his recently published memoir, Where We Keep the Light On. The experience taught him how to deal with emotional distress and keep it contained. “I had to anticipate a problem or a pain point before there was a blowup,” he wrote.

 

Likewise, California Governor Gavin Newsom also let America in on the psychological abuse he reports experiencing in his youth. The governor recalled how his mother tried to acclimate him to a life of being “average,” how his father’s absence scarred him, and the emotional pain associated with his mother’s assisted suicide.

 

As he prepares his own against-all-odds bid for the White House, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker let the country in on the anguish he felt at the deaths of both of his parents before he turned 18, leaving him orphaned but also “extraordinarily wealthy” as the heir to the “Hyatt hotel fortune.”

 

“Not every likely 2028 candidate is leaning into family trauma,” the reporters note. Never one for stoicism, New Jersey Senator Cory Booker emphasizes the “transcendent love” he received from his parents in childhood. That may be admirably honest, but it’s not going to get you far in a party that prizes most highly a plausible claim to victimization. At this point, the experience of psychological distress is so common among self-identified liberals that being well adjusted is liable to be regarded as a mark of inauthenticity.

 

In the spring of 2023, Columbia University epidemiologists found that rates of depression among students, while high across the board, were “increasing most sharply among progressive students.” Since then, similar studies have also concluded “that the rise in psychological distress is significantly more pronounced among self-identified liberals than conservatives of both sexes.”

 

Explanations for this phenomenon abound. David Brooks, until recently a New York Times columnist, postulated a few, including the extent to which the left’s hostility to “the established order of things” and detachment from the durable social bonds of marriage and community contribute to their dissatisfaction. Beyond that, “on personality tests liberals tend to score higher on openness to experience but also higher on neuroticism,” he wrote in 2023. “People who score high on neuroticism are vigilant against potential harms, but they also have to live with a lot of negative emotions — like sadness and anxiety.”

 

Brooks has that right. In fact, one’s predisposition toward neurosis may be a leading indicator of one’s politics, and not the other way around. As psychology writer Eric Dolan wrote of a recent study published in the International Social Science Journal, “young people with higher neuroticism may turn to liberal ideology because it often critiques hyper-competition and advocates for social safety nets that offer protection against risk.”

 

Abusive parents (and siblings) and broken homes can leave a lasting psychological impact. Estrangement from the moderating influence of family is a source of trauma. That’s just one reason why it was so ill-considered when the activist left did its utmost to advocate dissociating from one’s loved ones if they voted the wrong way.

 

“Even the New York Times recently published an essay titled, ‘Is It Time to Stop Snubbing Your Right-Wing Family?,’ in which former Obama speechwriter David Litt wrestles with whether to stay in contact with his conservative brother-in-law,” the clinical psychologist Chloe Carmichael wrote last year:

 

The piece reads less like someone awakening to the dangers of ideological cutoffs and more like someone reluctantly conceding a grudge. That this question — whether to maintain ties with family — was posed at all in a national newspaper shows how far the goalposts have shifted. Ostracizing loved ones over votes once seemed extreme. Now it’s mainstream content.

 

It stands to reason that if you want to be taken seriously by Democratic primary voters, any sensible consultant might advise you to meet those voters where they live. And where they live is a fetid quagmire of anxiety punctuated occasionally by crippling bouts of depression.

 

There’s nothing unusual about presidential candidates leading in the biographical phase of their campaigns with the hardships they encountered throughout their lives. Typically, the story those candidates are telling is one of endurance and fortitude. They overcame those challenges, after all, and look at where they are now. Today’s Democrats are not emphasizing how they managed to overcome their hardships, if they overcame them at all. Rather, those events and the misery that accompanied them have come to define these candidates even in adulthood.

 

If there’s anything the average Democratic primary voter can identify with, it’s that.