William A. Galston is senior fellow and Ezra K. Zilkha chair in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution.

Although some observers have dubbed the 2014 midterms the “Seinfeld Election”—meaning it’s supposed to be a big show about nothing—in fact this vote reflects something important: the electorate’s fear and anxiety. Let’s call it, instead, the Chaos Election, one that is dominated by the vague but pervasive sense that almost nothing in the country is going right or, just as importantly, is likely to any time soon. It is the theme that shows up in almost every race, whether it’s a key Senate contest in Alaska or a meaningless House race in the Deep South. While Republicans are hoping that voters will take their unease out on the Obama White House and the Democrats (especially in the Senate), most Democrats are trying to put a lot of distance between them and the unpopular president—to the point that some candidates won’t even say if they voted for the man.

Democrats could well be the immediate victims on Nov. 4, but this anxiety and fear have been building for a long time—far longer than Barack Obama has been in office. These emotions have been part of the American scene, in fact, since at least Sept. 11, 2001. Today, to a degree that Obama, or indeed any president, would find it hard to control, the United States faces an unrewarding economy at home and abroad, an arc of crisis stretching from Libya to the East China Sea. Little we do seems to work on any of these fronts. When we act decisively overseas, we end up embroiled in conflicts we neither understand nor control. When we step back, our enemies fill the void. The American people swing back and forth, torn between their desire to wash their hands of the entire world and their belief that the advance of groups such as the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant will eventually threaten our own security. When our leaders cannot explain what is happening and settle on a steady course of action, the public’s sense of loss of control only deepens.


Against this backdrop, the events of recent months have fortified the sense of a nation under siege. The unexpected arrival of tens of thousands of Central American children rekindled fears about border security. Ebola seemed to materialize out of nowhere as a terrifying threat.

It is often—and rightly—said that the first duty of government is to provide security. We typically understand security in physical terms: Government must protect citizens from domestic crime and disorder and from foreign attack. But security has a psychological dimension as well—the confidence that government has threats to our safety and wellbeing under control. The American president who declared that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself”—and by so doing began the task of rebuilding public confidence—also identified “freedom from fear” as one of the key preconditions for a decent human life.

At its core, fear is a response to a specific threat. But fear has a penumbra of anxiety—a generalized sense of a world filled with dangers that are hard to anticipate and even harder to control.

The midterm election reflects that mood but will not end it. In the recent Politico survey of likely voters in the competitive elections that will determine control of the Senate, only 36 percent of respondents expressed confidence that the United States is well-positioned to meet its economic and national security challenges. Fully 64 percent reported that “things in the United States feel like they are out of control right now.”

Today’s politics of anxiety has replaced the politics of complacency of an earlier era. Recall the pre-9/11 period of the 1990s. We had won the Cold War, the Soviet Union had collapsed and democracy was on the march. American rules and norms, we believed, would be at the heart of a new world order, which we believed we could shape. To be sure, globalization and technological change presented challenges, but we were confident that these tectonic forces could be made to work for American workers. The steady, broad-based increase in wages and incomes reinforced this confidence. Trust in government rose significantly.

Only 15 years separate us from these sentiments, but they seem very distant. The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks shattered our sense of invulnerability, of course, but many other developments have contributed to today’s pervasive anxiety as well. More than five years after the official end of the Great Recession, Americans do not understand why their wages and incomes continue to stagnate. If globalization and technological change are good for our country, why have so many good jobs disappeared, replaced with worse ones? As I’ve argued, economic stagnation threatens the basic bargain between citizens and leaders that sustains democratic self-government in the United States and throughout the West.

Bill Clinton, in whose administration I served as a domestic policy adviser, spoke often of an economy that rewards Americans “who work hard and play by the rules.” Today, these Americans still work hard, but they no longer know what the rules are, and they are no longer seeing the rewards as readily. They want, but are not getting, a credible success story for the American economy in the 21st century. That is one reason why the sense of loss of control is so pervasive.

There are other reasons. Our confident assumptions about the new norms of international relations turned out to be unwarranted. If the Cold War is history, why is Russia once again threatening the peace of Europe? The Bush administration launched a long, costly war in Iraq that few Americans now think was worth the price. The Obama administration hoped that the withdrawal of our forces would induce Iraqi leaders to unite in shared responsibility for their country’s future. Everyone can see how that has worked out. Exploiting the opening created by a narrow-minded sectarian Iraqi government, bloodthirsty radical Islamists now control dozens of cities that our soldiers fought and died for. Americans can be forgiven for concluding that their government doesn’t know what it’s doing and hasn’t for quite some time.

Government incompetence magnifies the impact of threats on public confidence. President George W. Bush’s botched response to Hurricane Katrina dealt his administration a blow from which it never recovered. President Obama’s handling of the Gulf oil spill raised doubts—which subsequent events have done little to allay—about his ability to manage his own government effectively. Indeed, those doubts have only grown.

Above all, the persistence of the politics of anxiety shows that it is always a mistake for government to reassure the public by exaggerating the extent of its knowledge and control. In the early stage of the Ebola crisis, Thomas Frieden, the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, exuded confidence. After the first nurse contracted the disease from the Liberian visitor, he declared that she must have disregarded the safety protocol, which he apparently considered foolproof. It was only after the second nurse fell ill that a note of humility entered his public statements.

Loss of control is deeply troubling, and publics who experience it will seek remedies from their government. One response is a strategy of assertion—forward-leaning policies that seek to master threatening contingencies. This was the heart of the Bush administration’s post-9/11 strategy, and it scored some early successes—in Afghanistan and against global terrorism. But if the results of policy fail to redeem the promise of mastery, as happened in Iraq, public disillusion is inevitable.

Another response, misnamed isolationism, is a strategy of insulation. If the threat is immigration, seal the border. If it’s Ebola, suspend flights and visas. If it’s foreign economies, protect domestic industries. If it’s foreign foes, retrench our commitments, bring home our forces and build Fortress America. Through an inward-looking nationalism, we regain a sense of control by retreating from what we cannot control while neutralizing the effects of external chaos. This strategy works as long as the chaos seems not to touch us. But when it does, public sentiment can turn quickly, as it did in the wake of the gruesome ISIL videos showing the beheadings of two American journalists, which helped shift U.S. opinion dramatically in favor of intervention against the terrorists.

Whatever the strategy, the public craves reassurance, and it is the responsibility of public officials to provide it. Matching words and deeds, promise and performance is important. So is anticipating problems rather than responding to them. (The perception—fueled by his own statements and actions—that Obama is constantly blindsided by events has been the reverse of reassuring.) When it is not possible to prevent unwelcome developments, there is no substitute for getting the response right the first time. When the response misfires, it is vital to take charge, hold accountable those directly responsible for the failure and ensure that the problem does not recur. A new round of problems next month with the Affordable Care Act’s website would be very damaging.

There are some things presidents can do to increase the odds that their response to crises will be effective, in reality and as judged by the people. First, level with the country about the nature of the problem, acknowledge risks and avoid timetables. Always aim to exceed expectations. Second, create command and control to coordinate the efforts of different departments and agencies, as the president has sought to do by designating Ron Klain as his Ebola czar (although Obama’s been criticized by some for picking a political operative for the job). And third, use those departments and agencies as sources of information about developments beneath the radar line. The president should be in touch regularly with cabinet secretaries and other senior officials who can warn him about looming problems and help him deal with them before they explode into public crises. Obama’s well-documented distance from his own executive branch has not served him well.

Above all, I believe, an anxious public wants their leaders to explain what is happening to them and to the country. The clarity of truth, however unpleasant, is preferable to evasive consolation. This will require both parties to abandon their moth-eaten talking points, and the president must do his part. After Bill Clinton’s bravura performance at the 2012 Democratic convention, Obama quipped that he wanted to appoint the former president as his “secretary in charge of explaining stuff.” Unfortunately, this is not a job that any president can delegate.

A final reason for the long-term rise of anxiety is that our old institutions have become less effective.

For much of the 20th century, large hierarchical institutions shaped life in the United States and throughout the developed world. For better and worse, the relative handful of people who headed these organizations could make decisions on behalf of their societies. Despite their many defects, these institutions were able to provide the security of rules and routines and to serve as instruments for translating decisions into action.

As Moses Naim argues in The End of Power, the influence of these institutions has waned in recent decades. Although scale continues to offer some advantages, power has become far more dispersed—to civic groups, entrepreneurs, networks and individuals. The upside of these developments is clear: more variety, more flexibility, more scope for innovation, more ways to disseminate information and mobilize the like-minded. Their downside is harder to see but equally real: The task of coordinating large societies is more challenging than it was. Many more actors wield veto power over collective action, especially but not only in democracies.

If so, the loss of control so many Americans are now experiencing reflects deep shifts, not only in economic production and global order, but also in the ways we govern ourselves. We need new policies, yes, but we also need an era of institutional innovation so that leaders can effectively translate the will of the people into action. A century ago, the Progressive movement renewed political parties, state governments and national financial and regulatory institutions for an emerging industrial society. Unless a new wave of reform can do the same for an innovation-based economy and a more fluid society, it will be hard to close the gap between promises and performance, and the loss of control so many Americans are experiencing is likely to persist.

In the waning days of the 2014 contest, many observers—and most citizens—believe that its outcome will change nothing. This skepticism may turn out to be warranted. But if the Republicans take over the Senate, at the very least, GOP leaders will face a moment of truth. If they want to rebuild a tarnished brand and improve their chances of winning the White House, they will have to show the American people that they are more than the party of no. For his part, a president who wishes to end the gridlock of the past four years, finish strong and burnish his legacy has an incentive to sign legislation that he might have rejected earlier in his presidency (such as immigration reform that provides secure legal status to undocumented immigrants but stops short of offering a path to citizenship). If things go right, Obama’s final two years could begin the process of restoring Americans’ confidence in their governing institutions. That is, of course, a very big if.

From time to time throughout our history, presidential elections have risen above politics as usual to pose new alternatives and clear choices. The president who declared “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself” eventually vanquished that fear. The American people are desperate for such an election in 2016. We won’t get it in November, but the 2014 midterms could turn out to be consequential anyway—if they pave the way for a politics more focused on our real problems.