The Fatigue Is Real. The Nihilism Is the Trap.
What the numbers actually say about political burnout, why corruption follows both parties like a shadow, and how to stay in the fight without losing your soul.
“Let me now take a more comprehensive view, and warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party generally. This spirit, unfortunately, is inseparable from our nature, having its root in the strongest passions of the human mind. It exists under different shapes in all governments, more or less stifled, controlled, or repressed; but, in those of the popular form, it is seen in its greatest rankness, and is truly their worst enemy... It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection.”
George Washington, Farewell Address, September 17, 1796
“The spirit of party” was the eighteenth century term for what we now call partisanship, and Washington diagnosed it two hundred and thirty years ago, before either of our parties existed. Read that middle clause again. He did not say the spirit of party would corrupt our institutions, though he warned about that too. He said it agitates the community with ill founded jealousies and false alarms.
Agitation. That is the product. That is what is being sold to you every single day, and it is why you are so tired.
I run a county party. I sit on a city council as mayor. I do political work for a living across Washington State. And I will tell you something that probably should not come from a guy with my job description:
I understand why you are done.
Not “done” in the sense of switching sides. Done in the sense of tired. Done in the sense of muting the group chat, skipping the podcast, scrolling past the headline, and deciding that the yard sign is not worth the Thanksgiving argument.
That instinct is not a character flaw. It is a rational response to a system that has been optimized to keep you agitated. But before you check out entirely, I want to lay out what the data actually shows, name the real disease, and then talk about what a sane person does with all of it.
Part One: You Are Not Imagining This
Pew Research asked Americans to describe our politics in a single word. Seventy-nine percent chose something negative or critical. The top two words were “divisive” and “corrupt.” Only two percent could come up with anything positive. When Pew asked people to name a strength of the American political system, more than half either said nothing or could not answer at all.
Sixty-five percent said they always or often feel exhausted thinking about politics. Fifty-five percent said angry. Ten percent said hopeful. Four percent said excited. And four percent said the political system is working extremely or very well.
Four percent.
Here is the part that should stop you cold: the exhaustion is worst among the people who care the most. Among the highly politically engaged, seventy-two percent report chronic exhaustion. The system is not just wearing down the disengaged. It is grinding up its own volunteers.
And it has gotten worse, not better. A Change Research national survey of registered voters this June found seventy-seven percent saying they feel exhausted by how much is happening politically. Twenty-eight percent have deliberately cut back on political news and social media in the last three months. Among independents, thirty-six percent have cut back.
The American Psychological Association found that seventy-six percent of adults call the future of the nation a significant source of stress. That is not a Republican number or a Democrat number. It is roughly the same across parties. About a third report political strain inside their own families. Half say political tension makes them less likely to want to connect with other people at all.
Read that again. Half of Americans are withdrawing from human relationship because of politics.
Then there is trust. In 1958, seventy-three percent of Americans said they trusted the federal government to do the right thing most of the time. As of Pew’s most recent measure, that number is seventeen percent. Two percent say “just about always.” That is not a partisan collapse. Republicans sit at twenty-six percent, Democrats at nine percent. Everybody is out.
And the exit shows up in registration. Gallup recorded a new high in 2025: forty-five percent of American adults now identify as independents, the most since they started asking in 1988. Republicans and Democrats are tied at twenty-seven percent each. Among Gen Z, fifty-six percent refuse both labels.
Nearly half the country has looked at both of our teams and said, no thanks. As a party chairman, I am not going to pretend that is somebody else’s problem.
Part Two: Why Both Parties Keep Producing Crooks
Here is the question I get asked most, usually by good people who are one scandal away from quitting politics forever: why is there so much corruption in both parties?
The honest answer is not comfortable for anybody.
Corruption is not a partisan trait. It is a human trait that concentrates wherever power concentrates. And we have built a system that concentrates enormous power, distributes it to people with weak accountability, and then acts surprised when the people who wanted that power most turn out to want other things too.
Look at the ledger from just the last two years, without flinching.
Bob Menendez, Democrat, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, convicted on all sixteen counts. Cash. Gold bars. A Mercedes. Acting as a foreign agent for Egypt and Qatar while sitting atop the committee that oversees American foreign policy. Eleven years.
George Santos, Republican, expelled from the House after a scathing ethics report, and later a guilty plea on federal fraud charges.
Henry Cuellar, Democrat, indicted over roughly six hundred thousand dollars in alleged bribes tied to a Mexican bank and an Azerbaijani energy company. He was pardoned in December before ever standing trial, which is its own commentary on how this town resolves things.
Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, Democrat, indicted in 2025 over campaign finance violations involving COVID-era funds.
And this is only the part that gets prosecuted. Transparency International now scores the United States at sixty-four out of one hundred on its corruption index, ranking us twenty-ninth in the world, down from seventy-five in 2017. We are trending the wrong direction on a measure where we used to lecture other countries.
But the indictments are the small story. The big story is the stuff that is perfectly legal.
On July 22, the House passed the Stop Insider Trading Act, 232 to 198, barring members of Congress and their spouses and dependent children from buying individual stocks. Republicans passed it. Thirteen Democrats joined. It is the first congressional stock trading ban to ever get a floor vote.
And it is riddled with holes. Members get to keep the stocks they already own. They get to keep selling them, as long as they give a week’s notice. The penalty is two thousand dollars or ten percent of the transaction. Under the existing STOCK Act, thirteen years old, not one member of Congress has ever been prosecuted despite documented violations. The Senate has shown little appetite to take the new bill up at all.
Tim Burchett, a Republican, said out loud on the floor what most members will only say in private: you should not own individual stocks while you write the laws that move them.
Then look at the revolving door, which is where the real money is. In 2025, eight hundred seventy-two former public servants registered as lobbyists, shattering the previous record set in 2007. Four hundred forty-two Republicans. Three hundred eighty-eight Democrats. Registered lobbyists topped fourteen thousand for the first time since 2009. Nobody was indicted for any of that. It is the business model.
So why both parties? Because the incentive structure does not care about your platform. It rewards proximity to power, punishes independence, and offers every officeholder the same deal: play along, and there is a soft landing waiting on K Street. A Democrat and a Republican facing identical incentives will, on average, behave identically. That is not cynicism. That is arithmetic.
The Founders knew this. That is the entire architecture of the thing. Separation of powers, enumerated authority, federalism, staggered terms: none of that was designed for a nation of angels. It was designed by men who assumed the opposite, because they had read their Bibles and their history and they understood that power finds the crack in every man.
Washington said it plainly in the same address. Parties, he wrote, are likely in the course of time to become potent engines by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men subvert the power of the people and usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines that lifted them to unjust dominion.
He was not predicting that one faction would go bad. He was telling us that the machinery itself, whatever name it flies, becomes a vehicle for whoever is most willing to use it. Both of our parties are now running that experiment simultaneously.
We drifted from that. We stopped believing in fallen human nature in general, and started believing that only the other side is fallen. That is the actual corruption. Everything else is symptom.
Part Three: “What Does It Matter?”
Here is where the fatigue turns into something more dangerous than fatigue.
Voting is the least of what a citizen can do. It is the floor, not the ceiling. It takes ten minutes and a stamp in this state. And people are so worn down that they will not even do that anymore.
Look at what happened in my own county last November. Twenty-seven percent turnout. Roughly thirty-seven thousand ballots out of more than one hundred thirty-five thousand registered voters in Yakima County. Statewide it was thirty-nine percent. And that was the election that picked city councils, school boards, fire commissioners, the county coroner, and judges.
The year before, for president, Yakima County turned out sixty-seven percent.
Sit with that gap. Two and a half times as many of us will show up to cast a ballot that gets swallowed in a hundred and fifty million others, in a state whose electoral votes were never in doubt, as will show up to decide who runs the school our kids attend and who sets the levy on our own house.
We have the whole thing exactly backwards. And “what does it matter?” is the reason.
So let me answer the question honestly, because it deserves an honest answer rather than a scolding.
In a national race, your individual vote does not matter very much. That is just true, and everybody senses it, and pretending otherwise is why civics lectures bounce off people. Your ballot is one drop. The outcome is decided by money, media, and demographics operating on a scale you cannot personally move.
In a local race, your vote matters enormously, and the math is not close. I have watched council seats and school board races in this valley decided by margins you could fit in a church pew. A handful of votes. Sometimes a recount.
And here is the part nobody says out loud: low turnout does not dilute your vote. It concentrates it. When seventy-three percent of your neighbors are too tired to mail a ballot, the people who do mail one are running the county. That is not a tragedy for the voter. That is a windfall for the voter. Your ballot has never been worth more than it is right now, precisely because everyone else has quit.
The exhausted think they are opting out of a system. What they are actually doing is handing the system to the small, motivated, well-funded minority that never gets tired. That is Washington’s warning made literal. The engines do not stop when the people walk away. They just get easier to steer.
So the answer to “what does it matter?” is: it depends entirely on which ballot you are talking about, and almost nobody has done the calculation correctly.
And if voting is the floor, the ceiling is a lot higher than most people think, and a lot emptier. Precinct committee officer positions sit vacant across this state, in both parties, in nearly every county. Planning commissions go begging for applicants. Candidate filing weeks close with races unopposed. The barrier to entry in local politics is not money or connections or a famous name. It is that almost nobody bothers to walk through the door.
Part Four: How You Balance It
So what does a normal person do? Not a consultant, not a candidate. A working adult in Yakima or Selah or Sunnyside with a job and kids and about forty minutes of margin in a day.
Stop confusing consumption with participation. Doomscrolling is not civic engagement. It is a slot machine with a flag on it. You can be the most informed man in the county on national politics and have zero effect on any of it. Meanwhile your school board runs unopposed. Trade an hour of cable news for one hour a month at a meeting where your presence changes the room. The Change Research data found something hopeful here: even among the exhausted, eighty-six percent still believe staying informed matters. The instinct is right. The channel is wrong.
Shrink your radius to where verification is possible. You cannot personally audit the Department of Defense. You can read your city’s budget. You can look a county commissioner in the eye and ask a question, and watch his face when he answers. Local politics is the only level where an ordinary citizen still has a functioning epistemology. It is also, not coincidentally, where you can still win.
Apply the standard to your own side first. This is the hard one, and it is the only thing that actually breaks the cycle. If you can name three things your party got wrong in the last year and cannot name one thing the other side got right, you are not doing politics. You are doing team sports with higher stakes. I would rather lose an argument than lose the ability to make one honestly.
Build a life that is not political. Faith. Family. Work. Your neighbor’s driveway when it snows. The people who burn out worst are the ones for whom politics became identity, because then every election is a referendum on their worth as a person. It is not. Go to church. Take the family somewhere with no cell signal. The republic will still be here Monday.
Then get back in. This is the part where I stop being agreeable.
Exhaustion plus withdrawal equals rule by the least exhausted. And the people who never get tired of this are, almost by definition, the people who enjoy it most: the extremes, the grifters, the ones with something to sell. Every reasonable person who quits hands the microphone to someone louder and worse. The tired middle is the only thing that has ever moderated American politics, and it only works when it shows up.
Forty-five percent of this country now refuses both parties. That number is not apathy. That is a market signal, and it is enormous. It says there is a giant constituency waiting for anyone willing to run on being honest, being local, and being accountable. Not clever. Just clean.
That is the opening. It has been sitting there for years while both parties argue about everything except the thing everyone is actually mad about.
You are allowed to be tired. Rest is biblical. But do not confuse rest with surrender, and do not let anyone convince you that because both parties have crooks, integrity does not exist and your ballot is a formality. That conclusion is exactly what the cunning and ambitious men Washington warned about are counting on. The jealousies and false alarms are not a side effect of the spirit of party. They are the mechanism. Exhausting you is how it wins.
Take a week off. Then fill out the ballot, and come back and make somebody uncomfortable at a meeting.
Sources: George Washington, Farewell Address, September 17, 1796 (Library of Congress); Pew Research Center, “Americans’ Dismal Views of the Nation’s Politics” (2023) and “Public Trust in Government: 1958-2025”; Change Research national survey of registered voters, June 2026; Gallup party identification annual averages, January 2026; American Psychological Association, Stress in America 2024 and 2025; Washington Secretary of State and Yakima County Auditor turnout reports, November 2024 and November 2025 general elections; Roll Call, CBS News, and NOTUS coverage of the Stop Insider Trading Act vote, July 22, 2026; LegiStorm revolving door analysis, 2025; Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index; GovTrack Legislator Misconduct Database.