Dr. Whitney Phillips
Assistant Professor of Digital Platforms and Media Ethics, School of Journalism and Communication, University of Oregon. Phillips focuses on the intersections of U.S. politics, media, and religion. Her most recent book, co-authored with Mark Brockway of Syracuse University, is titled The Shadow Gospel: How Anti-Liberal Demonology Possessed US Religion, Media, and Politics (MIT Press, Spring 2025).
Website: https://populardemonology.substack.com/
Email: wphilli2@uoregon.edu
U.S. Election 2024
1. Trump’s imagined reality is America’s new reality (Prof Sarah Oates)
2. Trump’s threat to American democracy (Prof Pippa Norris)
3. Why does Donald Trump tell so many lies? (Prof Geoff Beattie)
4. Strategic (in)civility in the campaign and beyond (Dr Emily Sydnor)
5. Can America’s democratic institutions hold? (Prof Rita Kirk)
6. How broad is presidential immunity in the United States? (Dr Jennifer L. Selin)
7. Election fraud myths require activation: Evidence from a natural experiment (Dr David E. Silva)
8. What ever happened to baby Q? (Harrison J. LeJeune)
9. We’re all playing Elon Musk’s game now (Dr Adrienne L. Massanari)
10. Peak woke? The end of identity politics? (Prof Timothy J. Lynch)
11. Teaching the 2024 election (Dr Whitney Phillips)
Since 2020, I have taught courses on presidential and midterm elections as they unfold in real time. In these classes I focus on politics, of course, but also on the relationship between stress, overwhelm, and communication. This approach draws from published research and many years teaching courses on public debate and controversy (training wheels for my election courses) that have highlighted the relationship between how we’re feeling and what we’re sharing, online and off. The pedagogical nutshell is, the more overwhelmed and stressed out people are, the more problematic their communication tends to be, either because they’re triggered into sharing information that is itself problematic or because they’re sharing too much information or sharing in ways that are stressful to others.
This tendency is a function of brain science. When people shift into a limbic “fight flee freeze” mode, their sympathetic nervous system essentially hijacks their prefrontal cortex, which is what manages critical faculties like the ability to take perspective, control impulses, distinguish real from imagined threats, and effectively attune to others (psychiatrist Dr. Dan Siegel elaborates on the cognitive skills that go offline following limbic hijacking here). Given this relationship, talking about politics also requires talking about mental health and wellness, and further, talking about how mental health and wellness impacts the overall information environment, not just at the individual and interpersonal level but also societally.
And so, on the Monday before the election, I put mental health issues front and center in my 2024 Election undergraduate class here at the University of Oregon. That day’s lecture explored strategies for navigating difficult political conversations, which included tips for noticing limbic reactivity in the body (a raised heartbeat, changes in breathing, sweating) and for adopting effective calm-down strategies (breathing exercises, body scans, placing one’s hand over one’s heart) so that students could activate their parasympathetic “rest and digest” nervous system–essentially the system that puts the breaks on limbic reactivity–to more effectively talk about contentious political issues, including what I assumed would be a very close and contested election result.
And then Donald Trump won the election, not by a razor-thin margin, not with a split between the popular vote and the electoral vote, but decisively. Hit-you-upside-the-head-ly. As that specter began to appear on Tuesday night, I started receiving texts from friends and family who had been prepared for anything and everything, except for this. I was struck by the tone of these reactions, and what I was feeling in my own body as well: anger, summarized by the texted lament, how could Donald Trump lose an election pre-January 6th and be winning an election post-January 6th? Waking up to President-elect Trump and to even more angry messages from friends, I knew that I would need to bring anger–that is to say, a discussion of anger–into my Wednesday election class.
I started with a defense of the emotion itself, one I initially forwarded in a book on digital ethics and have also written about regarding online discourse. While anger is often regarded as a ”bad” emotion, one that is especially pathologized in women, Black people, and other minoritized groups, anger is actually very important and indeed very helpful. It signals that something is wrong and requires action. It compels people to protect and care for others and themselves. Conversely, refusing to express anger can cause various kinds of harm.
Anger becomes unwieldy when it emerges from limbic reactivity. When we have been hijacked by the flight-flee-freeze mode, we lose all the cognitive functions described above, most critically, the ability to assess threats accurately. This means that we are often wrong about the specific causes of our anger and end up lashing out at the wrong people or things. But even when we identify the correct causes, solutions born of limbic thinking are not likely to be very effective. Limbic thinking is fundamentally short-sighted. It often creates bigger messes, even if the anger itself is justified and directed at the right target. This is where discussions of anger loop back to discussions of parasympathetic “rest and digest” strategies. When we pay attention to what’s happening in our bodies and can calm ourselves down in limbic moments, we are better positioned to harness our anger in ways that are useful–rather than have our anger harness us in ways that are contagious.
Given the strong limbic energies many of my students brought into class on Wednesday, it was good that we talked about anger. Given the equally strong energies animating post-election finger pointing and other anti-MAGA sentiment, it will be good to talk about anger more broadly as the world prepares for Trump’s second term. Specifically: how can this anger be used to protect rights and freedoms while retaining the ability to maintain perspective, control impulses, distinguish real from imagined threats, and effectively attune to others (including Trump supporters)? Over the next four years, anger will either be a roadblock or an asset in the fight to maintain a pro-democracy coalition. Let’s take a breath and make sure it is an asset.