At the Conservative Political Action Conference on March 4, Donald Trump gave a speech that my colleague Tom Nichols called “long and deranged,” adding that it was, “even by his delusional standards, dark and violent. Much of it was hallucinatory.” And revealing too—not just of Trump’s worsening state of mind but of the attitudes and temperament of MAGA world which Trump has, for seven years, personified. He remains the GOP’s apotheosis.

That doesn’t mean that Trump is unbeatable in the Republican presidential primary. He’s viewed throughout much of the party as a loser; his presentation is noticeably more lethargic than when he ran in 2016; and his obsessive promotion of lies about the 2020 election is exhausting even some of his loyal supporters. He’s also having trouble drawing large or enthusiastic crowds, which he never had a problem with in the past.

Despite that, at this early stage, Trump and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis are polling as the overwhelming favorites to win the Republican nomination. And although individual surveys are scattered, two recent ones, from Emerson and Fox, show Trump leading DeSantis by 30 and 15 points, respectively. (An Emerson poll from New Hampshire earlier this month showed Trump with a 41-point lead over DeSantis in that early-primary state.) But what the polls can’t measure is just how much the party’s sensibilities have fused with Trump’s, or how many imitators Trump has spawned. His imprint on the Republican Party is almost impossible to overstate. Which is why Trump’s remarks at CPAC are instructive.

[Read: Trump has become the thing he never wanted to be]

One section of the nearly two-hour speech particularly caught my attention, and not mine alone. The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman and Shane Goldmacher devoted an article to the implications of these comments:  

In 2016, I declared, “I am your voice” Today, I add: I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution. I am your retribution.

“This is the final battle,” America’s 45th president said. “They know it, I know it, you know it, everybody knows it. This is it. Either they win or we win. And if they win, we no longer have a country.”

To understand the modern Republican Party, you must understand the intense sense of fear and grievance that drives so many of its voters, which has in turn given rise to a profound desire for retribution and revenge, for inflicting harm on Democrats, progressives, and other perceived enemies. Those negative emotions existed before Donald Trump ran for the presidency, but he tapped into them with astonishing skill.

In September 2015, I had an email exchange with a person who worked for a theologically conservative church. In the course of sharing thoughts on the early stages of the Republican primary, I described my views and concerns: “I consider Mr. Trump to be in an entirely different category—wrong not just on the issues and philosophically unanchored, but alarmingly erratic … wholly untrustworthy, a flippant misogynist, crude and vulgar, and downright obsessive. As president, he would be unstable and dangerous. As leader of the Republican Party, he would be an embarrassment. As the de facto face of conservatism, he would be a disaster. That’s why I would not vote for him under any conceivable circumstances.”

Although Trump was not this person’s first choice in the primary, his response was instructive. “I am fed up with our side rolling over.” He then said: “I think we have likely slipped past the point of no return as a country and I’m desperately hoping for a leader who can turn us around. I have no hope that one of the establishment guys would do that. That, I believe, is what opens people up to Trump. He’s all the bad things you say, but what has the Republican establishment given me in the past 16 years? First and foremost: [Barack Obama].”

Note the line of argument: My interlocutor agreed with all of the negative things I said about Trump—misogynistic, untrustworthy, erratic, psychologically unstable, and dangerous—but in the end, they didn’t matter. Trump was, to use a word I heard repeatedly to describe him, a fighter. The negative aspects of his character were assumed to be essential to that pugilism. Over time—and it wasn’t much—most of those on the right who had reservations about Trump made their peace with his flaws. Some even quietly celebrated them.

A year later I participated in an event at Stanford University with the sociologist Arlie Hochschild, the author of the acclaimed book Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. Hochschild spent five years immersed in a community around Lake Charles, Louisiana, then a Tea Party stronghold. What was important to understand about the rise of Trump, Hochschild told me during one of our offstage conversations, was that it was tied to feelings of being dishonored and humiliated. Trump supporters feel they have been disrespected; Trump is their response, she said, their antidepressant. Hochschild understood the power of emotion in politics, how reason is so often the slave of the passions. And the passions of people who feel unseen, who feel they have been treated with contempt, are destructive and dangerous.

[From the January/February 2019 issue: The real roots of American rage]

Since the Trump era began, we’ve seen a particularly toxic mix of passions on the right: fear and desperation, anger and indignation, feelings of betrayal and victimhood, all of which cry out for vengeance. Whether the nominee is DeSantis—who bills himself as a God-given “protector” and a “fighter”—or Trump, or someone else, the MAGA wing of the Republican Party will demand that the leader of the GOP seek vengeance in its name. Donald Trump has energized a movement and a propaganda infrastructure that will outlast him.

Vengeance is different from justice. The psychologist Leon F. Seltzer puts it this way: Revenge is predominantly emotional, while justice is primarily rational; revenge is, by nature, personal, while justice is impersonal and impartial; revenge is an act of vindictiveness, justice an act of vindication; revenge is about cycles, justice about closure; and revenge is about retaliation, whereas justice is about restoring balance.

“With revenge,” William Mikulas, a professor of psychology at the University of West Florida, told ABC News, “you are coming from an orientation of anger and violence or self-righteousness: ‘I want to get him, I want to hurt them … I want to make them pay.’ You’re coming from a place of violence and anger and that’s never good.”

Revenge creates a cycle of retaliation. It “keeps wounds green, which otherwise would heal,” in the words of Francis Bacon. Vengeance is insatiable, and in any society, over the long term, it can be deeply damaging. The desire for revenge reduces the capacity for legislators to work together across the aisle. It creates conditions in which demagogues can successfully peddle conspiracy theories and call for a “national divorce.” It leads Americans to see members of their opposing party as traitors. And exacting revenge tempts people to employ immoral and illegal methods—street violence, coups, insurrections—they would not otherwise contemplate. (The defamation lawsuit against Fox News by Dominion Voting Systems revealed that a Fox producer texted Maria Bartiromo, a Fox news anchor, saying, “To be honest, our audience doesn’t want to hear about a peaceful transition.”)

White evangelical Christians have been a driving force in creating the politics of retribution and revenge—maybe the driving force. White evangelicals are among the GOP’s most loyal constituencies, and if they declared certain conduct off-limits, candidates and elected officials would comply. But no such signals were ever sent. According to the Pew Research Center, in 2020—after all the lies, misconduct, and deranged conspiracy theories we saw unfold during the Trump presidency—85 percent of white, evangelical Protestant voters who frequently attended religious services voted for Trump. Most of them became more, not less, tolerant of Trump’s misconduct over the course of his tenure.

Human emotions can be dominant and even determinative in distorting and deforming people’s judgments. Individuals who honestly believe that the Bible is authoritative in their lives—who insist that they cherish Jesus’s teachings from the Sermon on the Mount (blessed are the meek, the merciful, the peacemakers, and the pure in heart; turn the other cheek; love your enemies) and Paul’s admonition to put away anger, wrath, slander, and malice and replace them with compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, patience, a spirit of forgiveness, and, above all, love, “which binds everything together in perfect harmony”—find themselves embracing political figures and a political ethic that are antithetical to these precepts. Many of those who claim in good faith that their Christian conscience required them to get passionately involved in politics have, upon doing so, discredited their Christian witness. Jesus has become a “hood ornament,” in the words of the theologian Russell Moore, in this case placed atop tribal and “culture war” politics.

[From the June 2022 issue: How politics poisoned the evangelical Church]

One recent example: Jenna Ellis, a former attorney for Donald Trump who has made much of her Christian faith and worked for several different evangelical associations. “My mission is Truth, my God is the Lord Jesus Christ, and my client is the President of the United States,” she tweeted in 2020. But last week she admitted in a sworn statement that she had knowingly misrepresented the facts in several of her public claims that widespread voting fraud led to Trump’s defeat—and she posted a video on Twitter mocking an injury from a fall that sent 81-year-old Senator Mitch McConnell to the hospital. (McConnell, although a Republican, has been a critic of Trump, earning the enmity of MAGA world.)

The antidote to the politics of retribution is the politics of forbearance. Forbearance is something of a neglected virtue; it is generally understood to mean patience and endurance, a willingness to show mercy and tolerance, making allowances for the faults of others, even forgiving those who offend you. Forbearance doesn’t mean avoiding or artificially minimizing disagreements; it means dealing with them with integrity and a measure of grace, free of vituperation.

None of us can perfectly personify forbearance, but all of us can do a little better, reflect a bit more on what kind of human beings and citizens we want to be, and take small steps toward greater integrity. We can ask ourselves: What, in this moment, is most needed from me and those in my political community, and perhaps even my faith community? Do we need more retribution and vengeance in our politics, or more reconciliation, greater understanding, and more fidelity to truth?

The greatest embodiment of the politics of forbearance was Abraham Lincoln. With a Civil War looming, he was still able to say, in his first inaugural address, “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have been strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.”

Those bonds were broken; the war came. By the time it ended, more than 700,000 lives had been lost in a nation of 31 million. But the war was necessary; Lincoln preserved the Union and freed enslaved people. And somehow, through the entire ordeal, Lincoln was free of malice. He never allowed his heart to be corroded by enmity or detestation.   

In his 1917 biography of Lincoln, Lord Charnwood wrote, “This most unrelenting enemy to the project of the Confederacy was the one man who had quite purged his heart and mind from hatred or even anger towards his fellow-countrymen of the South.”

Another Lincoln biographer, William Lee Miller, said of America’s 16th president, “He did not mark down the names of those who had not supported him, or nurse grudges, or hold resentments, or retaliate against ‘enemies’—indeed, he tried not to have enemies, not to ‘plant thorns.’” Lincoln’s previous failures did not leave scars or resentments, Miller says; he was an unusually generous human being, lacking in ruthlessness, disinclined to make himself feared, explicit in disavowing vengeance. Some believed he was too sympathetic to be a great leader. He turned out to be our greatest leader.

Lincoln was unique; we will never see his kind again. But the contrast between America’s first Republican president and its most recent Republican president is almost beyond comprehension. Each is the inverse of the other. One cannot revere Lincoln and embrace the political ethic of Trump, his many imitators, and the MAGA movement.

Sensibilities and dispositions can be shaped and reshaped; the “ancient trinity” of truth, beauty, and goodness can still inspire the human heart, even among cynics. The burning question for each of us is what we aspire to, for ourselves and for our leaders, and the kind of political culture we will help build. We are citizens, not subjects, and so it is within our power to write magnificent new chapters in the American story. But that requires letting go of hatred and vengeance and to be again touched, as we surely can be, by the better angels of our nature.

For many Americans, these claims sound self-evidently true: Information is good; knowledge is power; awareness of social ills is the mark of the responsible citizen. But what if they aren’t correct? Recent studies on the link between political awareness and individual well-being have gestured toward a liberating, if dark, alternative. Sometimes—perhaps even most of the time—it is better not to know.

Like taking a drug, learning about politics and following the news can become addictive, yet Americans are encouraged to do more of it, lest we become uninformed. Unless you have a job that requires you to know things, however, it’s unclear what the news—good or bad—actually does for you, beyond making you aware of things you have no real control over. Most of the things we could know are a distraction from the most important things that we already know: family, faith, friendship, and community. If our time on Earth is finite—on average, we have only about 4,000 weeks—we should choose wisely what to do with it.

What the writer Sarah Haider calls “information addiction” is nothing short of an epidemic. In a quite literal sense, politics is making Americans sick. But the sole way to contract the illness is by seeking out the news and consuming large amounts of it. And that’s a choice. Haider chose differently, deciding to go news free for six months in late 2021 and early 2022. Having missed out on stories that were speculative, overhyped, or irrelevant, she reported being “saner, happier, and (surprisingly) more informed.” But does it make sense for other Americans, perhaps millions of them, to completely rethink their relationship to political information and knowledge? In a 2022 study, the political scientist Kevin Smith estimated that between 50 million and 85 million Americans suffer from politically induced fatigue, insomnia, loss of temper, and impulse-control problems. Moreover, 40 percent of his sample of American adults reported that politics was a “significant source of stress” in their lives, while 5 percent—which would translate to roughly 12 million people—reported suicidal thoughts due to politics.

And the problem is especially bad for young people. Last month, the CDC reported that depression and suicidal ideation are at their highest levels on record, with one in three teenage girls having seriously considered suicide. Boys aren’t faring particularly well either. Some observers insist that smartphones are the culprit, but smartphones are ubiquitous in all advanced democracies. In another study, politically induced mental and physical symptoms appear to be more pronounced among not just the young, but specifically those who are politically engaged and left-leaning. Young conservatives, despite presumably also owning phones, experience significantly lower levels of dissatisfaction.

[Conor Friedersdorf: The trouble with boys and men]

In the United States, the combination of being young, engaged, and liberal has become associated with anxiety, unhappiness, and even despair. If you’re a progressive, wanting your kids to be progressive is obviously understandable. It might be good for the world, but it might not be good for their health. The co-authors of a study on the politics of depression argue that since around 2010, left-leaning adolescents may have “experienced alienation within a growing conservative political climate such that their mental health suffered in comparison to that of their conservative peers whose hegemonic views were flourishing.”

According to this line of thinking, liberals, because of their liberalism, have good reason to be depressed. After all, life is bad, America is bad, and the world is bad. As The Washington Post’s Taylor Lorenz recently put it on Twitter, “We’re living in a late stage capitalist hellscape.” But this is not true, at least not the hellscape part. Despite claims to the contrary, the United States is not experiencing civil war, nor is it under a dictatorship. It is a democracy, and one of the wealthiest that has ever existed. Although far from ideal, the American safety net has grown more rather than less generous, as measured by public social spending as a percentage of GDP. Unemployment is at its lowest rate since the 1950s. Child poverty, according to one comprehensive analysis, has declined by 59 percent in the past three decades.

Meanwhile, on cultural questions, the 2010s and ’20s have witnessed one of the most striking progressive shifts in American history. Conservative views are not hegemonic. In major cities and mainstream institutions, the cultural left has established a dominance that would have been unimaginable decades ago. New norms around social justice—or, more pejoratively, “wokeness”—now prevail in the medical profession, in the U.S. government bureaucracy, and in universities. What my colleague Helen Lewis calls “woke capitalism” has spread through corporations that might have otherwise been indifferent to justice, social or otherwise. The rapid acceptance of gay marriage has been nothing short of remarkable. Progress comes gradually and then suddenly. In an influential 2021 essay, the writer Richard Hanania laid out an exhaustive case for why “almost every major institution in America that is not explicitly conservative leans left.”

[Helen Lewis: Cancel culture and the problem of woke capitalism]

If this is true, why aren’t young conservatives more depressed? Hanania suggests that it’s because they care less about politics. But it’s also likely a question of demographics. On college campuses and in major cities, conservatives tend to be a minority. So they have little choice but to acclimate themselves to a liberal environment and learn to interact with those who are different from them. A 2021 Generation Lab/Axios survey of college students found that only 5 percent of Republicans would not work for “someone who voted for the opposing presidential candidate,” compared with 30 percent of Democrats. Meanwhile, 71 percent of Democrats say they would not date someone who voted for the other candidate, compared with only 31 percent of Republicans.

While progressive cultural norms face growing pushback, not just from conservatives but from otherwise left-leaning communities of color, progressives can take solace and pride in having won most of the great cultural battles of the 21st century so far. Despite these myriad successes and victories, however, young progressives—who are more likely to closely follow the news and care about it—have developed a habit of thinking catastrophically. The old media adage “If it bleeds, it leads” has now been repurposed for the era of equity and inclusion: Injustices are systemic, the thinking goes, and beyond the agency or control of mere individuals. White supremacy is embedded everywhere, not just in our institutions but in our language.

[Read: Why Democrats are losing Hispanic voters]

For people who view the world in these terms, being depressed is evidence of virtue. In the study on the politics of depression, for example, the co-authors note that “liberalism frequently signals a relatively greater awareness of social disparities that may be damaging to mental wellbeing, especially among less privileged groups who are the targets of societal neglect.” Meanwhile, the authors of a 2023 article in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology lament the implications of their own findings that knowledge of daily political events contributes to “worse psychological and physical well-being.” They offer the cautionary note that “although it is natural to want to feel better in the face of stress, feeling better can come with both benefits and costs.” Apparently, the cost of feeling better is that people may experience “less motivation to take political action” and may “divert their attention away from the injustice, thereby minimizing their likelihood of taking to the street.”

Such arguments are morally questionable, at best. Catastrophic thinking and negativity bias should not be encouraged, even if they lead to more just social outcomes. After all, how just can outcomes be if they come at the cost of the mental health of tens of millions of Americans who have been taught to expect the worst? As the writer Matthew Yglesias recently argued, “Mentally processing ambiguous events with a negative spin is just what depression is.” He adds that “our educational institutions have increasingly created an environment where students are objectively incentivized to cultivate their own fragility as a power move.”

However difficult it may be, Americans need to find ways to disengage from the constant assault of politics. In a culture where everything is “problematic” even if it’s not, the drumbeat of everyday political events too easily arouses worry, anger, and hopelessness. Indeed, focusing on supposed catastrophes, including those far out into the future, can have even more profound effects that are at once odd and unnatural. Remarkably, The New York Times’ Ezra Klein observed last year that the question he’s been asked more than any other in his public engagements is: “Should I have kids, given the climate crisis they will face?” This is the platonic ideal of catastrophic thinking. Klein’s interlocutors, among other things, are probably reading too much news.

If there were a way to consume the news without catastrophizing it, then that could be one path forward. But progressives in particular have trouble doing so. For them, to be aware of the ills of the world is to feel compelled to speak and act—or at least to feel. If we can’t all go news free—which is difficult in the world as it is—we can, at the very least, establish a truce with the news. Information and knowledge can be—and often are—quite great. But they are not unqualified goods. Sometimes ignorance is, in fact, bliss.