Americans’ anxiety aimed at nation’s political system

changed to fear.”

Only 34 percent approve of President Barack Obama’s handling of the Islamic State, according to the poll, and more Americans are worried about terrorism than at any time since the aftermath of 9 /11.

This abrupt change in the climate explains why Hillary Clinton is suddenly talking tougher about terrorism and why the president is keen to get some good national security photo ops in before he leaves for vacation.

But I can’t shake the sense that the polls, politicians and my fellow pundits are mistaking a symptom for the disease.

We live in an anxious age. That anxiety runs like a river beneath the political landscape. Different news events tap into that river and release a geyser of outrage and fear. Right now, mostly on the right, it’s terrorism, but before that it was Mexicans illegally sneaking into our country. Sometime before that, there was the freakout over Ebola.

One common explanation for the anxious age we are in is that the economy is undergoing a profound transformation that is leaving a lot of people on the sidelines. But I don’t think economics explains everything. Seventy percent of Americans think the country is on the wrong track. Many of those people are doing just fine economically.

I think the missing piece of the puzzle is the fact that Americans — left and right — think that the folks running the country have an agenda different from theirs.

So Christie says, “We have people across this country who are scared to death.” For a great many of them, I suspect, the fear is not so much a fear of the Islamic State but a fear that our own government just doesn’t take terrorism seriously.

I suspect most conservatives think that if America marshaled the sufficient will to defeat the Islamic State, we’d make short work of it. Obama has no interest in such an undertaking. He reserves his passion for attacking Republicans or pushing his other priorities.

But the president himself is a symptom. The whole system seems to have lost its mind. That there’s even a debate about whether security officials should be allowed to look at the social media posts of immigrants is a sign that bureaucrats have such open minds their brains have fallen out.

Terrorism is a big concern, but this sense that the political system is unresponsive, unaccountable and operating on its own self-interested ideological agenda is bigger.

The failure of credible politicians to address this anxiety created an opportunity for Donald Trump. At least he’s willing to say Washington is stupid.