The Politics Of Anger
People seem to be feeling their politics these days. All kinds of emotions are circulating: anxiety, anger, disgust, and fear, to name a few. One of the most pungent feelings humans experience in any context is anger.
Alison Dagnes’s book Super Mad at Everything all the Time (2019) looks at how American politics arrived at the destination of nationalized anger. These days, anger is motivating all forms of politics. Anger is an intense, highly potent and mobilizing emotion. It is externally directed and reinforces a desire to react against the subject of a negative stimulus or to punish those who could control or moderate the stimulus. The examples are too numerable of how anger manifests in modern political contexts ranging from the campaign speech to legislative antics.
For too long though, emotions were dismissed as an irrational feature of human reason. Even Plato and Aristotle privileged human reason to be devoid of emotional appetites as the pinnacle of human aspiration. However, more recent reconsiderations of human emotion have shown that human emotions do not function independently of reasonable cognition, but human feelings are, in fact, another function of it. Emotions are rational tools in service of human survival. Our brains are wired for constant threat assessment, to identify ‘friends’ and ‘foes’ in our immediate environments. Emotional sensations can range in intensity, and is why people tend to trust their feelings as salient information in politics.
However, emotions are vulnerable to manipulation. In the specific context of American politics, political campaigns offer an experience rich with information and emotive cues for voters and spectators. The spectacle of the American campaign or political speech are saturated with emotive cues to activate myriad negative dimension emotions (fear, anger, disgust, anxiety), which also makes misinformation take root much easier in the anxious mind.
From the subject position of a campaign, appealing to negative emotions proves effective in fundraising and mobilizing voters. In this landscape, politicians lean into emotional appeals. There is sharp asymmetry observed in the volume of emotional versus policy statements offered to the public. There is even sharper contrast in the volume of lies versus truth presented in the information available for public consumption. Modern journalism is contributing to this landscape with its adversarial “he said-she said” model of “both sidesism” in conveying politicians’ statements. The advent of digital platforms and social media has all but galvanized the emotional landscape by making it easier for users to self-select content and sort their social network accordingly. The American electorate is so acutely polarized that there are now two versions of a reality: the Republican and Democrat versions. The emotional underpinnings of anger are motivating citizens to lean into their own confirmation bias to see the world how they want to see it. The source of the problem is not in the media, journalism, or the politicians—but perhaps the vulnerability of information itself. Manipulated information influences the mind that consumes it. James Madison admonished on the power of factions, and currently, there is a dominant political faction trafficking in negative emotions, using the vehicle of misinformation to infuse them into most aspects of our political system.
