Anger is all the rage these days in American politics. A recent New York Times column bore the headline “The Year of the Angry Voter,” while an earlier Washington Post story read “It’s Not Just Trump: Voter Anger Fuels Outsider Candidates.” Our nation’s choleric mood has not gone unnoticed in other parts of the world: “Why Are Americans So Angry?” a BBC think-piece wondered. Backed up by poll after poll purportedly showing that Americans are somehow angry (maybe because they are being prompted by the question), the conventional wisdom has settled on the idea that this is a nation today at wits’ end.
It is not just voters who have been subjected to psychological examination. Political analysts have partitioned the candidates into two emotional camps: the genuinely angry (Trump and Cruz on the Republican side, Sanders for the Democrats), and the feigned-angry (Clinton) or not-angry-enough (Rubio and Kasich). That the candidates in the first category have enjoyed such success—tapping into anger, stoking it, and riding it to electoral victories—is taken as proof that this passion is the defining feature of this election cycle. The politician in our febrile political climate has no alternative but to understand and confront anger, either to harness it for electoral gain or else, while acknowledging it, to somehow limit or counteract it by other appeals.
Yet for all this attention to the subject, our pollsters and analysts have been less than precise in their treatment of it. Not all of the anger associated with the three self-proclaimed outsiders is of a piece: The frustration that the Trump campaign simultaneously feeds and feeds off differs from the kind drawing people to Cruz and from that sustaining the Bernie Sanders surge. And upon closer examination, what has been labeled anger may in fact be a more complex mixture of emotions.
Trump’s appeal no doubt focuses on anger, but it also plays to other feelings. The Trump “program” is filled with reassurances full of upbeat hyperbole. “We’re going to take care of the economy,” he told supporters after his victory in New Hampshire. “We’re going to take care of jobs. We’re going to take care of all the things that I said—our border, everything, health care. It’s going to be so great.” Call this Hope and Change, Donald-style. Though Trump does not speak of slowing the rise of the oceans or healing our planet, he at least promises to Make America Great Again.
Trump’s different themes, as the exit polls and surveys now show, have resonated most powerfully among working-class white males, a demographic group that has not seen appreciable improvements in its fortunes over the past eight years or more. Still, to attribute the emotional reactions of the hardpressed middle class solely to anxiety over economic factors, as President Obama did recently in an interview with NPR, misses the specificity of anger.
The old political analyst Aristotle may have something here to teach to our modern pollsters and consultants. Anger, he instructs in his Rhetoric, is an “impulse . . . to a conspicuous revenge for a conspicuous slight directed without justification toward what concerns oneself or toward what concerns one’s friends.” The reaction of blue-collar workers, so far as they are angry, comes from their feeling of being disregarded. President Obama has been at the receiving end of this reaction from the moment of his famously contemptuous dismissal of those who “cling to guns or religion.”
Their anger has further grown in response to various forms of political correctness, which insults the working class’s intelligence, trying to force people to act or even think in stark opposition to what their experience and common sense has shown. And while these workers clearly believe that immigration policies and new environmental regulations have harmed their economic prospects, the core of their anger comes less from their economic plight than from the sheer insult of an elite, professing to be their protectors, who ignore or deny that these policies have had any adverse impact. Anger, as Aristotle stresses, is directed more at a specific person or target than at a condition. It is not just a matter of being screwed, but of someone screwing you. Trump has peeled the veneer from these buried insults and brought this anger to the surface.
Ted Cruz is more explicit in his anger. He has drawn the picture of a smug, patronizing, and detached liberal elite, comprised of career politicians, lobbyists, and the media. This “Washington cartel” uses government to protect and extend its place, power, and privilege, claiming to protect the equality of citizens while in fact displaying contempt for the American populace. Cruz operates under a general theory deriving from a strand of conservatism that helps explain who should be the objects of people’s ire. Government is supposed to be limited, but it is being expanded and perverted by those seeking advantage. The anger people feel toward this group, which Cruz both articulates and stimulates, is accompanied by a special kind of anger toward many of those in his own party, who, elected to take on the system, have betrayed their promises from want of conviction or courage. After all, as Aristotle observed, “we are angrier with our friends than with other people, since we feel that our friends ought to treat us well and not badly.”
The revenge that anger seeks would in both cases be satisfied by bringing down the establishment, which can be accomplished by the reunification of “that old Reagan coalition . . . conservatives and evangelicals and libertarians and Reagan Democrats all coming together as one.” Colored by the evangelical flavor of his support, Cruz has struck a righteous tone: “Morning is coming,” Cruz proclaimed in his victory speech in Iowa. “Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.”
Trump supporters, and to a lesser degree the supporters of Cruz, come by their anger from what they are feeling and experiencing in their own lives. It is an anger, especially in Trump’s case, that is visceral, unaccompanied by any kind of general theory or set of ideas. For Trump it is wholly outside of conservative thought, even if it sometimes confirms or conforms to certain conservative themes.
In his relationship to ideas, Bernie Sanders presents a different case. Sanders has personally been feeling his burn for over half a century, having been instructed by the teachings of a pre-packaged ideology of socialism just who are his mortal enemies. Sanders embraced this ideology as a young student and has not deviated from it one iota. To his mind, the economic problems and growing inequality facing America have nothing to do with the current policies of a progressive administration, except for the fact that it has not gone far enough in seeking to bring about a full political revolution to humble the rich capitalists. Obama’s call in 2008 for “fundamentally transforming the United States of America” turns out to be only a harbinger for Sanders’s promise of “transforming America” in 2016. Sanders is at once closer to and more distant from Obama than Hillary Clinton.
What is new for Bernie Sanders is the unexpected appearance, thanks in part to the Occupy movement, of a more receptive audience for his message. The vehicle for this change has been the rise of a strong emotion. “I am angry,” Sanders told Iowans in January (as if they could not see it), “and millions of Americans are angry.” Sanders found a specific target in the Wall Street banks, which by his account caused the Great Recession of 2008 and which, having been deemed too big to fail, were bailed out. This double insult provides the basis for Sanders’s best applause line: “The taxpayers of this country bailed out the illegal behavior of Wall Street. It is time for Wall Street to bail out the middle class.”
While Sanders now has this specific object on which to vent, the passion he is kindling does not really flow from any concrete experience encountered by his most passionate supporters, the university students who flock by the thousands to his rallies. Few if any of them have been slighted by a banker or have been shown disregard by a Wall Street broker. For them, the enemy has been defined abstractly through the lens of a set of ideas. Aristotle would call their emotion hatred or enmity rather than anger: “Anger is always concerned with individuals,” he wrote, “whereas hatred is directed also against classes.” Socialists and Marxists have always preached class hatred more than class anger. The bad news for America is that while those who are angry “would have the offenders suffer for what they have done,” those who bear enmity “would have the offenders cease to exist.”
Given these different passions and various kinds of anger, how should they be managed? The Stoics, concerned mostly with the peace of mind of the individual, advised never letting anger enter one’s consciousness in the first place. “Once it begins to carry us away, it is hard to get back again into a healthy condition,” Seneca argued, “because reason goes for nothing once passion has been admitted to the mind.” But while that option might be a possibility for the individual, it is unavailable in politics, and certainly in the political circumstance in America in 2016. Aristotle, ever the political scientist, accepted the inevitability of anger inside of political life and even saw that it could be put to some good, provided it was “made use of, not as a general, but as a soldier.” The problem in American politics today is that some of our prospective commanders in chief cast themselves in the mold of angry generals only too happy to lead an electorate of angry soldiers.
James W. Ceaser is professor of politics at the University of Virginia and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.
