A mob overruns the U.S. Capitol, prompted by the country’s outgoing and now re-elected president. A lone gunman vents his wrath by assassinating health-insurance CEO Brian Thompson and is cheered on social media. These are two among many examples of the eruption of political violence.
U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren allowed that the shooting of Thompson was a “visceral response” to “vile practices” in the country’s health-care system, a response that should be taken as a “warning” not to push people too far. “Violence is never the answer,” she added, “never a justification for murder.” The immorality of murder had to be stated. It could not be taken for granted.
Rage is unleashed among us. Unrestrained anger and furious violence mark our troubled times and signal the broken state of the body politic. This is not history’s first outburst of political rage; thus, it is important for us to recognize the present frenzy for what it is.
What is this scourge?
Rage is raw emotion—a toxic mixture of frustration, fear, anger, and hatred that can trigger uninhibited violence. Fury suppresses reason while focusing narrowly on targets of hatred. More than just an individual aberration, it is a cultural phenomenon, a socio-political breach of existent norms and constraints, the vehicle of demagoguery, the engine of war propaganda, the recourse of political movements that have renounced nonviolence. Once unleashed, fury seeks vengeance by mayhem and annihilation.
Are we about to succumb collectively to a culture of hatred as we incline toward authoritarianism? Can we find a way out of these dark times, out of this neurotic attachment to the hate-driven construction of a scapegoat enemy?
Samuel Wells, in his 2023 essay entitled “The Emotion Standing in the Way of Peace,” depicts vividly the deadly dynamic of rage. In the exhilarating moment of an “intoxication of indignant furor,” when “a red mist descends,” we lose “all rational faculties.” All sense of restraint is abandoned in “our rampaging quest for destruction and vengeance.” We tell ourselves that destroying everything in our path will restore justice. Nuance is absent from this justificative story; the raw narrative reduces to a “bellicose roar”—a scream to resolve every wrong by obliterating an enemy.
Rage carries a mythic charge of avenging injustice. Erinyes were the avenging goddesses in ancient Greece, the personification of righteous justice, known variously as the Furies. Their enduring spirit is a formative expression of rage. “Among all the gods, monsters, and spirits,” Mike Greenburg observes, these goddesses of the dark realm “with their particularly harsh view of justice” were “among the most terrifying.” Their calling was to hunt, punish, and torment wrongdoers until they died in agony and then to continue tormenting them in the afterlife. Orestes, pursued for the crime of matricide, could be saved from the Furies and exonerated only by the intervention of Athena who ordered his trial by a panel of twelve Athenian citizens. The Furies were tempered by a nascent democratic act.
Yet, democracy itself is victim to rage when anger, stoked by political elites, becomes an omnipresent force of politics. Political tolerance, on which democratic society is premised, succumbs to a profound antagonism between “us” and “them.” Rage undercuts the citizenry’s commitment to democratic norms and values (See Steven W. Webster, American Rage: How Anger Shapes Our Politics. Cambridge University Press, 2020; and also Michael A. Milburn and Sheree D. Conrad, Raised to Rage: The Politics of Anger and the Roots of Authoritarianism. MIT Press, 2016).
The mythic force of righteous rage corrupts the pursuit of justice by resorting to means that pervert professed ends. The rhetoric of vengeance whips up an authoritarian insolence. Democratic values are debased, and democratic practices are diminished. Deliberation is silenced. Justice is defiled. The common good is sacrificed. Democratic polity is lost. Violence prevails, except by divine intervention, deus ex machina.
What explains this dysfunction?
The present demagogic moment reflects and exacerbates deep tensions created by economic displacement, demographic shift, and mass migration in a context of divisive new media that breed disinformation and construct opinion silos. The country’s loss of its imperial grip on world order is mirrored domestically in the destabilization of its timeworn racial hierarchy. Faith in the system is stretched to the breaking point. Tearing down a failing establishment feels right to the disaffected public that this November returned an authoritarian demagogue to the White House. Rage is the noxious product of systemic insecurity.
Wrath now dominates American politics. That has not always been the case, nor did it come about suddenly in the present instance. The country gradually changed over decades, argues anthropologist Peter Wood (Wrath: America Enraged, Encounter Books, 2021), from a nation that preferred self-control to one that relies on anger to wield political power. But to assume a national preference for self-control, Wood must overlook a history of national rage that includes, for example, the anticommunist McCarthyism of the late 1940s and the 1950s, the preceding Red Scare of 1917-1920, and multiple outbreaks of Ku Klux Klan domestic terrorism in the 1860s, 1920s-30s, and 1950s-1960s against Black Americans and other minorities. Unfortunately, Wood’s desire to celebrate American Greatness requires him to overlook these malign features of U.S. history.
Wood tells his story of civility’s current decline from the perspective of a scholar who sees the threat of righteous anger as emanating from the political left rather than the right. These are the barbarians, he believes, who use anger to acquire power and pervert American culture. Wood sees himself as a higher-education watchdog because the university is the point of origin, he maintains, for nearly all the bad ideas (such as critical race theory, White racism, climate alarmism, and gun control) that blight contemporary American culture. Wrath is a dangerous weapon of resistance, but in Wood’s view it is justified to save the country and its civilization from the ostentatious anger of progressive ideologues. They are the malignant force that provokes the justified wrath of ordinary Americans who have been denied “a legitimate voice in their own government” (p. vii). Echoing the interwar “conservative revolutionaries” who paved the way for fascism in 1930’s Europe, Wood stands for the defeat, and indeed the eradication, of progressivism in all its forms.
Here, boldly set out, is wrath’s circular raison d'être of rage on rage. Fury is acceptable in the service of the right cause, Wood insists, in response to the adversary’s perceived hostility. Those on the left, whom he accuses of taking sadistic delight in thwarting the popular will and harming the republic, deserve the wrath of the Furies. Yet, this harsh measure of justice is based on the troublesome premise of an absolute distinction between good and evil, a judgment at odds with the ethos of contingency, fallibility, deliberation, and the tolerance of a broader, more nuanced perspective that is at the heart of any meaningful democracy.
Taking the measure of social rage, sociologist Bonnie Berry observes that besides violence, per se, it encompasses “selfishness, rudeness, short-sidedness, aggression, intolerance, and narrow-mindedness.” The expression of rage, “replete with absolutisms and over-simplification,” is fraught with distortions and distractions irrelevant to addressing serious social problems. Demagoguery prompts a disenchanted public to target scapegoats based on their nationality, race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion, and other markers of difference. The distraction of these socially created enemies leaves the ultrapowerful in charge and unaccountable. All of this makes social rage appear bigger than it is, Berry argues. Its “vociferousness, exaggeration, loudness, and vivid imagery” is a matter of “impression management” that makes it seem “pervasive and powerful”—and thus beyond resistance (Social Rage: Emotion and Cultural Conflict, Taylor and Francis, 1999, pp. x, 13-14).
Yet, questions remain: Are we about to succumb collectively to a culture of hatred as we incline toward authoritarianism? Can we find a way out of these dark times, out of this neurotic attachment to the hate-driven construction of a scapegoat enemy?
The country’s thin veneer of democracy has not held up well to the surge of tyranny’s rage, a rage that has intensified.
Such questions are better raised than answered by Willard Gaylin with his focus on individual psychosis and paranoia, but he does point to social conditions, economic factors, and religious and political institutions that cultivate and exploit rage more broadly. The great danger, Gaylin concludes, lies with those who “cynically manipulate and exploit” the misery of people suffering “a sense of deprivation,” agitators who “organize and encourage hatred for their political ends” (Hatred: The Psychological Dissent into Violence, Public Affairs, 2003, pp. 215-15, 239-40, 246-7).
Rage over a deep sense of loss can be turned inward when a people no longer recognize one another as such, when they cannot empathize across differences and divisions, do not identify with the Other, and choose to render diversities in dehumanizing and demonizing terms to the point of losing sight of a shared humanity.
Domestic rage is akin to rage in international relations when the image of the enemy within reflects the projected image of the foreign enemy as the savage, the barbarian, the cause of trouble. The ancient Greeks protected their own polities from civil war by dedicating temples and altars to the Furies, which meant rage in hard times was redirected toward foreign enemies. Outsiders took on the bestial form that placed them beyond empathy. Yet, what may have preserved civility and contained rage in the ancient city-state does not hold in a disparate republic of over 300 million, where insiders are more easily marked as outsiders. As Rupert Brodersen suggests, resentment of the estranged Other produces rage without moral restraint or regard—indeed, a sense of moral imperative in an aggressor’s pursuit of justice, which can “plunge entire communities into chaos” when the target of rage is viewed as “undeserving of moral consideration” (Emotional Motives in International Relations: Rage, Rancour and Revenge, Routledge, 2018, pp. 4-7, 37-40). A baseless internet rumor that Haitian immigrants “are eating the dogs … eating the cats … eating the pets” of Springfield, Ohio residents, repeated by Donald Trump in a presidential debate witnessed by 67 million viewers, was an unprompted lie, observed Politifact, that reinforced negative stereotypes and incited dozens of bomb threats, “stigmatizing the town and its residents in the name of campaign rage.”
Where does that leave us?
On the one hand, the present rage promotes authoritarian oligarchy over democracy. On the other, it signals democracy’s failure. We are more accustomed to fighting wars in the name of defending democracy than to enriching democratic culture. Rage is attuned to the culture of war, a culture that permeates and informs daily life in the U.S. and diminishes civic life. Trump’s first administration was a dire warning and a clear and present danger—a bleak reminder of what we have been before and should not become again—but a danger that mattered too little to too many people this past November. If there is a lesson to draw from the outcome of the 2024 general election, short of giving up on politics, it is the need to cultivate a thicker, stronger democratic character. The country’s thin veneer of democracy has not held up well to the surge of tyranny’s rage, a rage that has intensified. Whether we can deepen the sources of authentic democratic citizenship in the face of four more years of a Trump presidency remains an open question.
