The Politics of Anger
As election season heats up, anger is becoming a powerful force in politics. Its crucial to think critically about the relationship between the two,:Harnessing the power of collective discontent
Over the last week I’ve been reading a fascinating book that explores the political aftermath of the fall of communism in Poland. It’s essentially a deep dive into how what began as a massive worker’s strike that led to the collapse of communism in Europe took a hard right turn to become an extremely conservative political party in the following decade.
I was interested in this topic for a number of reasons. My dad’s parents are both from Poland, they left after the war. I’ve also visited the country a number of times and made a handful of friends. Those personal connections have kept me a bit more tuned in to the political climate of Poland than other countries so I was intrigued to learn a bit more about how it got to where it is now. But mostly, I’m just fascinated with social history and how it can teach us to pay attention to shifts and trends in the present.1
The central argument of the book, and the topic I want to think about today, is the role of anger in politics. The author draws a distinction between two types of systems: those of transparent power and those of opaque power — as well as the role of social anger within each. The first, transparent power systems, are when everyone knows who is charge (such as under state communism). One party = one target to direct your anger when things go wrong. However, in opaque power systems (such as ours) it’s not as clear who is in charge (or at fault). We have to “learn” who to blame. In this system, social anger is organized.
Think about it practically for a second. When something goes wrong in our democratic society, we have a dozen different voices jumping in trying to tell us why and who to blame. It’s why everything becomes an ideological battleground in our politics. It’s all about organizing our anger.
This is how bike lanes become a wedge issue in the Toronto mayoral election.
Anger is a complex emotion. We don’t really know what to do with it in our culture. Good research seems to suggest that suppressing anger isn’t healthy for us in the long run2; but expressing it too much is considered aggression. So we’re left to find a comfortable middle ground. A little bit, but don’t overdo it. It’s like the cloves of our emotional spice rack.
From what I understand3, anger may be rooted in our response to threats. It’s the fight part of ‘fight, flight, or freeze'. This means that it’s related to our survival instinct as humans. It also means anger is a completely natural thing to feel in response to something that is threatening or hurting us. It’s also, as the author of the book notes, the feeling that makes people the most politically available.
And this is the point I want to hit: when a system is broken or failing, people need to put their anger towards something. Exclusionary politics has always done this well, often turning people’s anger towards minority groups. It’s how Poland made the political shift that it did in the aftermath of communism; by turning people’s anger towards a system that wasn’t providing for them into moral blame (this is what happens when communists and atheists run things). It gave their anger an easy target.
It’s something I’m worried about here. The cost of living is pushing to a breaking point (and has blown past it for many). Housing, food, healthcare, employment, education, the environment — its all in decline. This makes people angry — and rightfully so. The question becomes who is organizing all that social anger? And towards whom is it being directed?
Now, I’m not suggesting that the answer is to try and stoke up our own rage fuelled fire in response. Remember, the goal is a healthy approach to anger. A good therapist working with an angry patient would help them learn to identify triggers and learn how to express that anger in a healthy and productive way. Perhaps our role as activists and change agents is to do something similar with social anger: to help our communities make sense of the anger they’re feeling within a collapsing system and show them how to express it in healthy and productive ways.
This can look like all sorts of things but an important factor is that it needs to be organized. As said, anger makes people politically available. We need to use those moments of anger to onboard people to the movement and give them ways to get meaningfully involved. Help them put that anger to good use.
May we not let exclusionary and dangerous politics be the sole organizing force of the social anger of our time. May we instead seek to build and strengthen networks of inclusion and solidarity with people by giving them healthy and productive expressions for their anger.
Thanks for reading to the end
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Important caveat: history is not prescriptive. Just because a + b led to c in one time and place doesn’t mean the same thing will happen again in another. History is much too nuanced for that. But, we can learn about human behaviour and how societies react and reshape in response to certain things. It’s not prescriptive but it can still be very valuable in helping us make sense of the present.
A quick search on this topic and the consensus seems pretty clear that suppressing anger can be damaging. However, its pretty clear that just letting your anger out all the time is also not the right solution. Emotional maturity is not about suppressing feelings, it’s about healthy expressions of those feelings.
I don’t offer this as a definitive understanding of anger. As I said, it’s complex. While there is some sort of overlap between the emotion of anger and our fight response to threats, I can’t say whether or not that is a full or complete way to understand it.