By Ben Shapiro
Wednesday, June 14, 2017
The Democrats have apparently discovered the fountain of
political youth: rage. Speaking last week, Senator Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.), a
crazed elderly loon recently spotted wandering around the country shouting
about wealth inequality while closing on a second vacation home, stated, “You
should be angry. Take your anger out on the right people.” Mayor Eric Garcetti
of Los Angeles, speaking to Politico,
explained: “If we only turn that anger inward, I fear we become the permanent
part of opposition. Over the next couple months, we’d better get our act
together.”
The Democrats are late to the game. During the 2016
election cycle, Republicans expressed their anger routinely and richly. Trump
himself cultivated that anger. As Ian Tuttle rightly wrote at National Review in 2015, “Many
conservatives are having their Howard Beale moment: They’re mad as hell, and
they don’t want to sit down and take it anymore.”
Now, anger is nothing new in politics. Anger has
dominated political discourse since the times of the Bible (ask Moses how he
felt about a stiff-necked people seemingly ready to throw him overboard every
few weeks). And some anger is justified. If you are angry at corruption in
Washington, D.C., you have every right to be. If you are angry at a heedless leviathan
grasping at your wages, that anger is justified. Even if you channel that
emotion in the wrong direction, we can at least understand the anger.
But something new has happened to American politics in
the last few years: Politicians have realized that the simplest path to power
is to humor everyone’s anger. If you
take someone’s anger from them, you’ve emotionally castrated them. More
important, you run the risk of driving them into the arms of someone who will
feed their anger — an anger that will now turn on you for the sin of having discounted that anger in the first place.
This is deeply unhealthy.
One of the great lies of psychology, dominant since the
era of Freud, is that coddling emotions leads to more emotional fulfillment.
Actually, coddling emotions leads to emotional unhealthiness. It leads us to
wallow in our emotions. Anger feels
good — and it feels even better when someone tells you that you’re not wrong to
be angry in the first place. If you crave emotional payoff, and if those around
you are taught to cosset your emotions, you’re likely to engage more and more
often in emotionally overwrought behavior. Bad psychologists indulge their
clients’ emotional states. Good psychologists ask whether those emotional
states are justified.
As social psychologist Jonathan Haidt (among others)
states, cognitive behavioral therapy, a technique used to treat those with
emotional disorders, is generally as effective as antidepressants for anxiety
and depression. Therapy consists of identifying illogical links in a chain of
thought that leads to an emotionally hazardous place. You might figure out, for
example, that you’re attributing motives to someone even though you have no
evidence about his motives, or that you overgeneralize, or that you’re looking only
at the bad things in your life rather than at the good things as well. Once
you’ve identified your own faulty thinking, you can stop the emotional runaway
train.
Politicians are trained to do the opposite.
Politicians spend their lives seeking the favor of
others. That means they find it wildly beneficial to nurse the emotions of
constituents — the customer, of course, is always right! It means that if a
constituent is angry, the best option isn’t to help break the chain of
emotional volatility — it’s to channel that volatility into the beating back of
enemies. If you wonder why generic congressional support is so low, but support
for local incumbents is so high, this is why: Your local congressman hears you and understands you, but the faraway government, full of cronies and
fools, simply doesn’t. On a national
level, such pandering has become endemic: It’s why Hillary Clinton presided
over the intersectional Olympics in 2016 (in which voters must be constantly
reassured that their anger at alleged victimhood isn’t illegitimate), and why
Trump spends inordinate time talking about Rust Belt voters (who must be
reassured that their anger at the system — and China and Mexico! — is
worthwhile).
All of which makes for a toxic politics.
The Founders knew that public passions were constantly at
risk of demagoguery. It’s why they weren’t democrats. They believed in a system
that would check passion with passion, and they believed in a system in which
each politician would be forced to answer to so many different factions that he
would be incapable of satisfying all of them. In Federalist No. 10, Madison eloquently laid out the problem of
demagoguery. His answer: gridlock. Federalism; various legislative entities;
passions incapable of satisfaction at the governmental level. Without such a
system, Madison wrote, the despotism of the majority would rule: “If the
impulse and the opportunity be suffered to coincide, we well know that neither
moral nor religious motives can be relied on as an adequate control.”
Madison wasn’t wrong to rely on the intricate framework
of American government as a bulwark against the perverse passions of the
majority. But he also relied on local interests to supersede national interest
— and diffusion of power to defeat virtually all interests. The growth of the
federal government has rendered such notions obsolete. On the one hand, local
interests can now dictate national interests — President Trump can cater to the
anger of a factory worker by promising tariffs that affect everyone in small
ways. On the other hand, every local politician can now campaign nationally —
Eric Garcetti barely presides over the potholes in Los Angeles, but he’s seen
as a national face for his party.
The result: a national pathology.
The only cure: Americans must get real. And that means,
unfortunately, that politicians must be brave. They must tell voters when their
anger is both misplaced and unearned. They must be willing to stand with truth
rather than with the power of sympathy. If they don’t, the anger that
politicians have attempted to channel for their own ends will eventually burst
loose in ways those politicians never anticipated.
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