Why do politics make people angry

The kind of anger he drew upon did not offer the immediate catharsis that Averill would one day describe. Rather, it provided something else: the opportunity to right an injustice, to feel like part of a meaningful fight. We have suffered, and we are not afraid to suffer in order to win our cause. One proposed flying to New York and holding a vigil at the headquarters of one of the most influential growers.

Another argued for making the trip by bus, to draw attention to their plight. Those were good ideas, Chavez said—but he proposed a plan that would require even greater sacrifice. What if the group marched from the dusty grape fields all the way to the state capitol in Sacramento, miles away? Joanne Freeman: America descends into the politics of rage. It was an audacious suggestion. Such a march would take almost a month. But if it was timed correctly, Chavez said, the protesters could arrive on Easter Sunday.

The Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee scoffed at the idea. Other organizers had spent decades trying to get workers to walk off the fields for just one day at a time, with little success. On March 17, , about 50 people gathered near Garces Highway with sleeping bags over their shoulders and clothes in paper bags.

The youngest marcher was 17; the oldest was Carrying signs, banners, and flags, they began their long walk. They covered 15 miles on the first day. That night, they slept in a makeshift camp. The next morning, they set out again: miles to go.

Scholars, in examining successful protest movements, have sought to explain how anger goes from the fleeting feeling that Averill studied to a pervasive, more powerful moral force. One clue to understanding how this shift occurs emerged about a decade ago, when historians began reexamining past rebellions, such as the mutiny against the East India Company in the mids. For decades, the company had ruled the Indian subcontinent by building armies of indigenous soldiers overseen by British officers.

Indian troops were treated poorly, paid very little, and forced to move far from their families and serve for long enlistments. These should have been conditions ripe for insurrection. But there were few uprisings. Most of the troops were Hindu or Muslim and thus forbidden from consuming beef or pork, respectively. As Rao looked deeper, he found something else: Many soldiers who rebelled had attended religious festivals immediately prior to mutinying, and had listened to religious leaders preaching about the historical oppression of Muslim holy men and Hindu prophets.

The rebelling regiments had thus seen their everyday frustrations remade as something more profound. Chavez was up to something similar: He made his followers see their discontent as part of a larger story about right and wrong. The sight of uniformed cops looming over poor migrants drew attention, and the police soon dispersed. When the marchers continued on, they found families waiting to greet them—and ready to join the protest.

By the end of the first week, dozens of families were marching each day. More than 1, people welcomed the marchers when they arrived in Fresno. As the group neared Sacramento, the crowds of onlookers ballooned to 10, Newspapers across California and eventually the nation sent correspondents to document the demonstrators singing defiant songs and carrying banners celebrating revolution.

Shops in San Francisco and Los Angeles had already stopped selling products made from grapes farmed in Central California when the march began. Soon, the boycott spread across the nation. As the marchers closed in on Sacramento, Chavez received a phone call from a grape-growing company.

The march did not succeed in extracting every concession Chavez wanted—the strike would go on—but it forced the nation to pay attention to the plight of migrant workers. By the time the protesters arrived in the state capital and celebrated an Easter Mass, Chavez had become the face of the California labor movement, and one of the most famous agitators in America. Today, he is lionized alongside Martin Luther King Jr.

But moral outrage must be closely managed, or it can do more harm than good. Stoking the emotion is easy. Learning how to channel it to useful ends, he told me, is harder.

For anger to be productive, at some point, it must stop. Victory often demands compromise. Young strikers, impatient at the pace of progress, began sabotaging produce trucks. There were reports that workers who had crossed picket lines were being threatened.

Buildings were set ablaze. Chavez had consistently preached nonviolence. As the discontent worsened, however, he realized that he was losing control. And so, on a grim February morning, Chavez announced that he was fasting to urge the movement to recommit to its principles. In a small room of an adobe-walled gas station, Chavez consumed only water.

He was a small man when his fast started, and as the weeks passed, he withered. Local newscasts began speculating that he might die. The fast continued for a week, then two weeks, then nearly a month. As Chavez starved, the violence in the fields tapered off. When he emerged after 25 days to join a Mass attended by thousands, Robert F. Kennedy prayed with the leader. One reason America is so angry is that anger works.

When channeled by someone like Cesar Chavez, it can lift up the disadvantaged and reshape a nation. But its power is not reserved for the righteous. When less scrupulous leaders tap into our rage and use it for their own ends, the emotion can be turned against us, in ways large and small, often without us even realizing what is going on. Corporate America, for example, has long sought to profit from our anger.

Robert Sutton was a young professor, about to start teaching business at Stanford, when James Averill published his study on Greenfield. For Sutton and others, the idea that you could examine an unruly emotion with scientific rigor was fascinating. Sutton nosed around and found a debt-collection agency whose executives were as fascinated as he was by the new scholarship on anger. They, too, had read the studies—and were using the social science to get rich.

Sutton persuaded the agency to let him enroll in its training program for credit-card debt collectors and then allow him to work the phones alongside its employees, who together made , calls a month.

Express mail! As soon as a debtor started screaming back, the collector would switch tactics and become soothing and accommodating. Jones, calm down. Excuse me. The bill collectors were hardly alone in exploiting the new understanding of anger.

Harvard Business School devoted a course to using anger in negotiations. Take, for instance, a moment in when Apple had temporarily fallen on hard times and Michael Dell had suggested that the company should simply fold and return what cash it had to shareholders.

Rarely is it a force for social good. Nowhere has that been more evident than in the media industry. If the bill collectors figured out how to use interpersonal anger to their advantage, the cable-news business perfected the monetization of moral outrage.

In , a television reporter named Geraldo Rivera began hosting a daytime talk show. It failed to attract much attention in its first year.

Then he tried a new formula, inviting white supremacists, skinheads, and black and Jewish activists into his studio, all at the same time. A brawl broke out. The episode was a hit. Broadcast news had been constrained by regulations that enforced fairness and encouraged decorum. Cable executives, however, could do whatever they wanted. One former Fox producer I spoke with said that his network realized early on that if watching anger was entertaining, then getting a chance to participate in it—hearing your indignations given voice by a bombastic host—was irresistible.

Executives from other cable-news channels publicly disdained his approach—and rushed to imitate it. The method at both networks was, and is, to tap into our reservoirs of moral indignation.

The point is to keep viewers tuned in, which means keeping them angry all the time. No reconciliation, no catharsis, no compromise. The more recent rise of social media has only further inflamed our emotions. On social media, the old rewards of anger—recognition of our unhappiness, resolution of our complaints—are replaced with new ones: retweets, likes, more followers, more influence.

The targets of our rage, meanwhile, tend to be strangers less inclined to hear us out than to fire back. The democratic nature of social media has given previously marginalized groups new outlets to express their outrage and to translate anger into action. Lawyers relied on Twitter and Facebook for help mobilizing in support of immigrants to the U.

But the political actors who use anger to more cynical ends still have the upper hand. Political consultants have long been among the most devoted proselytizers of rage. In , the presidential candidate George H. Anger is now de rigueur on the campaign trail, weaponized by Republicans and Democrats alike. His would-be successor, Hillary Clinton, found herself similarly constrained by misogynistic stereotypes.

All of this anger-mongering in campaigns, whether subtle or overt, has had a corrosive effect on American democracy. A poll by The Washington Post found that 35 percent of voters in battleground districts of the midterm election chose the word angry to describe their feelings about the campaign; 24 percent chose patriotic. Without anyone to channel that anger, it can turn into a destructive obsession.

In the fall of , Larry Cagle, an English teacher in Tulsa, Oklahoma, became so furious that he started plotting to throw his school into chaos. In Florida, where he taught previously, it was almost twice that amount. Cagle had been so angry at the school system for so long that his wife had instituted a rule: No ranting at the dinner table.

I love getting feedback, positive or negative, so send it along to rport forumcomm. I try and sometimes fail to respond to everything I get, even if it doesn't make it to the column. Garrett writes, in response to my column headlined, " Conservatives believe they can use big government to win the culture war ": "Excellent diagnosis in today's article! This was especially interesting for me as I've had the opportunity to witness some of the disappointing change over the years I'm The question I've been pondering for some time, 'How do we get back to what conservatism used to be.

Humans have a bad habit of remembering the past as better than it actually was. Nostalgia tends to inspire us to put on the proverbial rose-colored glasses. I don't want to do that with conservatism, believing there was some time when right-of-center politicians were paragons of limited government and fiscal restraint.

Still, there's no doubt in my mind that, in the Trump era, a large faction of the conservative movement has turned their backs on principle for the sake of culture war expediency. Port: Proposed policy at UND would classify misgendering as discrimination. Friday Mailbag: Vaccination choice, school dress-up days, oil pipelines, and innumeracy of the national debt debate.

Port: I don't blame hospitals for reticence to release vaccination numbers. I tend to agree with National Review columnist Kevin Williamson's diagnosis of the status quo : "[T]he economic incentives of right-wing media more or less ensure that Trumpism will remain enough of a force within the Republican Party for long enough to cripple it for a generation," he wrote this week. The unfortunate truth is that Trumpism is snake oil.

There's a big market for that flavor of snake oil, and thus money to be made. What we need is people who think of themselves as conservatives to stop being obsessed with personalities and the news-as-entertainment schtick and start believing in ideas again. Collin writes: " Your article on term limits and a cognitive test [for aging politicians] was interesting and provocative.

I do have a couple of points to offer. Regarding term limits and the idea that the 'solution' is to vote them out. Unfortunately, the Republican Party is loathe to replace candidates who should not be endorsed see Luke Simmons. There is no doubt in my mind he would have been re-elected had he been left alone. Rioters scale a wall at the Capitol on January 6, Credit: CC image via Flickr. The researchers surveyed roughly 1, people online from across the political spectrum, presenting them with a series of mock news stories about a recent political debate.

They discovered that when it comes to politics, anger may lead to more anger. Those same steaming partisans also reported that they were more likely to get involved in politics, from attending rallies to voting on Election Day.

Anger and politics in the U. Stapleton, who is not related to the Colorado political family, wanted to find out just how contagious those kinds of emotions could be. He will start a position as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Notre Dame in the fall.

To find out how the emotions of politicians might rub off on their supporters, he and Dawkins ran an experiment. The duo wrote a series of news stories about a debate on immigration policy between two candidates for an open Congressional seat in Minnesota.

Unbeknownst to the study's subjects, neither the candidates nor their debate were real. In some cases, the faux politicians used language that tipped into outrage although it might still look tame in the current political landscape.