Patterns of outrage
This post is part of a series focused on political persuasion. Others in the series are linked from an introductory overview.
Present-day politics are commonly governed by negative emotions, such as fear, anger and disgust. So says conventional wisdom, and I agree. Analyzing these surging emotions is difficult, but here’s a framework that I think could help:
A huge fraction of significant modern politics boils down to outrage at patterns of events.
1. My best argument for focusing specifically on outrage is this — political issues sort roughly into three buckets:Â
- There are some things that are generally agreed upon, give or take levels of competence in carrying them out. For example, we all believe potholes should be filled, streets should be patrolled, and that there should be sufficient national defense to deter invasion.
- Some disagreements are long-running, with people either favoring or disagreeing with aspects of the status quo. You may think defense spending is much too high, much too low, or about right. You may think government should aggressively invest in nascent industries or that it shouldn’t “pick winners”. This is the realm of normal politics.
- Some things are viewed by some people as unacceptably beyond the pale. I.e., they are outraged, and they vigorously pursue change. And so a large fraction of political turmoil and change — especially if it’s sudden — is driven by outrage.
The impact of outrage can be traced through most of recorded history. Riots and revolutions are commonly driven by outrage. Recorded riots go back to ancient times. Revolutions — for example the American, Russian and Chinese ones — shaped the modern world.
2. What is this “outrage” of which we speak? Dictionary definitions describe outrage as a strong, negative reaction to one or more of:
- Perceived unfairness or injustice.
- Violation of actual or should-be taboos.
- Direct attacks on the outragee or the outragee’s group, often in the form of insults, actual or perceived as the case may be.
What that really boils down to is that outrage is the combination of two things — anger and a story about its target.
3. Also simple and amenable to modeling is the view that outrage amounts to:
- People getting greatly upset at …
- … the real or perceived combination of:
- A transgression.
- A victim.
- A villain.
Major classes of transgression include:
- Injustice and inequality in the application of government power …
- … especially hostile/coercive power such as policing …
- … but also benign/friendly power such as patronage jobs or localized spending.
- Gross incompetence or dereliction of duty, especially in anything related to public safety.
- Violating norms of “proper” or “ethical” behavior.
- Insult or denigration.
Perceived villains can include, for example: individual politicians, political parties, specific regulatory agencies, the “government” in general, big corporations, the “media”, rich people in general (or just the “super-rich”), or “global/coastal” “elites” in general.
Perceived victims might be grouped in categories such as race, class, region, gender, age or religion.
4. Now we get to some paradoxes. Outrage often seems ridiculous, as people get upset about seemingly trivial things yet stay calm about much bigger ones. Accordingly, political partisans feast on arguments like “If you’re outraged about A, it’s hypocritical to the max that you aren’t also outraged about B”. Indeed, a word has been coined for such arguments: Whataboutism.
The obvious explanation is this: Outrage about a specific incident usually isn’t just or mainly about that event. More commonly, it’s about a general pattern that that event or other happening supposedly represents. (The metaphor of the “final straw” that “broke the camel’s back” will sometimes apply.) Illustrative examples include:
- Any one terrible thing Donald Trump says could just be a gaffe. But 10 or 100 or 1000 of them? That’s a pattern.
- Hillary Clinton’s email missteps are no worse than many, many other senior officials’ security lapses. (For example, both Donald Trump and John Kelly have done worse.) But if you generally think she’s an unfit national security official, or a habitual liar — well, then maybe you want to lock her up for whichever of her missteps she could actually be convicted of.
Non-political examples may occur to anyone who’s ever been in a long-term romantic relationship. 🙂
5. But that analysis takes us to a second paradox, or at least a conundrum: If outrage is all about specific incidents triggering strong responses to patterns that have long seemed established, what actually pushes somebody over the edge into outraged fury?
That is a central question in all of politics. I wrote this series of posts largely to raise it … and also to lay groundwork for future answers. Please stay tuned.
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