November 2, 2010
Peter Sloterdijk points out: ''At the beginning of the first sentence
of the European tradition, in the first verse of The Iliad,
the word 'rage' occurs.''
Homer was writing of the rage of the warrior hero Achilles. In the past decade, the world has been stunned at the rage of Islamic extremists. Today it is the rage of the American voter that astonishes the world and threatens to put Barack Obama's Democrats into the minority in the US Congress.
The image of children parading in front of the White House with an ''Obama Antichrist'' placard, the froth-mouthed Tea Party movement, with its wild claims that sharia is taking hold in American cities, the news report that the Secret Service is overwhelmed by death threats against the President, are all part of the angry election of 2010.
It's not that Americans have nothing to be angry about. Unemployment is at 9.6 per cent. There are 7 million fewer Americans in work today than three years ago, according to the Bureau of Labour Statistics.
And despite some recent gains, the median price of a house across the 160 biggest US cities today is $41,000 lower than it was three years ago, according to the National Association of Realtors - an 18 per cent loss for home owners.
And the number of Americans living in poverty rose by 4 million last year to a total of 43.6 million, the biggest number in poverty in the half-century for which the Census Bureau has statistics.
But the surprising thing is that Americans' anger is directed not at the creators of their pain, but at the people who tried to cushion it.
The Obama administration and the Democrats in Congress who rescued the banks, enacted a $787 billion economic stimulus and created a form of universal health insurance are the object of the anger. The problem, as the conservatives chant, is government or, specifically, too much government.
The rage-mongers of conservative talkback radio and cable TV have identified it as onrushing socialism, sponsored by the Democratic Party: ''We already know of at least five radical leftists currently advising the President of the United States,'' says Fox News anger-monger Glenn Beck. The de facto leader of the opposition, radio broadcaster Rush Limbaugh, rants: ''And just as Obama's doing, Hitler - well, even prior to Hitler - German socialists attempted to remake and order their country using healthcare as the springboard and the foundation.''
This derangement feeds the Tea Party, a movement of political fundamentalists of which one in eight Americans count themselves a part.
But are Americans today really any angrier than they have been in other moments of national distress?
Polling suggests that Americans have been this angry before. Indeed, 1994 was dubbed the ''Year of the Angry White Male.'' It was an anti-Clinton ''wave'' election that cost the Democrats a whopping 54 seats - about the same number the Democrats are expected to lose today.
And the conservatives don't have a monopoly on anger-peddling: ''When George Bush was in charge, you had people like Al Franken or Michael Moore, who on a daily basis were drumbeating anger about the state of the country, and they got their anger amplified by the blogosphere,'' points out commentator Sasha Abramsky of the Demos think tank in New York.
''And when Obama comes in, you see that anger in a sense inverted, and the right gets very, very angry.''
So anger is a standard tool, used by both sides of politics.
Is there anything new about it? One striking feature of rage 2010 seems to be that it is increasingly fact-proof.
A Democrat member of Congress, Brad Sherman, recently turned up to address a regular town hall-style gathering of his California constituents. The mild-mannered Sherman recounted his surprise when one voter said that the Department of Justice had a policy to not prosecute any black person who had committed a crime against a white. ''I am extremely sure that we do not have a policy at the Department of Justice of never prosecuting a black defendant if the victim was white,'' he replied.
Not only was the voter insistent, the crowd didn't believe Sherman. They booed him. Sherman's conclusion: ''I remember extremely angry people on both sides of the Vietnam War, but they were both watching pretty much the same news every night.
''Now, you can have people living in their own separate worlds with their own sources of facts or alleged facts.''
In a country where partisans can live in a self-selected world of partisan media, there is no set of agreed facts, only agreed points of conflict.
The future? American political anger is not going to go away, even if the economy improves. Because it works.
In the US system of voluntary voting, typically fewer than 40 per cent of voters will cast a ballot in a midterm election. So the ability to motivate turnout is decisive. Naturally, this works better for the party out of power.
This is the reason the Democrats are going to lose today. As the Pew pollsters explain in a study of the differences between the people who will be voting and those who will not: ''Non-voters express greater satisfaction with national conditions than do likely voters, and are more likely to approve of Barack Obama's job performance.''
And anger? While 19 per cent of non-voters say they are angry with the federal government, 27 per cent of likely voters are. That margin is big enough to be decisive. The motivating power of anger makes it uniquely valuable, and guarantees its place as the first - and future - emotion of politics.
http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/why-rage-not-facts-will-win-20101101-17abm.html