A Look at the "New Anger"

Which side is angrier, left or right? Stanley Kurtz reviews A Bee in the Mouth: Anger in America Now by Peter Wood.

Used to be that Americans admired the strong silent type, who kept anger under control unless grievously provoked.

Above all, Americans (especially women) kept anger at bay “lest it overwhelm the relations on which family life depends.”

But now we have the New Anger.

New Anger is everything that Old Anger was not: flamboyant, self-righteous, and proud. As a way to “empowerment” for ethnic groups, women, political parties, and children, New Anger serves as a mark of identity and a badge of authenticity.

And of course, the New Anger entered the culture from the left, finding its national political inauguration at the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

This New Anger leaked rightwards, notably in the conservative antipathy for Bill Clinton, but it is still much more prevalent on the left.

But if the left is angrier, why should that be? Wood reaches back to Adam Smith and his Theory of Moral Sentiments where deprivation of that “which we are possessed of” is a greater evil than deprivation of mere expectations.

The Left has seen its taken-for-granted cultural monopoly threatened, of late... So, over and above any character differences between liberals and conservatives, the freshness of the threat to liberals’ self-perceived “right to rule” evokes proportionally more deafening howls of rage.

Bloggers, of course, are a notorious source of rage, and many bloggers have succumbed to the delights of angry self-expression.

The New Anger can also stand analysis from the perspective of developmental psychology. In the Spiral Dynamics approach, Anger is the approach of red impulsives who experience themselves as helpless in a world of power. The question is why lefty green communitarians should find anger so compelling.

But the question is whether unfettered anger is the best way to fight the culture wars. There is no doubt that political change requires that the current powers-that-be should be delegitimized. But is uncontained anger the best strategy?

Conservatives have always believed that anger must be carefully handled. As JFK is reported to have said: Don’t get mad, get even.