/ Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call
Twenty years ago, observers worried that apathy was the biggest threat to the American psyche. Today, that seems quaint. How can Americans turn off the outrage machine that urges them to get angry about . . . well, everything?
By Harry Bruinius | Christian Science Monitor
Anger has long been seen as a particularly dangerous emotion. Poets and theologians in the West have long warned of anger’s social devastations. Homer sang of a rage “black and murderous, that cost the Greeks incalculable pain” in “The Iliad.” The Roman Stoic Seneca called anger a “hideous and wild” emotion that “drags the avenger to ruin with itself.” Roman Catholics have considered it one of the seven deadliest of sins.
Such traditional warnings are part of the reasons many Americans today feel a deep sense of unease, perceiving that the nation is now descending deeper into what many call a politics of rage. It threatens what observers have for centuries seen as America’s boundless optimism, its particular civic faith that the future can be better and that Americans have a duty to make it that way.
“For all her material comforts and ubiquitous technological devices, America is a profoundly uneasy place today,” says Jeff Deist, president of the Mises Institute, a libertarian think tank in Auburn, Ala. “This results directly from what we can only call the politicization of everything – from where you live and what kind of work you do to whom you date to whether you get married.”
Such a “politicization of everything” is a malady creating self-segregating, politically homogenous communities throughout the country, where even neighborhoods are becoming red or blue.
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Politics has been straining more friendships and marriages, surveys say. Republican pollster Frank Luntz was troubled to find in one of his surveys exploring political dialogue that about a third of the 1,000 voters surveyed said they stopped talking to a friend or family member after the 2016 election. More than half of Democrats say the Republican Party makes them “afraid,” a Pew Survey reported in 2016. Nearly as many Republicans say the same of the Democratic Party.
Just two decades ago, the conservative thinker William Bennett wrote a cri de coeur about “The Death of Outrage” over President Bill Clinton’s sexual indiscretions. He argued that a culture of apathy and irony that ignores such immoral behavior would cut to the very fabric of democracy, a delicate political system that requires citizens with a sense of civic virtue.
It sounds almost quaint today, even as crime has now reached historic lows and the US economy remains the most stable and wealthy in the world.
