Popular anger denied makes way for populists

Torrey Orton
April 1, 2009

So here I am teetering on a fence, pulled unpredictably but certainly by the interdependent forces of rage and terror. The opportunity in the challenge of these times is to stretch my understanding, and maybe that of others, particularly in the ‘elites’ of socio-political practice, of how public anger works.

It’s not populist anger, it’s popular!!
One thing the anger is not is “populist’. It is popular in both original senses of the term. It arises from popular experience and it has achieved a certain popularity. The two together give it a new power. The popularity authorises, to an extent the experience of its popular roots. The apparent linguistic mistake in the US and UK of tagging bonus anger and remuneration rage as “populist” is interesting. There may be populist uses of broadly shared outrage sustained by recurrent anger roots. To call it “populist anger” from the start pre-empts possible outcomes by demeaning their shared sources – demeaning the popular experience of the world.

For example, let’s say I’m angry about the increasingly unfair results of our economy. This has been developing for decades, only now being demonstrable with some clarity (though, like climate, still disputed from certain established positions). On top of this falls the GFC emerging from the background of various other collapsing systems – food, fuels, climates, etc. – which enhances the emotional terrain of my existing anger. Creaming the cake of my multi-dimensional distresses is the news that those who created the increasing unfairness – the sometime Masters of the Universe celebrated by Tom Wolfe‘s Bonfire of the Vanities – see their remuneration for their collective failure as the first take from the bailouts which they have been forced to accept because they are too big to fail!! What?! This course of anger development is not the only pathway, I’m sure. Just mine.

However, many commentators I respect around the anglosphere take the path of populisting the popular anger. I see their ‘tell’, their pre-emption, confirmed when they argue that the object, the coalescing event, of the anger is a small number (minimal percentage of X zillions of bucks poured into the very organisations which are the source of the outrage) and therefore unworthy of strategic attention in the battle of / for the banks, and more recently the autocrats. It’s certainly possible, and fairly likely, that the anger will blow over as some have suggested recently. Disregard makes investment in emotions unrewarding to their owners, but it doesn’t reduce their energising sources. Often it intensifies them, or the owners’ perception of them, which does just as well for outrage production.

How anger works – the immediate and the referred / displaced anger (of rages and the like!!)
This popular anger is the visible, repeatedly reinvigorated, anger of public discourse driven by rage, which coalesces around particular acts (CEO pay, Madoffs, etc.). To the extent it takes violent forms – actual or virtual – it is bretheren to the small ’r’ rages which populate our daily lives as pungent but obscure and untraceable (in their origins) outbreaks of displaced feelings by individuals. Popular anger is a group phenomenon expressed in group events - demos, mass email attacks, etc. – and individual acts.

A small example of dis-placed anger: in our house we intensely dislike phone solicitations for charity or sales, with slightly less animus for the charity than the sale, and greatly more for those who just want to ask a few question as a cover for a sale by marketing slime!! I’ve placed us on the national not-to-be-called register and things keep coming, especially around dinner time. One of these happened yesterday from a charity. I called back today to ask them to take us off the call list (we give regularly by mail). I was rougher in tone and barely withheld anger than she deserved, except that they are the latest in a running series of these things which seem unstoppable. I did not know when I picked up the phone to call that I was actively angry. I was and she got a bit of it (I do the same to males – gender free aggressiveness).

You may have your own version. They are how rages sneak up and burst out. This one was cheap for all. For anger to characterise a group, a coalescent public event must be strong enough to attract some of the free floating anger otherwise expressed in little rages. A ‘strong enough’ public event must be a gross violation of collective sensibilities – moral, political, spiritual, or their surrogates. We are back to the likes of Madoff who was put away, Wagoner (GM) who got sent away, and Sir Fred Goodwin (RBS) who renounced his takeaway some weeks too late (April Fools to you…). Otherwise, there are acts of nature which we confuse with human agency – Katrina in New Orleans, wildfires in the hills around Melbourne – evidenced by the search for the blameworthy for unpredictable events, while disregarding the performance of the forces of saving those who remain! The appreciation they deserve.

Can we “channel” our anger, as Obama proposes ?
In principle and fact, yes….but, channeling requires the existence of viable channels, both within us and about us, pathways for practices whose meaning and functionality are understood by those concerned. In matters of public channelling, the pathways are seriously in doubt these days. Existing political means are debased and disregarded by such numbers as to be barely technically legitimate. Fulfilment of policy implementations is too often compromised by various alphabetical failures: PPP’s, ICT’s, MBA’s. This of course doesn’t prevent the exploiters of those pathways pretending, by disregarding, that they are legitimately where they are – Senator Fielding comes to mind as the grossest violation in Australia.

The fear generated by the possibility that basic systems are dysfunctional is so intense that almost no one will entertain it. The most convincing evidence that these channels are in doubt are the various new violences which assail us daily, but then the stats on such are not good, any more than they are on normal crime or a range of the other marginalia of modernity. Too hard to look for; too painful to see. On the 17th of January this year I saw two separate references to shooting bankers in the CIF section of The Guardian. (UK) And Sir Fred gave his separation pile back today….to who I wonder. Who’s fool day?