I'm lifting another article from the National Journal. This concerns the difficulties of trying to contain an electorate that is not just angry, but seemingly conflicted about what it is angry about and who it is angry at.
As with the other related posts, this illustrates the problem Madison addresses in Federalist #10. How does a constitutional system restrain the passionate multitude? And how does it do so without violating individual freedom.
Anger Management
The public obviously is angry. But where Americans direct their rage is unpredictable.
by Paul Starobin
Saturday, Jan. 30, 2010
Toward the end of 2009, about three weeks before he quit his uphill bid for a sixth term in the U.S. Senate, Democrat Christopher Dodd of Connecticut reflected on the vagaries of anger among the citizens of his state, who are worried about jobs and housing prices, the collapse of Wall Street, and America's wars in faraway lands. It was a ripe subject, for, as Dodd readily acknowledged, "people are angry, and angry at me." He provoked their wrath when Countrywide Financial gave him a VIP discount for a home mortgage -- and even more when he neglected to mind the financial store as Senate Banking chairman and turned his energies to a futile quest for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination.
National Journal shared with Dodd a sampling of the scathing things that his Connecticut constituents were saying about him. From a hair stylist: "He's worthless. I'm trying to be very, very nice." From a small-business owner: "I hope the bastard gets wiped right off the map. Whoever he's running against, I'm voting for that person."
The senator, in response, suggested that the anger was less personal than it seemed. "You and I have never seen anything like this," he said of the awful economy, in particular. "Their reflection about how they feel about people in public life," he said of his state's citizens, "is more of a reflection of how they feel about life."
That was a philosophical answer and not a bad one, even if it served to get him off the hook a bit. Anger is one of the trickiest of all political and social sentiments. Although it is easy enough to take a thermometer reading of public anger -- and everyone can agree that the mercury stands at a high level right now -- it is devilishly hard to predict the path that the anger will take.
Anger can be a constructive or a destructive force. It can be the glue for a peaceful political movement, on the left or right, that strives for reforms. Or it can be the raw material for a charismatic demagogue bent on accumulating fame, power, and riches. It can cause crime. In some countries, it can fuel a revolution, and in others, it may simply dissipate into the Internet ether or, according to the dictum that depression is merely anger turned inward, it can boost the sale of Prozac.
What will it be, America, this time around? Where will your anger go? Whom are you going to beat up -- your neighbor, your dog, your banker, your representative in Washington, your president, or yourself?
An effort to answer that question involves, necessarily, some guesswork, but the exercise is not all guesswork. This much is certain: Woe to anyone in the public arena who fails to take the anger seriously. Just look at the indelible example of Democrat Martha Coakley, beaten in the January 19 special election to fill the late Edward Kennedy's Senate seat in Massachusetts. Coakley, the commonwealth's attorney general, ran a lackadaisical campaign, allowing the insurgent Republican candidate, Scott Brown, to become the vessel for popular anger and pull off a historic upset in one of the nation's bluest states.
And one other lesson: In this incendiary environment, almost anyone can become a convenient target of blame and be singed by a sudden burst of flames. Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke's appointment to a new term, which at first looked like a lock, ran into trouble from senators desperate to protect their own political hides who are faulting him for reckless policies leading to 2008's financial meltdown.
The economic decline began well over a year ago -- long enough for certain patterns to be discernable. Let's consider some places where the anger is -- and is not -- apparent, and where it might be headed.
Crime
It seems fair, if somewhat simplistic, to say that anyone who commits a crime, and particularly a violent crime, is angry. When financial and housing markets and the wider economy tanked in late 2008, stoking the fury of laid-off workers, mortgage holders, and retirement savers, and wreaking havoc in communities across the country, many criminologists and others predicted a crime wave. "The economic crisis has clearly created the conditions for more crime and more gangs -- among hopeless, jobless young men in the inner cities," a New York Times editorial declared.
And yet, no such crime wave has occurred in the worst economic times since the Great Depression, with unemployment hovering around 10 percent (the rate, in fact, approaches 20 percent if the definition of the jobless is expanded to include those who have stopped looking for work or can find only part-time employment).
To the contrary: In the first half of 2009, all property crime fell by 6.1 percent nationally compared with the first half of 2008. Motor-vehicle theft plummeted by 18.7 percent and burglary by 2.5 percent, according to the FBI's uniform crime report. Arson dropped by 8.2 percent. Violent crime decreased by 4.4 percent, with robbery declining by 6.5 percent. Even in Los Angeles County in California, a state especially hard hit by the recession, murder and car theft dropped sharply.
Consider, too, the broader perspective. As Heather Mac Donald, an analyst at the Manhattan Institute, a right-leaning think tank, notes, crime is at its lowest level in nearly a half-century. In her mind, this statistic is a death knell for the liberal theory of crime as a function of economically traumatic circumstances.
Her assessment may go too far. Many factors influence crime rates, including smarter law-enforcement strategies, which is the explanation that Mac Donald favors for the drop in crime, but also demographics, such as a waxing and waning of the groups most likely to commit crimes.
Surely, though, there is a heartening lesson here: America, and Americans, can take a punch. Other countries, Italy most recently, have experienced riots and other violence linked to their dismal economies, but the United States has not. We may be spitting mad, we may feel (for good reason) less economically secure, we may think (as opinion surveys suggest) that the future is not going to be as bright as the past, and we may yell and scream at town hall meetings, but at least we are not stealing from or bludgeoning one another. Under stress -- make that considerable stress -- we are behaving with greater civility than usual. Several pats on our back, please.
Depression
The Great Recession may not be causing a crime wave, but it does appear to be responsible for a surge of mental health ailments. Unemployed individuals were four times as likely as those with jobs to report symptoms of depression and other forms of mental illness, and workers who were forced to take pay cuts or work fewer hours were twice as likely to report such symptoms, according to an October 2009 survey conducted for Mental Health America and the National Alliance on Mental Illness in collaboration with the Depression Is Real Coalition. The survey also found that the unemployed were likelier to have thoughts of harming themselves and to abuse alcohol or drugs.
If the trend line of past economic downturns holds, this one will probably increase the suicide rate -- the ultimate expression of anger turned inward -- as well as domestic abuse, such as wife-beating, David Shern, a Ph.D. psychologist who is president of Mental Health America, said in an interview.
Women are generally likelier than men to become depressed because of an unforeseen economic trauma, Shern said. In simple psychological terms, he continued, people are either "internalizers" or "externalizers" -- likely to turn their anger against themselves or turn it outward, "when individuals are placed in unpredictable situations or situations that dramatically disrupt what they think is their normal life course."
Although science cannot claim to have a precise understanding of the diversity of factors that causes the blues, the idea that anger is a typical part of the mix has common sense on its side. Depressed people "often talk about being angry with themselves because they have not accomplished or achieved or done what they think they should have," notes a training guide that Barry Greenwald, a psychologist in Illinois, developed for mental health professionals.
The problem may well be self-inflicted, as Greenwald's guide says, a failure "to live up to some internal standard of who or what you are supposed to be." But the social culture is also implicated, because our idea of who or what we are supposed to be tends to come, at least in part, from values inculcated in us by our families, our communities, our nation, and even the entertainment industry. In this respect, modern-day hypercapitalism may bear part of the blame. In a society that often seems to abide by the dictum of the late football coach Vince Lombardi that "winning isn't everything; it's the only thing," a lot of folks are going to feel like losers when, even through no fault of their own, a decent job is next to impossible to find.
Today's economically caused blues may not be just about the current downturn but also a product of the long-term, slow-burn decline in economic mobility since the 1970s. Although the U.S. ranks with Norway as the planet's most affluent society, measured by wealth per capita, it generally does not place high on researchers' so-called happiness indexes: The U.S. placed 20th among 148 nations in a measurement of "average happiness" for the years 2000 to 2009, reported sociologist Ruut Veenhoven of the Netherlands, who put together the list. The leaders were Costa Rica, Denmark, Iceland, Switzerland, and Canada.
Among the more alarming trends is an increase in mental health problems among college students -- the cohort that is a natural wellspring of idealism and positive feeling in any genuinely healthy society. Campus counseling directors are seeing a steady increase in the number of students asking for help for "major psychological problems" -- such as depression, suicidal thoughts, and anxiety disorders -- as opposed to "the normal developmental concerns characteristic of this age group" -- such as "relationship problems" and "identity issues" -- according to a 2009 survey conducted by Robert Gallagher, a former vice chancellor at the University of Pittsburgh.
More students are "harming themselves, pulling their hair out, cutting themselves," and trying to "drown their sorrows" with alcohol, Gallagher said in an interview. "The economic situation," he said, "adds a level of stress" for college students, especially for those at high-powered, elite universities, who tend to have "somewhat unrealistic expectations, even in good times," about their path to success.
Youth activism was a valuable source of energy for Barack Obama's "Yes, we can" presidential bid in 2008. Now, should the bad economy continue, the question is whether that optimism will congeal into a corrosive cynicism, an attitude infused with suppressed anger. In a 2009 study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, economists Paola Giuliano and Antonio Spilimbergo found that "individuals growing up during recessions tend to believe that success in life depends more on luck than on effort, support more government redistribution, but are less confident in public institutions. Moreover, we find that recessions have a long-lasting effect on individuals' beliefs."
Political Movements
If the folks who have the blues represent the "internalizers" of personal anger, using psychological parlance, then today's mad-as-hell "tea partiers" may be a full-throttle example of the "externalizers." They are a prime case in point, circa 2010, of a venerable tendency for anger to find outward expression in the political culture. Although it would be nice to think that hope and optimism typically inspire political movements, in reality, movements such as these are likelier to start with raw anger, like oxygen to fire.
Furious citizens started the tea party movement as a spontaneous protest against Washington's taxpayer-financed bailouts of Wall Street banks and industrial giants such as General Motors. Although a conservative, anti-government hue tints the movement, it was not, at least in the beginning, self-consciously partisan. Tea partiers were steamed at George W. Bush's Treasury for its rescue of the banks; they are steamed at the Obama administration for what they say is Washington's effort to take over the health care system.
A primal anger, especially when it motivates a crowd acting in unison, is often associated with idiocy -- so it is not surprising that the media often portray tea partiers as a gaggle of bumbling and blustery know-nothings, captive to rancid prejudices about President Obama and all other targets of their free-floating animus.
This portrait, though, misses a certain canny intelligence in the tea party movement -- and to understand that point, it is helpful to return to the original tea party gang, the tax-protesting "mobsters," dabbed with Indian-like red paint, who dumped King George's tea into Boston Harbor on a December day in 1773. Sophia Hollander has written with clarity on this subject in "The Real Boston Tea Party," an Internet posting. "One of the oddest and most nuanced protests in American history, the Boston Tea Party was a riot without violence," she observed. "The uprising destroyed a fortune in private property while taking care to replace a single lock, inadvertently broken."
In Hollander's judgment, the Boston Tea Party "represented a uniquely American means of protest -- blending elements of ritual, rioting, and respect for legal procedures." That conclusion is overstated -- fired-up crowds in other lands have also at times displayed what seems like a surprising discernment. Still, this tradition is alive and well in America, a proud heritage of Jeffersonian populism that in the 19th century took the form of struggling small farmers directing their ire at the railroad giants that dictated prices for crop shipments. This is the eternal anger of those who feel that their fates are at the mercy of "the big," of large, remote forces beyond the control of the people.
Chris Ford, a leader of the tea party movement in Connecticut, is without doubt an angry guy. His rage is focused on the big-spending, high-taxing, self-aggrandizing political establishment in Washington. But he is certainly not a yahoo. A product of the public schools of Greenwich and the University of Connecticut (Storrs), Ford, 61, is a semiretired commercial lobsterman -- "one of the best," he said with a glint in his eye in an interview last November at a diner in Woodbury. Lobster-catching, it bears saying, is not about dumb luck -- this is hazardous, painstaking labor, requiring intimate knowledge of terrain and tide and tactical flexibility in the face of the pervasive uncertainty of the deep.
The folks who show up at the Connecticut tea party rallies, Ford said, are like him, "independent-contractor" types who either develop survival skills or go out of business. The group includes "carpenters, electricians, masons, restaurant owners, [and] printing company owners," he said.
Ford expresses his anger slyly, in humor and mockery. At the end of 2008, he and his tea party comrade-in-arms, Art McNally, a retired computer consultant, created the "Dump Dodd" campaign, exemplified in a button with a picture of "Joe the Voter" unloading a white-haired, money-bag-clutching Dodd from the back of a dump truck. "We're portraying Dodd as more of an incompetent buffoon," Ford explained. "He's not evil."
Ford and McNally are Republican-leaning political conservatives, but the Dump Dodd movement struck a chord with some grumpy Connecticut Democrats as well. Dodd's hasty January exit gratified the duo, naturally, but it has only boosted their appetite for more scalps. "We got Dodd to turn and run," McNally said in a phone interview the week after Dodd's retirement announcement. "We're not stopping. November 2010, we want to get rid of all incumbents. In Connecticut, it happens, they are all Democrats."
Another vulnerable Senate Democrat, Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, is also high on the hit list of tea party activists. In their favor is an especially sour climate in Nevada, where unemployment exceeds the national average and nearly two-thirds of all mortgaged residential properties are under water -- that is, worth less than their outstanding loan balance. Tea party activists contributed significantly to Brown's improbable victory in the Massachusetts special election as well. Sen. Barbara Boxer of California, a Democrat elected in 1992, could also prove vulnerable to the tea partiers' efforts to oust incumbents.
Liberals Are Angry, Too
The latest question confronting the tea party movement is whether it can make the kind of transition that often trips up campaigns born of reflexive grassroots anger -- the shift from a purely "anti" focus to a positive one, with efficient organizational machinery. The tea party folks most ardently hope for seismic change, "a revolution" that takes down the ruling political elite, as Ford said. But no such revolution appears in sight, for all the anger on the streets. America has never lent itself to revolutions -- the so-called American Revolution was more typical of an anti-colonial revolt than a change on the level of the French Revolution, say, which destroyed a long-existing order by root and branch and forcibly reorganized society under a new set of principles.
A more likely prospect is for the tea partiers to take over the Republican Party -- or a least to become a weighty presence in it, much as disaffected conservative Christian evangelicals, long on the political margins, did in the 1970s and 1980s when they became a crucial bloc in Ronald Reagan's coalition. Should the tea partiers' plans not work out, they can always form a new political party, but that is a difficult route in a system stacked to favor the two established parties.
Liberal anger, too, is a live current, especially evident in attacks on Wall Street, a staple of the liberal blogosphere in sources such as The Huffington Post, whose namesake founder, Arianna Huffington, is spearheading a campaign for Americans to move their savings from large financial institutions to small, Main Street, community banks because "too-big-to-fail banks are profiting from bailout dollars and government guarantees, and growing bigger," as she wrote on her website. She added, "Think of the message it will send to Wall Street -- and to the White House. That we have had enough of the high-flying, no-limits-casino banking culture that continues to dominate Wall Street and Capitol Hill. That we won't wait on Washington to act, because we know that Washington has, in fact, been a part of the problem from the start."
Even though The Huffington Post reliably comes from the left, with the likes of Fox News as a convenient and abiding target of its abuse, those words could just have easily been written by a tea party activist. For that matter, Obama's Treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, who orchestrated the bailout of AIG, the insurance giant, while he was president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, is as much an object of scorn among the populist Left as among the populist Right.
And yet it is almost inconceivable that the anti-Wall Street, anti-Washington anger shared by the Left and Right in America will fuse into a joint campaign -- liberals and conservatives are too invested in their ritual flogging of each other for that to happen. The future of anger-driven political movements in the United States remains captive to their imaginative limitations and their knee-jerk impulses -- to the relief, no doubt, of the cowering targets at which they take common aim.
Potentates
Take your pick among the Republican "P's": Palin, Perry, or Paul, as in Sarah, Rick, or Ron. Each wants to become the embodiment of the anti-government anger welling up from the tea party movement and other sources on the right.
Paul, a 2008 presidential candidate who represents a Texas district in the House, has proposed abolishing the Federal Reserve. Perry, the governor of Texas, has suggested that his state might secede from a union that no longer serves the interests of the common people. As for Palin, the former vice presidential candidate and Alaska governor, she may turn out to be the biggest "anti" force of them all. She's scheduled to be the showcase speaker at the first National Tea Party Convention, which will take place at the Opryland Hotel in Nashville in early February.
Sometimes it turns out this way. A movement begins in earnest, but not-especially-well-focused, anger and is taken over by a potentate -- a particular kind of leader, unusually gifted in dealing with the masses, in seeming to channel their passions. That leader may or may not be a true representative of the flock, whose members tend to oscillate between an ingrained suspicion of any person in high authority and a yearning for the leadership that such a person might supply. Palin, again, is the best example -- she turned off some tea party activists by seeking a reported $100,000 speaking fee. Customarily, political figures speak at such conventions for free.
The Ross Perot movement -- do the last names of such folks always start with "P"? -- was the most recent to display this dynamic. Perot, a little guy with jug ears and a squeaky voice, managed to take hold of a slice of an irate citizenry turned off by both parties and by Washington's profligacy. His strong performance in the 1992 presidential election set the bar for the anger candidate. He garnered nearly 20 million votes, about half as many as the losing Republican, George H.W. Bush, received. Perot's votes amounted to a 19 percent share of the electorate.
In 2008, Obama, too, attracted a cultlike following on the campaign trail, with supporters motivated, yes, by his idealistic appeal for change but also by an intense anger at President George W. Bush personally and at Republicans generally over the Iraq invasion and other perceived evil deeds. But Obama has not really governed as a potentate; his flock is almost nowhere to be seen; his White House is as much invested in the nitty-gritty of negotiations on Capitol Hill as in bringing out the president for one of his trademark big speeches. Once a vessel for anger, Obama now risks becoming one of its prime targets, with a job-approval rating dipping below 50 percent. Anger is mercurial that way.
The bracing example of Huey Long, the "Kingfish," immortalized as the character Willie Stark in Robert Penn Warren's novel All the King's Men, suggests how dark the potentate route can be. "In the pit of the Great Depression," the real-life Huey Long, as governor of Louisiana, "tapped into a deep vein of anger against the rich and a longing for political redemption," historian Michael Kazin wrote in 2006 in an appraisal of Long's career.
Although Long was a genuine populist who built roads, got free textbooks to school children, and levied a tax on oil refiners, he was also, Kazin noted, a genuine (if often entertaining) tyrant and a boozy thug with a yen for violently intimidating his rivals. The Kingfish was assassinated in 1935, at the age of 42, before he could fulfill his plan of running for president, probably as a third-party candidate, against Franklin D. Roosevelt.
The potentate tradition, happily, has never been as resonant in the United States as in places such as Argentina (think Eva Peron) or continental Europe (think Benito Mussolini and, obviously, Adolf Hitler). America's political soil is inhospitable to would-be potentates, in part because the Founders wisely insisted on a divided government of checks and balances. Also, the United States was blessed to receive early on the sacrificial model of George Washington -- the military hero (a familiar type of potentate) who could have served a third term, and perhaps more, as a revered, king-like president but chose to relinquish his position at the end of two four-year terms in office. (The country's unwritten rule that a president may serve no more than two terms was inscribed in the Constitution only in 1951, with ratification of the 22nd Amendment, to bar a repeat of FDR's winning four consecutive terms to the White House.)
And Justice Shall Reign
Anger can be irrational, a reaction to slights that are more imagined than real. Today's public anger, though, is nothing like that. Americans have been a dealt a body blow, and their anger is righteous.
Therapy has its uses, but in the end, only justice can satisfy a righteous anger. What constitutes justice is an eternally exquisite question that must be calibrated to the particular circumstances of the offense. Somewhere between the beheading and the slap on the wrist is the appropriate measure of justice for those who are most responsible for the economic collapse of our times, which was a creation not of nature but of human beings.
Justice is more easily, or at least more efficiently, dispensed by kings than by republics, with their encumbering rules of democratic governance. Public theater -- the dock -- may have a helpful role to play, for justice must be seen for it to be felt, and the standard is not necessarily sending culprits to prison but simply calling them to account.
In this fashion, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, modeled on the Pecora inquest into the causes of the stock market crash of 1929, may prove a deliverer of necessary comeuppance to the Wall Street titans who helped create the financial debacle that tanked the economy. In mid-January, as cameras clicked, Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman Sachs, had to listen to the commission's chairman, Phil Angelides, scold him that the firm's practice of betting in the market against its own securities products "sounds to me a little bit like selling a car with faulty brakes and then buying an insurance policy on the buyer of those cars."
Angelides's barb made the front pages of The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, and the video is no doubt destined for Internet immortality on YouTube and other such websites. The "media circus," so often derided for coarsening the political culture, may in such cases be an indispensable tool for the meting out of a people's justice, a 21st-century version of the pillories of Puritan times. Picture MSNBC anchor Keith Olbermann in a stovepipe hat. For Blankfein, no amount of high-priced PR is likely to repair the reputational damage of being likened to a sleazy car salesman.
For elected officials implicated in the financial and economic meltdowns, the public has the easier remedy of dispensing justice by evicting them from office -- or hounding them out, as it did in the case of Dodd, who abruptly and probably wisely decided to retire, given his diminishing prospects for a victory.
Even when the economy recovers, anger could still prove more a fixture of the political culture than it was in past epochs, when company-provided pension plans and other cushions tended to protect workers. So be it. Although it is probably not helpful for Americans to luxuriate in their anger, they may have more to lose by burying or suppressing the sentiment. It might be that revenge is a dish best served hot.
