The Natural Limits of Anger as a Political Motivator
Thoughts on the 2022 midterms
Our long-running midterm election cycle ended last night just before 11:00 EST as Raphael Warnock won reelection to the US Senate.1 It was an election well outside historic patterns as Democrats gained a seat in the Senate, flipped state level leadership, and minimized their losses in the House (making the next month very difficult for Kevin McCarthy). For the most part, the election-denier candidates, the culture war candidates, and the “stop the socialists” candidates didn’t do well.2
It turns out that this “anger the base” strategy can win competitive primaries but does not prevail in general elections. It may work on partisan media, FaceBook, Twitter, and YouTube but it leaves a bad taste in the mouths of mainstream voters.3
As I pondered this piece, my mind went to Paddy Chayefsy’s 1976 film Network. News anchor Howard Beale learns that his long-term show is going to be cancelled in two more weeks. In response, he begins a series of onscreen rants that drive ratings through the roof. You may not know the movie (you can rent it from Amazon for under $3) but you know its catchphrase: I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!
Beale’s rants get him his own dedicated hour on the network. But as he continues to critique the economy, negative social trends, and all that is wrong with the world, his ratings drop and the network needs to get rid of him.
It turns out that the angry-man schtick has built in problems. First, it is ever-escalating. It’s not possible to maintain last month’s level of outrage under the guise of “just asking questions”. You have to move on to accusations of the conspiracies that “they don’t want you to know about”. The search for the next level of outrage creates space to put out exposes about Twitter Files or Russian Agents or Rigged Elections.
As Jordan Klepper has brilliantly illustrated, there is always a subset of the population eager to feed off the latest outrage. They are already mad as hell and distrustful of all institutions: education, government, media. They have their hermetically sealed echo chambers where they tell each other how right they are.
But the rest of us, like Beale’s audience, get worn out. It’s hard to stay that mad for that long. And being mad doesn’t address the real issues people are facing.4 Those who have specialized in the Outrage model have found it hard to moderate (although seeing Alex Jones trying to keep Ye from praising Hitler was a good step).
At some point, people move on. They want to see democracy work for the good of the people. That causes them to rethink their partisan lean.5
Surprisingly, the entire idea for today’s newsletter came from Herschel Walker. After everything that was said and done during the Georgia campaign, after the vampires and werewolves, after wondering if the pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church was a real Christian, Walker said remarkably pro-democracy things in last night’s concession speech.
But one of the things I want to tell all of you is you never stop dreaming. I don't want any of you to stop dreaming.
I don't want any of you to stop believing in America. I want you to believe in America and continue to believe in the constitution and believe in our elected officials most of all.
I want you to continue to pray for them because all of the prayers that you had given me, I felt those prayers.
Walker called for his supporters to continue to believe in America. He then said to believe in and pray for our elected officials — not our party’s officials or those who agree with our side.
It was a surprisingly good speech. Maybe that shows that all of the apocalyptic rhetoric that has characterized our campaigns just wears everybody out in the end. You can’t playact anger for that long without it seeming forced. You can’t partake it in vicariously without it eventually feeling stale and empty.
Maybe, just maybe, we’ll learn from this and our 2024 election cycle will not be as soul-crushing as our recent elections have been. I’m not holding my breath but I can still hope.
Don’t fret — the 2024 election cycle should start in about 30 days.
We still have Boebert and MTG but we’ll see if self-interest wins out over performative outrage.
I’ve left party undefined so far. There has been anger on the left as well as the right and it has similar effects.
One of the earliest postmortems on the 2022 cycle quoted voters as saying that Republican candidates wanted them to be made about the cost of food or gas but offered little in terms of plans to address those costs.
Thanks to Charlie Sykes for sharing this remarkable tweet from Steve Kornaki. He reports that the 10 Metro Atlanta counties make up the same share of the Georgia electorate as they did in 2004. But the voting patterns have shifted 42% in favor of Democrats. (This is likely related to the Big Sort as people move out and into the Atlanta area — but it’s huge for the state).