The Politics of Outrage

In the 60 days since the Dobbs decision leaked to the press there've been at least 92 instances of vandalism and violence against pro-life churches and crisis pregnancy centers.

As I mentioned in a previous post the reaction to the overturn of Roe is not producing rational defense of Roe and logical criticism of Dobbs. There's no obvious attempt show how Dobbs was wrongly decided, only anger at having what people thought had been a constitutional right shown not to have been a right at all.

Anger can be healthy, but it's not conducive to reasonableness, and over the past few years it has caused us to become more polarized, perhaps, than at anytime since the Civil War.

Anger generates antipathy for the people one sees as "the enemy," and it's a short step from antipathy to hatred and from hatred to violence.

Jonah Goldberg writes at The Dispatch about the baleful effects that anger has on a society and notes that traditional rules of conduct are guardrails against the excesses of outrage:

[A]cross the political spectrum, combatants are arguing as much from anger as from reason. The ubiquitous cultivation of rage in our politics is a siren song to venture off the path; to disregard the norms; to shout, “Screw the rules!”

It’s a calling to take a shortcut on the mistaken belief that the rules are for suckers and that the enemies’ rule-breaking is a justification for your own.

...Wisdom, if it tells us anything, tells us that the rules matter more for the hard cases, when passions are high and the shortcut to victory seems obvious. Indeed, we have rules for the hard cases precisely because it takes no courage to follow the rules when it’s easy.

When we let our anger control our behavior, when we rationalize disregarding the rules and allow our behavior to be governed by our hatreds and passions we're setting wisdom aside and putting our basest instincts in the driver's seat. This is invariably foolish:

There’s a reason we tell people to sleep on big decisions rather than making a choice when they’re overcome with emotion, because intense emotions can seduce us into making bad decisions.

But everywhere you look, politicians, activists, and rabble-rousers tell us you’re not angry enough. These days, “mobilize” is just a political consultant’s term to get our voters as [angry] as possible.

This is unsustainable. It is dangerous. And it will not lead to permanent victory, but permanent political warfare and the law of unintended consequences.

Anger has its place, but if it causes us to dehumanize others, to strip them of their dignity as persons, to damage, destroy and harm others and their property, then our anger has crossed the line and become evil.

Goldberg concludes:

Human nature—and conservatism itself—stands athwart all of this folly, shouting, “Stop!” Permanent political warfare need not stop at being merely political, and a people in a constant state of rage cannot be free.

“It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things,” Edmund Burke writes, “that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.”

As the Greek philosopher Plato noted over two millenia ago, a people who can't subordinate their politics to a higher rationality and morality, who can't govern their social passions, is not fit for self-governance, and will ultimately find themselves ruled by a tyrant.