Don't Get Even, Get Mad!

Howard Beale got it right: "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!" If this is (fair & balanced) white rage, so be it.

[x TNR]
The Upside of Anger
By The Editors

It's early in the morning, and you intend to smell the roses. But where are the roses? You've already read about a squelched government scientist, the sad demise of consumer protection, and several previously undiscovered Bush administration methods for ticking you off. Fortunately, none of this has trampled your ebullient mood, let alone inspired you to march against the White House or join a local revolutionary cell. But then you turn to The Wall Street Journal's editorial page and read about yourself in newsprint. You find that your contempt for administration policy has earned you membership in a nefarious group--"the angry left." Because it's an incredibly annoying phrase that has begun to appear over and over, you realize that you've just been trapped by cunning enemies. The term now fits.

For many years, Republicans scored political points by merely describing their opponents as liberals. But, apparently, the old epithet has lost some of its shock value, and the new term of abuse is "angry." Call it the Howard Beale smear. Last month, Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman exclaimed, "Hillary Clinton seems to have a lot of anger. ... When you think of the level of anger, I'm not sure it's what Americans want." While Mehlman may have concocted this strategy for tarring Clinton, he was merely repeating a GOP trope. During the 2000 primary campaign, the Bushies whispered loudly about John McCain's rage. In the last election cycle, Republican propagandists slapped the same tag on nearly every one of their opponents--from Nancy Pelosi to the demure South Dakota Senator Tim Johnson. They cut an ad against Howard Dean titled "When Angry Democrats Attack."

This description of Clinton, however, merits special scrutiny. Anyone who has watched her knows that paroxysms of bile--expressions of strong feeling of any kind--are hardly her thing. She willingly appears on daises with Newt Gingrich, who helped kill her beloved health care plan and tried to do the same to her husband's career. There's not a hint of fire in her speeches. Instead, her demeanor rather eerily resembles the statue of her that Madame Tussaud's recently unveiled. If Hillary Clinton is angry, then there is no anger in the land.

To be fair, not all Democrats are as affectless and disciplined as Clinton. Dean really is angry, as are demagogues like Michael Moore and Cindy Sheehan. But the problem with the Moores and the Sheehans is not that they're angry; it's that they're wrong. The Republicans have substituted a temperamental category for an ideological one. When they fail to demonstrate a philosophical failing, they try to demonstrate a human failing.

That's the true damage extracted by this Republican attack. They have defined anger down. A good, honest emotion has been trashed in pursuit of cheap political points. But what is so awful about anger? There are times, after all, when certain policies--some of them implemented by this president--demand precisely an irate response. Any other reaction might suggest a cognitive mistake, as if you do not understand what is taking place.

For all their touching concern with political anger, Republicans have been known to display it on occasion. Indeed, for decades now, they have profited from the politics of resentment. Bush himself has been known to show flashes of anger, as when an aide's cell phone rings in a meeting. And Republicans hardly showed displeasure when Zell Miller went red in the face and delivered one of the most wrathful convention speeches in recent history, going after John Kerry with a rage that suggested an almost physical animus and then--when challenged by Chris Matthews--proposing a duel. Far from recoiling in horror at Miller's surrender to uncontrollable emotion, Republicans celebrated him. So anger in American politics is not the GOP's true concern. Their goal is to lump together those who are angry with Bush for sound reasons with those who are angry with Bush for unsound reasons, defining the opposition to him as a kind of derangement.

There are also obvious commercial reasons for conservative commentators to expend so much energy denouncing anger. Rage, after all, is an essential part of the Fox News ethos, where Bill O'Reilly makes Howard Beale look like Dag Hammarskjöld. Pretty clearly, these conservative commentators will denounce Democrats as angry, because that will make their audiences angry, generating even larger angry audiences. And you know what that makes us.

The Editors

Editor-In-Chief Martin Peretz, Editor Franklin Foer. Literary Editor Leon Wieseltier, Executive Editor J. Peter Scoblic, Managing Editor Jeremy Kahn, Deputy Editors Richard Just, Katherine Marsh, and Editor-At-Large Peter Beinart

Copyright © 2006, The New Republic

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