Weaponizing Anger is a Useful Political Strategy

It seems like people are angrier than ever. According to a poll by CBS News, 84 percent of Americans believe we are angrier than previous generations. Another survey recently found that nine in ten Americans can name either a recent news event or something about American politics that made them angry, while only half could identify a recent news event or something about American politics that made them proud.

What explains this feeling of rage? One noteworthy reason is that exploiting anger is politically convenient.  

The strategic use of anger in politics has transformed it from a natural human emotion into a weapon of division, with far-reaching consequences for our social cohesion and democratic governance.

According to Steven Webster, author of “American Rage: How Anger Shapes Our Politics” and assistant professor of political science at Indiana University, “Anger provides ample benefits to those politicians who are able to use it most skillfully.” 

Indeed, across political settings, angry people are more likely to vote than those who are not angry. In other words, politicians who can stoke anger can use it to motivate their base. The angrier voters are at the opposing party, the more likely they are to show up to the polls to support their own party. As Webster puts it, “angry voters are loyal voters.” 

Political anger has consequences that extend beyond how Americans view their governing institutions or the opposing political party. When American voters are angry about politics, they are inclined to avoid social interactions or social events where they are likely to come into contact with those whose political leanings differ from their own.

In a chapter titled “Emotions in Politics” published last year, the psychologists Florian van Leeuwen and Michael Bang Peterson suggest that along with other emotions, anger “seems to be a distinct strategy for increasing what one is entitled to in the minds of others.” 

Provoking rage against selected groups is an effective way to promote unity in politics. Today, many Americans across the political spectrum are encouraged to feel they are being victimized. It’s no coincidence that one of Donald Trump’s go-to lines on the campaign trail is “They’re laughing at us.” Being laughed at induces humiliation, which often quickly transforms into rage. 

In a notable historical illustration of a political movement using anger as a limitless source of ideological fuel, consider the case of the “Recalling Bitterness” campaign in Maoist China. In the 1960s, the communist dictator Mao Zedong grew worried that ordinary Chinese citizens were developing lukewarm attitudes about the socialist revolution. In response, the regime forced people into rituals in which they publicly announced how bad life was before they had been liberated. Mao ordered writers and artists to rewrite history through the lens of class struggle to suit the needs of his political agenda. Regime officials held meetings encouraging peasants to describe how much better life was now compared to pre-liberation, hoping to convince them that the revolution’s successes outnumbered its failures. The “devils” here were reactionaries, landlords, rich farmers, and counterrevolutionaries. Documenting the rituals of the Recalling Bitterness campaign, the historian Guo Wu has written, “Only poor peasants were allowed to speak; former landlords and rich peasants were silenced.”

Mass media and social media hold some responsibility here too. Headlines are full of angry and moralizing stories. Everyone seems to feel mistreated and upset, which might make sense given what we know about anger.

Indeed, a widely-cited study from 2017 on the social media platform then known as Twitter found that negative words such as “attack,” “bad,” “blame,” “shame,” and “wrong” are each associated with a 20% increase in the likelihood of a post being retweeted.  

More recently, a 2023 study found that negative words in headlines increase traffic. Words like “wrong,” “bad,” “awful,” “hate,” “sick,” “fight,” and “scary” each predict a 2.3% increase in click-through rates. 

These findings are disheartening. To understand why people respond so powerfully to anger, though, it helps to understand the biological roots of this emotion. 

Anger is not a new feeling. It has been around for a long time and has an important role in our lives. Anger arose as a tool to protect us, make others less likely to harm or take advantage of us, and motivates us to persist in the face of obstacles. Anger gives us a sense of control and motivates us to take action.

For instance, a series of studies published last year led by Heather C. Lench at Texas A&M University found that angry people persisted longer and did better at solving word problems. Angry people also earned higher scores on a challenging video game and were more likely to sign a petition to stop student tuition increases. Furthermore, analyzing survey data from the 2016 and 2020 U.S. general elections, they found that a person’s anger at an opposing candidate’s potential win predicted greater likelihood that a person would vote in the next election.

In a 2022 paper titled “How anger works” published in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior, a team of three psychologists explain that anger evolved to help people bargain for better treatment from others. Our various emotions such as happiness, anger, sadness, disgust, shame, and so on all activate in response to different situations, and arose as solutions to challenges faced by human ancestors. 

Our emotions evolved in the context of small hunter-gatherer societies before the rise of agriculture roughly twelve thousand years ago. Because culture and technology evolve faster than biology, our emotions are adaptive for those small-scale communities, but our emotions are not necessarily adaptive in the same way in modern advanced societies. 

You typically feel anger in response to signs that another person places insufficient weight on your welfare and well-being. 

Indeed, anger most often arises between friends, family, and other close relationships. Seldom do we experience as much anger at complete strangers, because we don’t necessarily expect them to place much importance on our well-being. 

Imagine a friend is supposed to pick you up from the airport, and he’s late. You’ve been standing outside for hours. Finally, he arrives and you say “I’ve been waiting all afternoon.” If he replies, “Yeah, I know. So what?” If you are like most people, you will interpret this as an indicator that your friend doesn’t care as much about you as you’d like, and will respond with hostility, either by directly confronting him (inflicting costs) or giving him the “silent treatment” (withdrawing benefits). 

Interestingly, this adaptive emotion can misfire, as in the case of people getting angry at inanimate objects. Perhaps you have observed people uselessly banging their fists on a printer in a misguided attempt to get the lifeless object to behave in the desired way. 

Anger helps us stand up for ourselves and demand better treatment. This makes sense from an evolutionary perspective, where showing anger could prevent exploitation and help with survival.

In our modern world, though, anger often leads to frustration. We are regularly exposed to profound societal problems without obvious and immediate actionable ways to resolve them. The mismatch between the causes of our anger and the lack of solutions leaves many of us feeling stuck. Politicians and public figures capitalize on this feeling, aiming to energize people into converting their anger into votes. 

Though politicians have incentives to stoke voters’ anger in their quest to get people to vote to bargain for better treatment, this strategy comes at a cost. In fact, voter anger has a host of negative consequences. In particular, anger serves to reduce Americans’ trust in the national government. In an era of heightened nationalization, the national government serves as the focal point for Americans’ views about politics. Because anger causes us to evaluate people, places, and institutions in a negative fashion, politicians’ stoking of voter anger has the unfortunate consequence of lowering Americans’ trust in their governing institutions.

This decline in trust is marked. In 1958, 73% of Americans said they trusted the federal government “always” or “most of the time.” By 2024, this figure dropped to 22%. This diminished level of trust presents challenges for effective governance. Trust in government has been shown to be essential for promoting bipartisan cooperation and maintaining support for social welfare programs. Thus, should trust in government continue to decline, we are likely to see less bipartisanship and a further erosion of social cohesion. Provoking anger supplies short-term political gains that lead to long-term societal costs. 

Understanding how our emotions are manipulated is the first step in breaking the cycle of outrage. While anger may be a natural and sometimes necessary emotion, we are capable of recognizing when it is being weaponized against us. As an avid user of the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, I have recommended muting certain phrases and words intended to express anger or condemnation (e.g., “Let that sink in,” “I can’t believe this has to be said,” “Yikes”) in order to clean up your feed and avoid being captured by the algorithm.

Recognizing when we are being manipulated, choosing not to react impulsively, and taking responsibility for our own experiences when consuming media can weaken the power that anger-driven politics holds over us.

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This article was originally published by the Boston Globe under the title “Why are you so angry?”