Anger is different. Scans of angry brains show activity in the left frontal cortex, the part associated with approach emotions. That makes sense. When you’re angry, you don’t want to run away; you want to get in someone’s face. And unlike disgust or fear, anger feels good—you don’t nurse disgust. “Looking ahead to how you’re going to avenge a perceived harm feels exhilarating,” says Jennifer Lerner, a psychologist and professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Her research, with Dacher Keltner of the University of California at Berkeley, has found that angry people are much more optimistic than fearful people. The angrier you are, the safer you feel from future terrorist attacks, the better you rate your health, the more attractive you believe you are to marital prospects. Indeed, angry people see the future as rosily as happy people do. That’s not true with fear. [...]
This is the through line in Trump’s otherwise erratic presidential campaign. For all the talk of the blue-collar economic fears driving Trump’s campaign, it has run largely on spleen. Trump’s public pronouncements are heavy on threats, challenges, and insults; his supporters have blasted perceived enemies on social media with furious invective; and his rallies have been punctuated by brawls. (As in ice hockey, the fighting seems to be what many fans come for.) The parable Trump tells—about bad leaders who have weakened America and the artful dealmaker who, alone, can fix it—matches the angry mind’s simplified universe of personal blame. His repeated invocation of a “silent majority” parallels anger’s empowerment: His supporters aren’t weak, he tells them, they’re strong. They’re just not loud enough.
There isn’t anything inherently wrong with anger in public life. All political movements depend on it. Civil rights protesters were propelled by moral rage, and the original Revolution-era Tea Partiers were good and steamed. But politics does feel particularly angry at the moment. Poll after poll shows a more ideologically segregated country whose inhabitants view their opponents as aliens and their disagreements as irreconcilable. In a world of self-curated Facebook news feeds, everyone is like the subjects in the MacKuen study, reading manifestoes and rants that buttress their worldview and keep the indignation at a titillating simmer.
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