The Upside of Anger and of Anchors

Without Malcolm X, Martin Luther King was the lunatic fringe; with him, he was less "angry," less "irrational," someone LBJ could talk with, someone who could win a Nobel Prize, someone who could be made a national hero whose actual words and beliefs could be safely ignored . . . but that's a story for later. For now, let's talk the Malcolm X effect, that of setting an outer anchor on a spectrum of possibilities so that those within the inner boundaries become less "extreme." And, as his case proved, that of showing the benefits to political discourse of "anger."

A dominant meme for the Republicans in the next few months, already active, will be how "angry" Hillary is, Dean is, those bloggers are, etc., and it is already being ably abetted by the media and by supposed allies in the blogging community. David Neiwert, as is always the case, has nailed the politics of it and the value and necessity of anger in bringing justice to our affairs:

Anger, for the most part, is a righteous and largely rational thing -- it arises from genuine grievances, and is typically a response to outrages of some form or another. Hatred, on the other hand, is an irrational thing; it comes from deep in the soul, and is usually an expression of some deep-seated imbalance on the part of the hater. Naturally, if anger is allowed to fester unaddressed long enough, it can easily mutate into hatred. But they are distinctive in nature.

--snip--

Anger can be a healthy thing, especially if it is based on solid reasons and real grievances. Anger over real injustices motivated the American Revolution, the anti-slavery and civil-rights movements, and women's suffrage. History is replete with righteous anger. Anger only becomes unhealthy hatred if it festers. And one of the ways it can fester is if the grievances underlying them are dismissed out of hand as irrational -- not just by the perpetrators of the injustices, but by the supposed allies of the victims.

Most of what is great in the American Legacy would never have happened, including the nation itself, without the determined anger of irrational people telling the "let's not go overboard, guys" wusses to shut up and get out of the way. Backlash? Sure. Two steps forward, one step back? Okay, that's how we got rid of slavery and Jim Crow, women the right to vote and have sex lives of their choosing, and cleaner air and water. King himself nailed the "channel our anger" types with his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail.”

That function of anger alone should be enough to marshall our troops for the battles ahead. But additional value comes from the anchoring effect of anger on discourse. The Repubs have understood this for a long time. As long as their angrys could be kept to their side on the right, their own demands looked more reasonable, something that allowed them to hold fast and compromise as little as possible because they couldn't be labeled "extremist." And proclaiming themselves not as bad as their anchors allowed them to say that they'd already moved toward the highly overrated "center" (King was talking directly to the "center" from his cell in Birmingham) and to demand that their opponents move closer toward them.

Without comparable anchors on the left (the "leftists" in this country for the last twenty years have been Ted Kennedy, Jane Fonda, and Ralph Nader, now joined by Michael Moore, people who would find it hard to move out of the middle in European politics), the Dems have moved toward the right from a starting point much closer to the "center" from the start, and they have moved more than the Repubs with every compromise. This has shrunk the spectrum between them and moved the "center" closer and closer to the right and their extremists, also allowing the "legitimate" right to move closer to their extremists, as Neiwert has detailed exhaustively.

American politics, as has been well demonstrated, has never been very fertile ground for leftist ideology, at least on Planet Reality, not talk radio, so its anchor of ideas has always truncated what was possible. However, there is also that anchor of temperament that will determine how committed they are to those ideas, and it too has been truncated by the Mister Rogersing of acceptable behavior. With the tamping down of angry "extremists" comparable to the right's with the "success" of Clinton and the DLC (and their overwhelming less than 50% of the votes), any remaining show of real determination and fortitude becomes the "extreme" on their side and gets labeled such (with hippie radicals like Wellstone and Feingold). So . . . truncated ideas and truncated ability and willingness to fight for what they do have. Pretty much the description of today's Democratic Party and of how the Repubs ascended to power.

However, the happy emergence of blogging and the forces it mobilizes has provided a new vent and possible opportunities to establish credible anchors within which Dem leaders who recognize and value them can prove, like King with Malcolm X, or Lincoln with the Abolitionists and FDR with Huey Long, more "reasonable" and "legitimate" and move the country back toward a real middle ground instead of today's Bizarro-land where John McCain and Sandra Day O'Connor get labeled without a trace of smile or irony as "moderates." In other words, the way to recapture the "center" may be to pull it back toward you rather than keep chasing it as it moves further and further to a right that negates the American Legacy. As I talked about in an earlier post, history has a way of coming back to people who deal with reality, even in the USSR.

It also means that, while Mister Rogers wannabes should be valued for their sensible contributions, and for their civility when times for its utility are at hand, they should be hooted off the field when they give away half the idea and temperament spectrum by denigrating the righteous and threatening anger that is the only thing that will broaden the spectrum back to where it should be to get this country's legacy back on track. The figurative "bomb-throwers" give cover for their leadership to use credibly to leverage their own attractiveness. Rather than counseling "channeling your anger so we don't look crazy," the "moderates" need to recognize and support the upside of anger.

Without Martin Luther King, we would have been a different country. Without Malcolm X, King would have been a different figure in our history. I know that the old saying is "the only lesson of history is that we don't learn the lessons of history," but to ignore this lesson, as the counselors of "civility in uncivil times" are doing, is turning history into hysteria.