Tice: Americans agree: We’re angry

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“Politics ... had always been the systematic organization of hatreds.”

Henry Adams, 1907

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One of the memorable episodes on the original “Star Trek” series back in the 1960s featured a sinister life form trapping Captain Kirk and a handful of crew members aboard the starship Enterprise, pitted against an equal force of Klingons, their perennial adversaries.

A struggle ensued. The mysterious incorporeal intruder prevented any actual deaths, prolonging the mayhem, while enflaming homicidal passions on both sides.

If that ending gave the episode something of a fuzzy, give-peace-a-chance 1960s flavor, today something a little like a strife-hungry puppeteer really does sometimes seem to have intruded on American political life.

I’m not entirely alone in being struck by how overwrought and overblown the emotional tone of the American dialogue seems just now — how out of proportion the fear and rage abroad in the land seem to the nation’s actual problems and sufferings. I realize that many, maybe most, Americans are trying to tune out the caustic cacophony. But my own fear is that too many readers will ponder these words and at best conclude that the old fool has a point — but only because they certainly are nuts — the wokesters or the MAGAs, depending — consumed with resentment and self-pity when they have nothing whatsoever to complain about. Others will conclude that I’m the one who’s nuts, oblivious to a planet on fire, a nation invaded, a grab for tyrannical powers in the White House, a virtual pogrom on Ivy League campuses, etc., etc.

In fact, I don’t dismiss any of those concerns, or even the etc. I just believe we can deal with our troubles — if we don’t tear the country apart beforehand.

Were there a sinister being on the prowl, feeding off dark emotions, it would be living large in America today. Evidence abounds that Americans in the 2020s are lonely, fearful and embittered. “American society has simply turned more negative,” writes economist Tyler Cowen in a recent Free Press column. “We complain more, we whine more, and we are more likely to dislike each other.” Attributing the recent surge in enthusiasm for “socialism” to a general “negative contagion,” Cowen is only one of many scholars seeking to identify the forces behind today’s oversized discontent. His Marginal Revolution blog has linked to a number of relevant studies.

In “Emotions and Policy Views,” a new paper from the Social Economics Lab at Harvard, Eve Davoine, Stefanie Stantcheva, Thomas Renault and Yann Algan explore what they call the “critical and omnipresent” role of emotions in today’s political discourse. “Economic factors,” they say, can no longer account for “ ‘emotional communities’ characterized by shared experiences of anger, outrage, and resentment.”

The results “document a sharp rise in emotionality in political discourse ... with anger emerging as the dominant emotion.” Angry rhetoric has reliably increased among Republicans when a Democrat (Obama/Biden) was in the White House and among Democrats when Donald Trump has been in office.

Few would deny that Trump is a virtuoso conjurer of anger. But these scholars’ findings suggest he rode to prominence on an already rising wave of social rancor.

The timing of the trends calls to mind arguments that social media itself has proved an invasive force fanning flames of hostility.

It’s no mystery why politicians have eagerly adopted the angry style. Malicious tweets attract the most “engagement” — retweets, etc. And in an intriguing experiment the researchers exposed subjects to emotion-laden videos before quizzing them on policy views. Those who watched peaceful nature scenes were far less likely than those exposed to images of disasters to express support for trade war policies, an immigration crackdown or massive redistribution of wealth.

Anger in politics is nothing new, of course. Historian, journalist and descendant of presidents Henry Adams knew all about it in the gaslight era. Hatred has its addictive pleasures, which is what makes it a dangerous drug to use as habitually as we do today.

The vagaries of economic effects on social harmony are also explored in “Doux (sweet) Commerce: Markets, Culture and Cooperation in 1850-1920 U.S.” Max Posch of Exeter University and Itzchak Tzachi Raz of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem show that during the great age of industrialization and urbanization, American communities with the fastest-growing access to the larger national market also most rapidly developed “a package of interrelated cultural traits that support cooperation with strangers and out-group members.” Their findings, they say, tend to support the French philosopher Montesquieu’s famous claim that “wherever manners are gentle there is commerce; and wherever there is commerce, manners are gentle.”

It certainly is, or should be, remarkable how readily each of us in modern America trusts perfect strangers all day every day to provide our food, repair our cars, prescribe our medications, etc., etc. And usually our trust is rewarded — not, as the pioneering Scottish economist Adam Smith famously said, from these strangers’ “benevolence” toward us, but “from their regard for their own interest.”

Posch and Raz conclude that “[t]he historical experience of the United States shows that markets can play a powerful role … in reshaping the psychological and cultural boundaries of cooperation. … At the same time, we show that this shift toward impersonal cooperation comes with a decline in traditional kin-based social insurance, echoing concerns from critics of markets.”

Smith’s “invisible hand of the marketplace” is mighty indeed. But it is not the kind of hand you can hold.

Could the loss of the old homespun, family and neighborhood-based life, however less prosperous a life it was — a loss more complete generation by generation — be a force fueling loneliness and alienation today? I’m reminded of another 1960s relic, a much-discussed book (at the time) from one of the original “neoconservatives,” Irving Kristol.

Kristol argued that free-market society had delivered on two of its shining promises — unprecedented affluence and individual freedom. But it hadn’t kept a third promise — that the allocation of power and wealth would be judged fairer than it had been under earlier regimes of inherited aristocracy.

Somehow, today, it seems not so much old-style resentment of the rich but a kind of psychic bankruptcy among people lacking a sense of belonging, meaning and common purpose that is keeping us at one another’s throats.

A debauch of friendly feeling to drive the beast away seems unlikely. But maybe just a touch more gentleness of manner, one combatant at a time, could begin to weaken its grip.