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Statecraft as catharsis: The mobilisation of social anger in politics

Donald Trump announces the 2020 re-election campaign in Orlando, Florida. Source: Executive Office of the President of the United States, http://commons.wikimedia.org/

Sometime I became very interested in why policymaking in cities was being used to direct public anger into projects to remove the vulnerable, anti-homeless ordinances, clearing street-level homeless, the destruction of social housing estates, and the policing of the poor. These were not new observations as such, but I was interested in trying to take something from them to create a kind of psychosocial model of these processes. I wanted to think about how we could begin to understand the lack of understanding or empathy that such programmes appeared to invoke. I had been reading with great interest around psychoanalysis and was very taken with the concepts offered by Melanie Klein and Jung and others that linke psychoanalytical thinking to wider social processes, like Neil Altman’s 2009 book The Analyst in the Inner City. Whether slightly clumsily or not the result was an article (in the link above) that described urban policymaking as a form of catharsis – a mobilisation of anger and diffuse anxiety, that formed the fuel of a mode of policymaking that identified often vulnerable targets as the ostensible means of releasing this psychic energy. I concluded that such a politics would never fully lead to resolution, and that to do so would require a deeper kind of social healing that such policies were never intended to deliver.

What strikes me today is that this model of policymaking is feels like a very useful way to frame the kind of policymaking going on right now and which appear to aggressive and confusing to many. This is not just about Trump, though that is arguably where we find the apotheosis of this model. It is also Israel in Gaza, it is the UK on migrants, and it is the Rotterdam Law, to go back to the city level. Many of these articulations of policy are driven by the need in their architects and supporters to relieve anxiety through aggression, against the socially marginal and the very spaces they inhabit. Initiatives are aimed at removing unwanted problems (often associated with either an external or enemy within), at certain populations and districts, rooted in resentment and fear directed at the politically scapegoated. Many of the policy programs being thrown-out at breakneck speed by the Trump administration, attacking migrants, deporting students, raising tariffs, ignoring legal judgments, can be interpreted as a model of policymaking designed to channel social anger and class resentments, many of which have emerged from the fatal inability of politics on right or left to address problems of inequality. The anger left by inequality is the very fuel being burned by Trump, Meloni, Milei, and even by Starmer, all promising a form of social catharsis (in slogans like Make America Great Again; Stop the Boats) that helps to vent prejudicial beliefs about marginalized groups.

Civility and Anger in Political Life

The negative emotional landscape of social life in polarised societies privileges particularly  anger and fear, which continually simmering. These emotions intersect with the interests of cultural criminologists who have identified media-driven vicarious victimization narratives, identity formation processes, and political polarization as drivers for anti-crime policies, but these models also work well for a diagnosis of the kind of politics that we see nationally and internationally. These processes contribute to an angry social torrent in which simplistic debates about poverty, criminality, migration and many other social problems are further agitated by media systems that generate emotional, knee-jerk forms of political decision-making.

All of this means that political action is accelerated by public demand for action and media coverage, with policymakers using scripts of condemnation that target key populations and spaces. This is the playbook for ICE in excluded districts and restaurants, the door knocks and plain clothes detentions, the use of fear in others as the spectacle driving a sense of joy and release in those recruited to be the political insiders and supporters.

The idea that political, judicial, and civic life is founded upon disinterested forms of decision-making and fairness is an important concept for understanding the nature of public life. However, we can now see that that civility and reductions in personal violence are not even seeking to be guaranteed by the executive. Instead political, social, and judicial elites now appear capable of aggression and of channelling a rage that is confected to achieve broader political objectives (which increasingly appears to be an incredibly crude manipulation of markets in order to achieve personal wealth for a coterie).

All of this means that civility in public life appears like a mask which has fallen off, revealing a more nakedly aggressive and unbound form of policymaking, one not to be tamed by law or convention – which we now realise were so very important and so very fragile. Sections of the angry middle and working-class become keen to see major decision-makers as the avatars who will wield their desire and aggression, smiting perceived opponents and those that make them feel angry or that some kind of injustice has been done. Welfare costs, migration, foreigners in general, those who have somehow stolen the vitality of a great nation must be punished or excluded, despite their very real contribution historically to the claims to economic gigantism that have historically been in place.

The Centrality of Anger and Fear in Policymaking

Action against excluded and vulnerable groups is now an everyday news event, whether in the USA or in Gaza. This appears to be driven by social anger and resentments that are then focused and projected onto externalized and thus threatening groups. Theorists like Ost have discussed the hidden centrality of anger within political life, arguing that capturing, for example, ‘economic anger’ is essential for attracting support through the creation of new emotional connections. Ost viewed political stability as a kind of ‘congealed anger,’ where recruitment to political causes feeds and transmutes diffuse social fury into projects that target ‘others.’ All of this no doubt brings us back to the work of Carl Schmitt who noted the need for statecraft to offer a perpetual creation of binary friend/enemy distinctions as the main task of political life. Schmitt, in this sense appears, intellectually at least, to be guiding the hand of many national policy actors.

Criminologists like Jock Young (1999) argued that the demonization and othering of social groups perceived as threatening and disorderly was a major feature of the kind of criminal justice systems rising up at that time. For Young, rising crime and social inequality were in fact forming a seedbed, one from which a diffuse social anger and a sense of injustice were growing. This was, again, rich ground – not for a new kind of politics of understanding, diversion and social investment, but rather one that needed to be manipulated to target the socially vulnerable.

Hate, anger, pleasure, and fear are now central components of the social media-driven reaction economy which monetises hate and humiliation in ways only guessed at perhaps by Orwell. Thus the components of our contemporary culture, with media saturation of things that will make us angry or upset are the things most foregrounded in our media feeds. None of this is inconsequential for the kind of politics built upon it and indeed manipulated by many of its key figures. The socially precarious are then attacked to provide a kind of psychological release from anger and frustration.

In a world of precarious work, real poverty, ill-health, an absence of care by community or the state and a generalised sense of anxiety are grist to the mill of a policy of catharsis and, in many ways, not to one of equality and social progress. Patterns of emotional frustration and the need for a release from this lead to a kind of emotional processing that is conducted for us by political actors and institutions, where impulsive political aggression are presented as the unending project of trying to release us from our frustrations and fears. The pervasiveness of anxiety itself has also appeared to result in more generalized worries and a hardening of dispositions toward the excluded and the dispossessed. For Gaza the result is an annihilatory logic, in the USA, it is the glee at seeing removal, in the UK it is the attacks on migration.

Cathartic policies and actions respond to patterns of frustration and obstruction, target poorer and socially ‘othered’ outcasts, and appear to offer relief from public anger and worry. However, these policies will tend only to lead to cycles of further regressive actions and reforms that actually worsen the conditions generating those problems. The cuts of thousands of vital public service workers is the start of a much larger process of state exit that will presage a new level of social ferality which is only likely to produce even more militarised and aggressive responses by a minimal security state.

Thinking the pro-social

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Social researchers spend so much time considering problems of inequality, crime, poverty, ill-health and related questions that they rarely have time to pause and consider more utopian, counter-factual ideas, to step outside the ‘realities’ and constraints of needing to be policy relevant or palatable for other audiences. Many of us act in ways that are self-disciplining, if not self-defeating – we make careful pre-judgements about who will listen and this often prevents us from making proposals or running ideas that might make the world a, dare we say it, better place. This has long been the case but in the context of contemporary forms of unparalleled inequality, ecological crisis and economic instabilities the role and perhaps duty of social researchers is to draw on their evidence and intervene effectively in helping social conversations about these issues. It doesn’t strike me as a terribly partisan comment to suggest that the UK coalition government and its new round of proposed cuts is inherently anti-social (not least because the mainstream alternative/s offer much of the same). Indeed it has managed to triumph in promoting a worldview that suggests precisely any other argument around taxation, spending and investment is either loopy or some kind of powerful ultra-leftist viewpoint that would endanger civilization as we know it.

Today’s economic, political and social environment undermines everyday social life as notions of the shared, the public, the municipal and common space have been fundamentally challenged. The global financial crisis has ended-up granting energy and fresh confidence to narratives that legitimise cuts to the funding of public services, disinvestments in diversionary and creative programmes for vulnerable groups and fresh rounds of public asset stripping. The apparent logic of such attacks is that we cannot afford, do not need and should not pay for arrangements, institutions and provisions that are shared or collectively provided. Yet social investigation now tells us, through convincing and in-depth investigations (like that of Pickett, Wilkinson, Sassen, Piketty and Dorling) that gross inequalities, absences of social insurance and expulsions from citizenship and common provision generate expanding forms of hardship and social problems.

It appears increasingly evident that the kinds of social distress, climate change and other modern evils cannot be contained in convenient or cost-free ways to the wider population. We appear to be seeing the ‘escape’ of social problems from traditionally vulnerable spaces and populations to include those who have more often been able to avoid such problems has led to renewed efforts by the affluent to insulate themselves from these risks (I wrote about this sometime ago as a ‘cut’ in which the affluent are now able to insulate themselves from the costs of inequality that has diminished arguments for promoting greater equality or progressive taxation).

We now find that a number of problems (insecurity, fear, ill-health, violence, education and reducing social mobility) are being exacerbated by new rounds of value extraction from the public realm in the name of increasing efficiencies and economic growth. New forms of anxiety, hardship and concealed exclusion appear to mark this situation, with mounting concern about the long-term consequences of dismantling a variety of forms of common provision and mechanisms that might guard against extreme wealth and income inequalities (notably the NHS but also systems such as water). One critical basis for arguing against this ongoing disaster is to suggest that we are more capable and happy as private, free citizens when freed against the excesses and intrusion of such a dominant corporate-political sphere of influence. In other words, strong forms of municipal provision, affordable health, education, meaningful and financially rewarding work lead not only to some mad vision of a more equal society – they offer deeper and substantial rewards in the form of personal emancipation, freedom and self-realisation than in societies marked by declining public investments and provision. In such contexts what we find is not only troubling forms of social damage and loss (to say nothing of the revolting levels of excessive wealth and consumption by the affluent amidst poverty) but also diminished forms of self, community that ride alongside the vision of a minimal state and corporate capture of assets and profits.

With social and policy thinking often fixed on notions of the anti-social it appears timely to consider the value and limits of the social itself, of the kinds of mechanisms for community participation and self-realisation amidst these powerful social and economic forces. The position of the academy in relation to these debates and to questions of social resilience, emancipation, social justice, the nature of collectivity and forms of social sustenance and protection are also raised by this context. The real lie amidst all of this is that there are sides to choose from when the systemic logic of markets that pervades and dictates so many areas of social life is antagonistic to almost all visions of a sustainable, enjoyable, healthy life for all.