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.