Yoshie went a long ways to replying to the question.... it is obviously OK to be angry at welfare mothers, immigrants, and terrorists; it is not OK to be angry at thieving plutocrats, polluters, gulag builders etc.
It may be worthwhile for progressives to have a better understanding of the multi-layeredness of emotions. Few emotions are "pure"; for example, "anger" toward victims is the socially acceptable form of grief/ shame, and it is the socially sanctioned redirection of anger away from threatening subjects and towards safe subjects. Anger toward the plutocrats is dangerous in the sense that everybody understands that if they are punished for their crimes, the whole system and its real "values" is threatened.
I would add that to the extent that we all feel ourselves to be implicated in this system, anger is a difficult emotion to experience or to channel into effective action. Getting back to Lakoff's "framing" issue, I would guess that the most helpful way to re-frame anger for the working class is to cast it, not in terms of the slighted/frustrated/resentful individual (which implicitly supports the underlying ideology of individualism), but in terms of the violation of the rights of the children of this country/earth and of their future. That is, try as much as possible to talk about anger in social rather than individual terms. If we cannot shift the terms of the discussion away from the "individual," we are doomed to fail.
Joanna
ravi wrote:
Louis Proyect wrote:
A Lexis-Nexis search for articles that contain the words "Howard Dean" and "angry" within the past 3 months returned 494 articles.
Going into the Iowa primary, the label "angry" had reached a critical mass. It probably was one of the factors that made the largely white, religious and rural Democratic voters shy away from him. They would seem to prefer somebody bland like John Kerry.
i hear this a lot -- that the average white american family is "turned off" by "angry" or "aggressive" rhetoric or acts. but when i look at reality, it seems quite different: the black guy who just got released from jail, after spending 20 years for a crime he did not commit, seems coinciliatory. he talks about not holding on to his anger, about moving on, etc. in the meantime, the same white people who angrily demanded for his imprisonment continue to angrily call for him to be sent back (see for instance the case of the 4 young black men who were wrongly convicted in the central park jogger case). it was american anger, driven by 9/11, that led to the mindless invasion of afghanistan and iraq. but it seems the iraqi people are not that angry at americans who (indirectly) caused the deaths of thousands of iraqis.
on a progessive list, i do not expect that there will be much disagreement with my view above. what i want to know is, if you agree with the above, how do you think this notion (of average white people being "turned off" by "anger") is sustained even in their own minds?
--ravi
