Your anger is legitimate

Don't let anyone tell you otherwise

Photo by Florian Olivo on Unsplash

There’s a simmering rage in the belly of America. It breaks through the veneer of order in fits and starts, manifesting in violence, graffiti, road rage – incoherent and disorganized, the anger that boils in so many of us almost never coalesces into a potent force. The last time that fury could be said to explode and cohere into something unified and powerful was a few weeks at the end of May into the summer of 2020. The powder keg of long-standing anger at police and their wanton murders was lit by the murder of George Floyd, and a tidal wave of humanity spilled into the streets, first in Minneapolis but then everywhere all at once. We formed a wall of rage and drove police forces back in a cry for justice and in a moment of unified rebellion.

Then, before long, the anger was co-opted and redirected, and the masses of people mostly made their way home. The anger didn’t disappear, of course, conditions merely returned to the status quo where rage lacks a means of expression, and thus we reverted from explosive boil back to simmer. Within that cooptation, within the statements released by politicians and certain organizations that swooped in and the repressive violence of the police themselves, was the message that your anger isn’t valid. You can believe policies are incorrect, you can disagree on how they’re implemented, but you cannot act from rage. A proper citizen is not guided by anger, but by reasoned discussion and civic participation.

And yet. And yet where has calm composure gotten us? The party that ran on vitriolic anger controls all three branches of government and the party that venerates its measured and reasoning approach is out of power. Even now, even as the fascist President and his shadow-president seize greater control, ignore the law, harass and harm the federal workforce, the Democrats place decorum before resistance. They perform symbolic gestures, raise their voices, and stay within the confines of business as usual. At the same time Trump and Musk destroy the very foundation of that business, destroy the workings of government and the norms of our politics. Sweeping the deck of the Titanic while the iceberg punches holes in the ship doesn’t cut it.

Tweet from Congresswoman Nydia Velazquez

None of this is new. For as long as I can remember one side has played dirty while the other has pretended propriety is more important than victory. Republicans have run on outright lies, deception, and anger. Only a specific subset of America’s anger has been utilized by the GOP, only the misguided threads that tie to racism and anti-immigrant sentiment and other forms of scapegoating, but Democrats have never chosen to pick up the other threads, the vast trove of legitimate rage that continues to burn slowly. In this most recent election they instead chased the anti-immigrant sentiment pioneered by their opposition, legitimizing Trump’s stance and enabling an attack on millions of migrants, all without winning over conservatives, who oddly enough voted for the more conservative party.

As we all know, there are other avenues Democrats could have taken; there are other sources of anger they could’ve pursued. But that’s not what they do. When the Tea Party, and subsequently MAGA, reared their heads in the Republican Party, their politicians ran with it. They embraced the ugly, increasingly far-right vision. What’s followed has been disastrous for the country, but beneficial for their party; the synergy between the base of the party and its leaders has propelled Republicans to power.

On the other hand, when a wing of the Democratic Party began agitating, began conveying their anger at billionaires and the economic status quo, they were quashed. The DNC apparatus and the leadership of the party wanted no part of that grassroots rage and momentum. They still don’t.

I’m reminded of that Jon Stone tweet, “One reason people insist you use the proper channels to change things is because they have control of the proper channels and they’re confident it won’t work.” We have always been told to direct everything, even vicious murders by state agents, to the proper channels. Anyone seeking to agitate in or around the Democratic Party has had their grievances directed to committees and resolutions and all manner of dead-ends. But in this moment we have to think far beyond “proper channels.” It’s always been a fundamentally flawed system, but now fascists have taken over the channels themselves, and just like murderous police officers they act outside the law and demand that we act within it.

Now is the time to activate long-standing, long-simmering rage. We all know how much fury is sitting there right beneath my surface, and polling confirms it. Last year a poll on America's anger was conducted and the report that followed was simply titled: Mood of the Nation: Angry. 91% of respondents identified something about U.S. politics that made them angry. Similar numbers of Democrats and Republicans were found to be “extremely angry.” Similar numbers of men and women, of people across incomes, across educational attainment were found to be angry. It was not perfectly uniform, but American anger is widespread and pervasive. And it has nowhere to go, for so many of us.

Some people might be feeling some vindication, some catharsis seeing the fascist, billionaire onslaught against government workers and basic services. Some on the right might think this is finally the political approach they’ve been hoping for, the one their anger excitedly awaited. But they are the minority. New polling from this past week shows that most people aren’t thrilled with what they’re seeing in Washington. Right now 73% of voters think billionaires have too much influence over federal government decisions. A majority feel the same way about CEOs, corporations, and Elon Musk specifically.

While there is undoubtedly complexity to America’s rage, there is also great simplicity. There is great alienation, great disconnection from community and from meaning, and a tremendous difficulty in making sense of where it all went wrong. But it did go wrong. We feel it. We feel that a wrong turn was made somewhere, we feel that this country is on the wrong track, and we feel powerless to change course. Admitting powerlessness, however, is hard. It’s not masculine, it’s not American, and it’s not pleasant. Anger, however, can be all of these things. And when it’s not pleasant it can at least paper over our fears and give us fleeting feelings of power.

But the feeling of power generated by fits of anger fades. It can’t hold up against the stark economic reality that the American Dream is increasingly impossible. People were promised a dream, promised a certain life, and that life is less and less attainable. The growing gap between that promised life, the one where you work a decent job and live a decently comfortable life, is one measure of our anger. As it gets harder to pay rent, harder to buy a house, harder to find affordable childcare and therefore harder to raise children, rage builds. It has become harder for millions and millions of people to survive, let alone have that life we were promised, all in the wealthiest country in history.

It’s no wonder that billionaire and corporate influence over government crosses party lines. The lack of economic mobility does not discriminate along that divide. The cost of rent and food does not fall along party lines. Rage at the status quo is one of the few uniters we have. A majority of people are fed up with both parties. Nothing has clarified the potency of this rage quite like the murder of the UnitedHealth CEO. People across the political spectrum condemned the rapacious, violent healthcare system in the wake of that targeted act of violence more than they condemned the immediate killing itself. And the ruling class saw that very clearly, hitting alleged shooter Luigi Mangione with terrorism charges. They fear nothing more than the unleashing of the mass anger they know lies dormant in America.

In particular they fear that anger being channeled into a class war, so our job is to do just that. We must build funnels for rage, funnels for the justified and righteous anger that is bubbling near the surface of this country. And that anger is justified. We should be clear that there are few things more reasonable in a society built on exploitation than being furious at the people who grow rich by kicking up their feet and placing them upon our backs. Rage at those who have everything they could ever need for ten lifetimes, but who still dedicate themselves to getting more wealth out of us, all while giving us less and less in return, is eminently reasonable. It is far more reasonable than playing nice with the man whose boot is on your neck. As the great Lucy Parsons said 140 years ago, “Oh, working man! Oh, starved, outraged, and robbed laborer, how long will you lend an attentive ear to the authors of your misery?”

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I’ve been reading a lot about organizing during the Robber Baron era, for obvious reasons. During that time the oppression of the ruling class became so abrasive, so violent, so cruel and repugnant that people increasingly organized toward revolution rather than reform. As union workers have said for a long time, “a bad boss is the best organizer.” I wish it didn’t take horrendous conditions and exploitation to prompt radical organizing, but that’s often how it goes. And under the heel of Robber Barons people started to think that workers ought to go hard or go home. Why have a boss at all if they were going to treat you like an animal? Why shouldn’t workers run the companies powered by their labor? Some radicals started saying stuff like “The capitalist has no heart, but harpoon him in the pocketbook and you will draw blood.”

That one is from Big Bill Haywood of the IWW. And he didn’t stop there. Once, while giving a speech advocating for a general strike, he was asked, “Doesn't the trend of your talk lead to direct action, or what we call revolution? For instance, we try to throw the bosses out; don't you think the bosses will strike back?” He replied:

“Well, comrade, you have no peace now. The capitalist system, as peaceable as it is, is killing off hundreds of thousands of workers every year. That isn't peace. One hundred thousand workers were injured in this state last year. I do not care whether it's peaceable or not; I want to see it come.”

You have no peace now. The truth is that the ruling class is at war with us. Musk and Trump have made that clearer than ever with relentless attacks on federal workers and withholding funding from preschools and cancer research and more. Some of us are afraid to unleash our anger, afraid to fight back, afraid of the vengeance of the fascists and the ruling class. But their vengeance is already here. Not only is a decent life increasingly out of reach, but now democratic norms are being destroyed and overt fascism is putting more and more of us in its crosshairs every day. As George Jackson said: “Settle your quarrels, come together, understand the reality of our situation, understand that fascism is already here, that people are already dying who could be saved, that generations more will live poor butchered half-lives if you fail to act. Do what must be done, discover your humanity and your love in revolution.”

The anger you feel is valid. Don’t let anyone tell you it’s not. Anger at the rapid advance of fascism, anger at those who hoard so much they crowd the rest of us out, anger at those who ought to fight for us but wallow in the status quo — all of it is legitimate. But without a channel that anger is merely poison. Without a way to shape hot rage into action and power we wallow in the fire and are consumed. Instead you must discover your humanity and your love in revolution. Instead of burning in our own flames we must organize, build vehicles with one another, vehicles that take our anger and allow it to fuel the reshaping of society.

That work can only be done with others. So set aside your quarrels and come together. It may be anger that first unites us, but as we organize we alchemize our rage. We combine it with love for our neighbors and families and for a life worth living and we radically shake and transform society and find ourselves able to create something new: a society filled with meaning, where life isn’t hard to live and where our anger is, at long last, no longer necessary.