Moral Outrage and Politics

In struggling to understand the nation’s politics, one is struck by the effectiveness of the Republican Party in getting people to vote for their candidates even if the policies of those candidates seem to have no relationship to the economic needs of the voters.  The Democrats represent the counter example of a Party that focuses on policies directed at relieving voters of their problems but seems to have the most difficulty in consistently turning out voters.  Tony Judt lamented this decline in progressive voters’ focus in his book Ill Fares the Land and produced this explanation.

“We no longer have political movements.  While thousands of us may come together for a rally or a march, we are bound together on such occasions by a single shared interest.  Any effort to convert such interests into collective goals is usually undermined by the fragmented individualism of our concerns.  Laudable goals—fighting climate change, opposing war, advocating public healthcare or penalizing bankers—are united by nothing more than the expression of emotion.  In our political, as in our economic lives, we have become consumers: choosing from a broad gamut of competing objectives, we find it hard to imagine ways or reasons to combine these into a coherent whole.”

There seems to be truth in this analysis, but it does not help explain why Republicans are more effective in turning out their voters.  The arrival of Donald Trump on the scene has proved unsettling in many ways, but his effect on voters may help explain what really makes them behave as they do.

Trump’s election generated a number of massive protests and marches objecting to him and his policies.  Dana R. Fisher has followed these activities through the 2018 midterm elections and reports her observations in the book American Resistance: From the Women's March to the Blue Wave.  The Resistance is the assembly of outraged citizens who were driven to participate in activities that would both protest and counter Trump’s activities and policies.  It is somewhat similar to the Tea Party activities in response to Obama and his policies.  There is some evidence that those efforts were subsidized and coordinated by big-money Republican interests.  The current Resistance appears to be a real grass-roots movement, generated partly by the inability of the Democratic Party apparatus to participate effectively at local levels.

“The Resistance is a product of the president’s behavior combined with the response by Americans to an out-of-touch Democratic Party and the reach of conservative dark money in politics.”

What Trump has accomplished is the combination of all the diverse progressive factions mentioned by Judt into a movement to drive him out of office in the next election.

“Because it is a countermovement with a common enemy, it is possible to bring diverse streams of progressive activism together even though they have historically competed for resources, energy, and attention.  As I document in this book, the Resistance represents a merging of movements working together to form the river of resistance we see today.  It includes Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, and the women’s, antigun violence, and the climate movements, among others.”

Fisher identifies “moral outrage” as the necessary driver to generate Resistance activities (and those of the Tea Party as well).

“To understand the growth of the Resistance, it is important to look at the ways that disconnected individuals mobilize.  In other words, what gets the disconnected nonjoiners off their sofas and into the streets and town hall meetings?  The answer is moral shocks: ‘when an event or situation raises such a sense of outrage in people that they become inclined toward political action, even in the absence of a network of contacts’.”

This concept of moral outrage seems even more fundamental than Fisher’s perspective makes it.  Viewed through the prism of moral outrage, the consistent and dependable behavior of Republican voters becomes understandable.  The Republican voters consist of a contingent of the wealthy who are permanently outraged at the notion that their wealth might be diminished by taxation or regulation, a contingent of white voters who were outraged at the notion of a black president and who are permanently outraged (whether they admit it or not) at the notion of equality between races, and a contingent of the religious who are outraged by the disrespect they and their beliefs receive from liberals.  While the Democrats argue policies, the Republicans fan the flames of moral outrage.

The Democrats seem united, for the moment, in their outrage at Trump, yet policy differences could still cause some to break ranks.  Younger voters who see themselves as being generally excluded from the “good life” their elders have enjoyed view the leftish policies promoted by Bernie Sanders as the only path forward.  It is not yet clear that they would universally vote for a less ambitious candidate.

The lesson that moral outrage should teach democrats is that and the Republican candidate for president is far worse than any candidate the democrats might nominate.  The Republican agenda is not only illiberal, it is also undemocratic; and it is inconsistent with the way of life favored by progressives. 

It is sad to say, but the Republican Party views the Democratic Party as an existential threat.  Winning is everything.  The democrats must also view republicans as an existential threat—even after Trump is gone.  Losing is not an option.

It seems the only solution to this standoff is for one party to lose so definitively that it must reconstitute itself with a new agenda.  That is not likely in the foreseeable future.