Sometimes when I have nothing better to do, I think back on the elections we had in the before times — when, say, Mitt Romney ran against Barack Obama or John Kerry ran against George W. Bush. I try to figure out why politics and society in general felt so different then.
It’s not because we didn’t have big disagreements back then. The Iraq war kicked up some pretty vehement arguments. It’s not because we weren’t polarized. Pundits have been writing about political polarization since at least 2000 and maybe well before.
Politics is different now because something awful has been unleashed. William A. Galston defines this awful thing in his fantastic new book, “Anger, Fear, Domination: Dark Passions and the Power of Political Speech.” Even before the Charlie Kirk assassination it was obvious that the dark passions now pervade the American psyche, and thus American politics.
A core challenge in life is how do you motivate people to do things — to vote in a certain way, to take a certain kind of action. Good leaders motivate people through what you might call the bright passions — hope, aspiration, an inspiring vision of a better life. But these days, and maybe through all days, leaders across the political spectrum have found that dark passions are much easier to arouse. Evolution has wired us to be extremely sensitive to threat, which psychologists call negativity bias.
Donald Trump is a man almost entirely motivated by dark passions — hatred, anger, resentment, fear, the urge to dominate — and he stirs those passions to get people to support him. Speaking before a CPAC conference in 2023 he warned of “sinister forces trying to kill America,” by turning the nation into a “socialist dumping ground for criminals, junkies, Marxists, thugs, radicals and dangerous refugees that no other country wants.”
Trump is a master of this dark art, but I wouldn’t say my Trump-supporting friends have darker personalities than my Trump-opposing ones. Progressives also appeal to dark passions. A decade or so ago I had a poignant conversation with a Democratic ad-maker who was anguished because to help his candidates, nearly every ad he made was designed to arouse fear and animosity. “The thing people forget is that the political left were really the ones who perfected the politics of anger,” the left-wing social organizer Marshall Ganz told Charles Duhigg for an essay in The Atlantic in 2019. “It’s the progressives who figured out that by helping people see injustice, rather than just economics, we become strong.” Michael Walzer, the eminent co-editor emeritus of the progressive magazine Dissent, put it clearly, “Fear has to be our starting point, even though it is a passion most easily exploited by the right.”