ANGER IS NOT AN ARGUMENT

National Review

 

Anger Is Not an Argument

By Dan McLaughlin

March 14, 2025 1:23 PM

 

There’s a roiling debate among Democrats right now about how to communicate their opposition to Donald Trump. The challenge is to communicate with two different audiences simultaneously: a Democratic voter base that is already persuaded that Trump is terrible and wants to see vivid demonstrations of urgency and opposition (a group that Democrats want to keep motivated), and the persuadable middle of voters who need convincing to turn against Trump and Republicans.

 

One of the recurring themes we see from a lot of elected Democrats, pundits, and agitated supporters on social media is the notion that Democrats need to get angry, look angry, and sound angry. Now, righteous anger has its place as a natural outgrowth of political arguments, and spitting a certain amount of fire is a tried-and-true method of riling up your partisan base. But there also seems to be a widespread misunderstanding, which is especially prominent on the left side and results from some particular characteristics in progressive ideology and the Democratic voter base, to the effect that anger is itself an argument. It isn’t.

 

The symptoms of the demand for anger are everywhere. It was on full display during Trump’s joint address to Congress, with Al Green’s cane-shaking outburst and Democrats holding up protest signs. Online Democrats were excited by Representative John Larson’s shouting outburst in a hearing about DOGE; one high-profile account’s emblematic comment was “This is how mad everyone should be.” Democratic politicians are performatively angry even in semi-private settings: it was reported that “press heard who they believed to be Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., screaming inside Democratic senators’ private lunch on Thursday.” At House Democrats’ annual policy retreat, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez declared that “there is a deep sense of outrage and betrayal” over Senate Democrats’ deciding not to shut down the government, and CNN reported that one “member said that Democrats in Leesburg were ‘so mad’ that even centrist Democrats were ‘ready to write checks for AOC for Senate,’ adding that they have ‘never seen people so mad.’” If you’ve been on social media, you’ve seen it from Democratic voters, too: There’s a palpable sense that it’s not enough just to express opinions and arguments disagreeing with Trump policies; one must boil with rage and grief.

 

The problem is, this isn’t how arguing works — it’s neither logical nor notably effective. Logically, it does not follow that your argument has more merit if you get angrier. If I see you do something I think is horrible, and you see me do something you think is horrible, but you get angrier, that does not mean that what I did was worse than what you did; it just means you had a stronger emotional response. Thinking otherwise is an immature response. Deploying disproportionate anger as a means to overwhelm rational disagreement and avoid probing questions and the need to back up your assertions is a species of emotional blackmail. Unfortunately, the progressive framework of treating subjective offense as a legitimate argument independent of objective reality and immune to question — “my truth” — exacerbates the temptation to deploy anger as a substitute for argument.

 

The tactic is also not enormously effective, or at least it has severe limits. In real life, getting mad doesn’t turn you into the Incredible Hulk, it just makes you unpleasant. You can mobilize people with rage, but persuading them is another story. Some people will tune you out as a lunatic, especially if your anger goes to 11 and stays there 24/7. Others may briefly think, “Well, this person must have a real grievance,” but that is rarely a lasting response. Trump may have channeled all manner of rage at the outcome of the 2020 election, but it didn’t get him anywhere; he returned to power because people were persuaded that the Democrats had mismanaged things like inflation and the border and were pushing nutty woke ideas about topics like transgenderism. When and if Democrats return to power in the next few years, it won’t be because they got really, really mad.