Rage addicts: the new Left

Bullies full of rage, trying to hide their rage behind a worthy cause, are taking over the Left, using humanitarian causes as an excuse to vent their out-of-control anger.

Will Stancil makes this point on Twitter:

There are many issues that deserve anger. The world is full of injustice. I am angry about many things. When we think of the way that the police in Minneapolis murdered George Floyd, or we think of the genocide that Russia has inflicted on Ukraine, then anger is the only rational response.

But most of us carry our anger quietly, and try to do useful work to make the world a better place. We focus our anger on those who have initiated evil acts, we do not focus our anger on other progressives, because we do not see ourselves as being in some competition where we need to prove who among us is the angriest.

By contrast, what we increasingly see online, especially on Twitter, is people competing to show how angry they are. The anger becomes a performance. And some of these people are clearly life-long angry people, their anger has nothing to do with any current political issue. They were probably angry when they were children. Progressive and humanitarian causes simply give them an excuse to vent that life-long anger while pretending they really care about people. But they don’t really care about people. That kind of anger gets in the way of caring about other people.

I’ve had my own encounters with these rage addicts:

These rage addicts are not healthy people, and they are not healthy for the Left. They create 7 problems:

1. Their anger drives away moderates who might otherwise support progressive causes.

2. Rather than doing real work, they mostly just vent.

3. They gatekeep what it means to be a supporter of progressive causes.

4. They insult and exhaust the people who are doing the real work in progressive movements.

5. When they show up for real-world events, they want to be in charge, often pushing aside those who have been working for years to create a grassroots movement.

6. They tend to focus more on the performance of anger than in actually doing real work that might influence politics in the real world.

7. They often ignore evidence about what policies might actually be best. These are not careful people. When confronted with contradictions in their thinking, they try to solve the problem with yet another episode of rage. This may have worked well for them when they were teenagers, but it does not do much in the real world.

Conclusion: Progressives movements need people who are angry about the injustices of the world. But we also need people who can control their anger. Above all, we cannot let the rage addicts get into leadership positions in progressive movements.