Philosophy versus Trump: Anger and Outrage

Well, we lost, and it sucks, but maybe this isn't the worst possible outcome. In the aftermath of the recent US general election, I take a bit to examine some of the details, fact and fiction, in the election results, and in regards to the parties and candidates. More importantly, on the philosophy side, we take a look at anger and outrage, in defense of anger and outrage, hope, and through Stephane Hessel's Time for Outrage (2010) and and excerpt from Sara Ahmed's The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2014).

Obligatory bibliography, or books (and articles) you may also want to check out:

Ahmed, Sara. 2014. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Second edition. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Hessel, Stéphane. 2010. Time for Outrage! . Translated by Marion Duvert. First North American edition. New York: Twelve.
Hessel, Stéphane. 2010. Time for Outrage! Narrated by Bob Walter: Hachette Audio, 2011. Spotify.

The Doctor's Speech | The Zygon Inversion | Doctor Who

References:
7 states vote to protect abortion rights, while efforts to expand access in Florida and South Dakota fail | CNN Politics
U.S. House Election Results 2018 - The New York Times
Federal Register :: Estimates of the Voting-Age Population for 2023

Transcript

Hello, welcome, and thank you for checking out this episode of Philosophy Versus Work, the podcast that examines the Ethics of the “Work Ethic” and other philosophical and socio-political questions regarding Work, Life, and Death. I am Michael Murray and I’ll be your guide on this philosophical journey. 

Episode 15: Philosophy versus Trump; Anger and Outrage

Hey, so, I know this episode was supposed to be about Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, but given the surprising results of the election, I felt the need to express my thoughts on the outcome, and some thoughts on the future of this podcast. 

To say that I’m surprised is an understatement. It was disappointing to see North Carolina go red, again, and by such substantial a margin – now, 2% is by no means a blowout, Trump didn’t win any swing state by anything close to the kinds of margins he won reliably red, largely rural states, like Wyoming (72 to 26), Arkansas (63 to 34), Idaho (67 to 30), etc. In fact, if you combine Idaho, Wyoming, Nebraska, Arkansas, North and South Dakota, and Alaska, you still come up 121 thousand votes short of what he received in North Carolina, where he secured a narrow victory. Now, a lager victory than four years ago, but still narrow in the grand scheme of things.

Now, it does look like Trump will win the national popular vote for the Republicans as well, only their second time in over 30 years, but I do have to raise the issue of the baked in advantage Republicans have in the electoral college. The GOP blowout states I just listed, combined, hold 27 electoral votes, compared to North Carolina’s 16, but even combined they fall well short of the number of votes of one basically purple state. If the Electoral College were in any way actually fair or representative, either states like North Carolina would have near double the votes it has - not to mention states like New York and California - or these rural states should have far fewer. Personally, and I don’t think this comes as a surprise, and I may revisit this some other time and get into the details of why, I support abandoning both the electoral college, in favor of a national popular vote, as well as state and national congressional districts, in favor of proportional representation. If 51% of the population voted Republican (and this is, interesting, where it looks like North Carolina reflects pretty closely the national results), then 51% of the elected government should be Republican. There’s no justifiable reason, in a legitimate democracy, that a 51% victory at the polls ought to produce a legislative super majority. A proportional representation system also empowers smaller parties, it encourages diversity of opinion and coalition building, but, we’ll get to that, I think, some other time. 

As to North Carolina being purple, it really is more purple both demographically (independent/unaffiliated is now the largest bloc by registration, followed by Democrats and then GOP in 3rd place), NC elected a Democratic Governor, again, Attorney General, again, elected Democrat Mo Green for State Superintendent of Schools (a contest against a Mom’s for Liberty book-banner and hardcore Trump backer that had previously called for Trump to implement the Insurrection Act on January 6th and implement martial law to stay in power). Now, personally, I don’t understand the logic that, for North Carolina Trump voters, candidates like Mark Robinson, Hal Weatherman, and Michelle Morrow were ‘too extreme’ but were still comfortable supporting Trump. I mean, I guess there’s wiggle room with Trump in that, despite what his actions have been, the people he surrounds himself with, the policies he enables his sycophants to implement, when he speaks it’s largely just word vomit. When it comes to rhetoric, the man is brilliant at speaking for hours and saying absolutely nothing. 

But, that’s not really what I want to talk to you about today. Am I surprised at the results? Yes, but I’m also upset, disappointed, worried, and angry. And you know what? That’s okay. It’s okay to be angry, it’s good to be angry. I think the only thing, so far anyway, that’s pissed me off more than Trump winning, is that there was a caller on NPR around the 10am hour Wednesday – I was tired, I didn’t sleep well, Kiyo could tell I was stressed so she was trying to calm me down, but of course having a cat try to sit on top of you, and head butting your chin and grooming you while you’re trying to fall asleep isn’t exactly conducive to getting to sleep – she called in and wanted to express that now isn’t the time for anger, it’s time to forgive and come together, to open dialogues and see where we have common ground, that whole load of liberal bullshit. She literally apologized for losing. 

Debate and dialogue with an opponent is a good thing, generally speaking, but it’s a really problematic ideal. A true dialogue requires a meeting of equals. If one side has all the power, it has no reason to engage in dialogue, it stands nothing to gain, or worse, as the mere act of appearing to open a dialogue legitimizes and empowers the other side. The weaker side must rise up (or the stronger side must be brought down, their power diminished, or degraded) to a position of parity.

If you want to understand how and why both parties in the US have lurched so far to the right over the past 60 years, you need look no further than this bipartisanship über alles of the liberal wing of the Democrat party. Since around the early 70s (the beginning of the end of the Vietnam War era and anti-war protests and the rise of Neoliberalism), and really embraced in the election of Bill Clinton, the liberal wing of the party has been on something of an apology tour, apologizing for having beliefs, ideals, caring about social justice issues, and, in the Obama era, ready from the get go to fully abandon any position, no matter how socially or economically beneficial (such as Medicare for all or some other single payer healthcare system) in the hopes of attracting bipartisan support - that they never got. I mean, The Heritage Foundation – the same conservative think tank responsible for Project 2025 – is the original author of the principal structure of the Affordable Care Act. They knew (it’s blatantly obvious in the basic structure of insurance, that a single payer system is the most cost-effective system of insurance, insurance companies are wholly dependent on large pools of coverage so healthy people, safe property, safe drivers, etc., can subsidize the risk on the higher end) they knew they needed the largest pool possible, but wanted to preserve private insurance, and so the individual mandate and tax penalty was their idea. The main reason Republicans, 14 years later now, still have no alternative to the ACA is because the ACA was their plan. The liberal wing has, and continues to drag the Democrat party further and further to the right, win or lose, and I suspect there will be some very loud voices once the dust settles on this election that are going to point the blame at Harris/Walz being too liberal, too far to the left for the American people, and seek to push the party ever further to the right. I mean, Harris had Liz and Dick Cheney’s endorsements. How much further to the right do you need to go before there is no Left anymore. 

And that gets me to the point of what I want to talk about today. Anger. Outrage. 

As came up with Edelman and Fisher, when it comes to getting out of systems and structures like reproductive futurism or capitalist realism, when it comes to trying to address, in earnest, the systemic problems in our politics and economics, our greatest problem is a lack of imagination. We keep coming up with, or electing those who keep coming up with, plans to address problems from within the existing system when the system is itself fundamental to the problem. The old Liberal solution of piecemeal reform – I know it’s not enough, but it’s something, and it moves the needle towards what we need to do, this is the best we can do given the restraints of the system. 

There are a lot of people out there, like that NPR caller, that will tell you now isn’t the time for anger, now is the time to come together. Bullshit. Now is precisely the time for anger. Yes, anger can be destructive, but anger can also be a powerful, productive motivation. And sometimes, as with the fall of the Berlin Wall, destructive, cathartic, energy can be a good thing. 

Yesterday I went back and listened to the audiobook – my old hardcopy was damaged some years ago, I used to carry it around in my bookbag at UNCC or at the office and glance through it whenever I felt particularly frustrated at the world – the audiobook version of Stéphane Hessel’s Time for Outrage: Indignez-vous! from 2010. Hessel was 93 at the time he wrote Time for Outrage, he was born in Berlin in 1917, his family emigrated to France in 1923, his Father, Franz Hessel, was a writer and translator (and had worked with Walter Benjamin on a translation of Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time”), he attended the École Normale Supérieure and studied under the likes of Jean Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty in 1939, now, his Wikipedia page cites a biography on Hessel that he became a French citizen in 1939, but the About the Author section of Time for Outrage notes this happened in ’37, which would make sense if he was admitted to the ENS in ’39. Hessel’s ethics and politics were markedly informed by Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, and he joined the French Resistance under Charles de Gaul during the Nazi Occupation in the Free French intelligence service, the BCRA, their equivalent of the American CIA. In 1944 he was on mission, to establish communication with various resistance groups as well find locations to broadcast information to London, but was betrayed to the Gestapo, arrested, tortured (by waterboarding) and sent to Buchenwald concentration camp. He was sentenced to death, but managed to change identities with another prisoner that was already dying, eventually tried to escape, failed, and was sent to another camp, Dora, where he eventually managed to escape successfully. After the war, he went on to join the French diplomatic service, appointed to the United Nations, where he served as the Chief of Staff to the Assistant Secretary General and Secretary of the UN Commission on Human Rights, where he collaborated with Elenor Roosevelt and served as a principal editor on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Hessel notes, writing Time for Outrage around 2008/2009, leading to and in a section titled, “Palestine, My Own Outrage,” “To the youth, I say again, look around you and you will find the themes to justify your indignation; the treatment of immigrants, the expulsion of illegal workers, the dismantling of Roma camps in some European countries… you will become aware of situations so deplorable, they simply demand civil action. Seek, and you will find. … Today, I am most outraged by the situation in Palestine, Gaza, and the West Bank. The source of my indignation is inspired by the call from courageous Israelis to us Jews living abroad, ‘you, our brothers, come and see where our leaders have taken our country, oblivious of the fundamental humane values of Judaism.” He goes on to describe visits to Gaza and witnessing the colonialist violence, oppression, and crimes against humanity – and this was during an only 3-week long conflict. 

Now, Hessel equally condemns Hamas and calls for nonviolence as “the only path that will move humanity forward.” He also draws a distinction in his position for nonviolence in contrast to his mentor Sarte’s position. He notes that, for Sartre, violence, however it manifests, is a failure, but it is an unavoidable failure because we live in a world of violence. Following Sartre, violence contra violence may only perpetuate violence, but it is also true that it’s the only way to end violence. 

Einstein as well, spent most of his life deeply committed to pacifism, but in coming to understand the absolute threat Nazism posed to the world, conceded and advocated for the free nations of the world to take up arms against Nazism. 

Hessel, however, believes nonviolence more reliable to end violence. That violence cannot motivate the masses as nonviolence can, because nonviolence holds the moral high ground. People respond viscerally to the confrontation of violence with nonviolence. 

Now, while I agree with that, it’s also a deeply problematic strategy. Take for example Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Children’s Crusade” the gambit in Birmingham in ’63. King was adamant about spreading the word about marching to black children, of getting them out of school to march in the streets, knowing precisely police commissioner Bull Connor’s plan to use police dogs. King’s intent was to get photos and newsreels of police, and specifically police dogs attacking children in the streets in order to drive anger nationally against segregation and racist police practices in the Jim Crow south. Personally, I find it really difficult to consider knowingly putting children in harm’s way for a photo-op to be “nonviolence.” I consider this kind of political would-be-martyrdom, of inviting violence against yourself or others to be using violence just as much as your opponent is. There is blood on Dr. King’s hands, and from everything I’ve read about Dr. King, by Dr. King, seen in biographical depictions of him, I believe he knew this as well. What’s important here is that this seems to be missing from the myth of Martin Luther King Jr. King didn’t risk that kind of violence because he wanted everyone to come together and hope for the best; he, and others, like John Lewis, allowed their outrage to empower them to fight. 

There’s a brilliant scene in the second season of Peter Capaldi’s run as The Doctor, his speech in the episode, “The Zygon Inversion,” where he places the leaders of the Human and Zygon war in front of boxes with a single button that will, if triggered, kill all of the other race, but warns them they don’t know which box they have. They each have a 100% chance of ending the war, and a 50% chance of killing themselves and their kind, as he puts it, “a scale model of war.” Or, he notes, they can close the box, step away from it, and talk it out. It’s a powerful scene, and I’m a big fan of the Capaldi seasons, I recommend checking out the ‘Zygon box’ scene on YouTube (or, better yet, just watching his run of Doctor Who, or better still, all the ‘New Who’ – I have mixed feelings about the Chibnall run seasons with Jodi Whitaker, Jodi’s great, but the whole run, the massive character changes, rather reflecting a new point of view for the Doctor, come across more like Chibnall wanting to leave his mark on the series, effectively rebooting the show instead of continuing it, largely throwing away so much of the prior 10 years’ worth of character development). 

But I digress. 

So, I originally phrased this next line as ‘Republicans are likely to’ but since I wrote this on the 7th, Speaker Johnson has already confirmed my suspicion here – the Republicans plan to ride into office in January boasting of a political “mandate” by the people, emboldened to rapidly begin instituting radical change. Now, of course, they have no such mandate. Trump appears likely to win by about 3% overall, with Harris having won about 40% (20/50) of the states and 48% of the voting population – and keep in mind, this is what’s expected to total up, when all votes are counted, to a national turnout of about 65% (2% lower than 2020), 35% of eligible voters didn’t vote at all. And while the GOP did flip some seats legislatively, the Dems did too, counts on House seats (as I’m writing this on November 7th) are still being tallied and running really tight, seven states voted to protect abortion access (half of which also voted for Trump), failing in three states (2 of which, Nebraska and South Dakota, went for Trump by larger margins than they went against abortion access; and Florida, the only state with a 60% threshold, rather than 50%+1 simple majority (which was instituted last minute after the Republican legislature discovered they were going to lose) still voted 57% in favor of protecting abortion access in a state that went 56% for Trump. Any potential ‘Red Wave mandate’ is only supported by about 28% of the US population (about 75 million, as votes for Trump, out of 262 million voting age US citizens (as of 2023)). So, when you hear people talk about ‘half the country supports Trump’ or ‘half the country voted for Trump’ it’s simply, categorically, false. 

Back to Hessel. 

Hessel makes reference to the “principles and values” set forth in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as well as those set out in the Declaration of the Policy of the National Council of the Resistance (to the Vichy Government and Nazi Occupation), which sought to bring together the various French resistance groups (such as the Maquis, Combat, the National Front, the Secret Army, the Liberation movements, as well as French Socialists, Communists, and Trade Unionists) under de Gaul and the Free France government. He states, “Today, more than ever, we need these principles and values [social democracy; nationalization of energy, insurance, and banking; social security and trade unions; universal rights, freedoms, and suffrage, etc.]. It is the duty of us all to ensure that our society remain one of which we are proud, not a society wary of immigrants and intent on their expulsion, or a society that disputes the welfare state, or a society in which the media are controlled by the wealthy. We would oppose such things, were we the natural heirs of the National Council of the Resistance.”

He notes that we should be fighting for economic and social democracy, as opposed to the economic feudalism we’re in now, under the rule of wealthy executives, the political slaves of the wealthy elites; and that this money-driven society we are in now hinders creativity and the spirit of debate. But, critically, he notes that we need to be paying attention to this, and that it’s right that we ought to be angry about it, because “indignation fuels resistance.”

Indignation, he notes, “is a precious thing. When outraged, as I was by Nazism, you will become militant, strong, and engaged. You will join the great course of history as it flows toward greater justice, greater freedom, but not the reckless freedom of the fox in the henhouse.”

Or, let’s consider anger from a different tack, one that’s more analytical than political. 

Sara Ahmed, in her text The Cultural Politics of Emotion, notes that “the passion of anger is crucial to what gives us ‘the energy’ to react against…” She responds to Audre Lord’s comment in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, noting the following regarding anger, and this is a pretty long passage, a few paragraphs in her section on Feminist Attachments, but I’m editing this down a good bit, both for brevity and to keep the focus on anger specifically. The first part of the quote is from Lorde, then Ahmed, “

My response to racism is anger. I have lived with that anger, ignoring it, feeding upon it, learning to use it before it laid my visions to waste, for most of my life. Once I did it in silence, afraid of the weight. My fear of anger taught me nothing… [A]nger expressed and translated into action in the service of our vision and our future is a liberating and strengthening act of clarification… Anger is loaded with information and energy.

Ahmed.

Here, anger is constructed in different ways: as a response to the injustice of racism; as a vision of the future; as a translation of pain into knowledge; and as being loaded with information and energy. Crucially, anger is not simply defined in relationship to a past, but as opening up to the future. … As Lorde shows us, anger is visionary and the fear of anger, or the transformation of anger into silence, is a turning away from the future. … If anger pricks our skin, if it makes us shudder, sweat and tremble, then it might just shudder us into new ways of being, it might just enable us to inhabit a different kind of skin, even if that skin remains marked or scarred by that which we are against.

Anger is not, or is at least not solely, destructive or self-destructive energy. Anger is the right and proper response to harm, oppression, and injustice, to racism and sexism. When those who stand against what you stand for, when those who would seek to dominate and exploit are victorious, it’s okay to be angry. What’s not okay is to do nothing. And you don’t need to apologize for your anger. 

I want to come back to Time for Outrage before closing this out. Hessel notes that we must be hopeful, that we must never lose hope. To which, I would add, it’s impossible to be outraged if you’re not also hopeful. One has to believe things can be better in order to be outraged that things are going wrong. 

Perhaps Trump winning isn’t the worst thing in the world. Now, I am by no means saying the next 2-4 or however many years will not be painful or difficult, but think of it in terms of trying to prove a negative. Democrats and Republicans have been warning for years of the serious threat posed by a second Trump presidency, but it’s easy for those who voted for him, but don’t necessarily consider themselves his supporters per se, the one’s that aren’t wearing MAGA hats and flying Trump flags, that see their vote as purely pragmatic, that are convinced their own potential economic benefit outweighs any political, international, or other harms he may cause, it’s easy for them to chalk the anti-Trump rhetoric up to fear mongering, the whole idea that surely he can’t be that bad, that surely our national institutions are stronger than any one man, they held up before (which, of course, he’s not, he’s backed by scores of extremist legislators and judges, think tank policy writers, and corporate executives). Letting Trump be Trump, trying to be a dictator on day one, instituting policies from project 2025, signing a national abortion ban into law, inviting the police to institute a Purge-style national day of violence, flooding city streets with machine-gun armed ICE agents, wasting an estimated 3 Trillion dollars on mass deportations – and the concentration camps that would be needed to round up and house those deportees, would cause far greater damage to the political future of the far right than any policy successes of a potential Harris presidency ever could. As opposed to Trump’s fantasy that had he stayed in office there’d be no inflation, no wars in Ukraine or Gaza, and housing would be affordable, or any of the rest of his rhetoric over the past 4 years, people will be able to see the real outcomes of his policies.

Historically, it’s highly likely that the more policies, and the more extreme policies, Trump is able to implement over the next 2 years, the larger and the more likely there will be a Blue Wave in the 2026 midterms. Republican’s social policies are, poll after poll, overwhelmingly unpopular. The more they focus on culture war issues, which I expect will be the big push from congress during Trump next first hundred days, especially if he gets a unified government, the more people will actually see Trump’s BS for what it is. Recall the response to the first Trump presidency: the Women’s March, the Science March, the MeToo movement, the Black Lives Matter movement, the highest midterm voter turnout since 1914, a wave of Women, minority, and LGBTQ candidates and their victories, and as for election statistics? The Democrats won every race they were expected to (Republicans lost 2 they were expected to win easily), Dems won every race expected to be narrow, Republicans lost 2, and out of the 30 toss-up races?  Dems won 21 of them. Republicans were counting on a red wave, and it backfired spectacularly.  

And hopefully, the anger, indignation, and outrage felt by women, the LGBTQ community, and all of us on the Left will cause some real and imaginative leaders to step up in resistance and opposition.

Harris’ greatest failure wasn’t the shortness of her campaign – though the Democrat Party certainly failed everyone by not allowing a legitimate primary season, once again opting for a deeply conservative commitment to custom and institutionalism – nor her lack of a succinct, and different, economic plan, or her failure to offer any correction of course regarding Gaza (though that really hurt, especially in the ‘Blue Wall’ states). It was that Harris was the status quo candidate par excellence. A middle of the road, tough on crime, committed to market capitalism, unimaginative on policy proposals, flanked, literally, by traditional liberals and conservatives alike, that, aside from her race and gender, could have run as a Republican or a Democrat at almost any time in the past century. A political glass of tepid water. Do I think we would be better off with Harris than Trump, yes, absolutely, but maybe I shouldn’t be surprised we lost. But maybe Harris needed to lose, or, more accurately, maybe the middle needed to lose. Democrats have a history of doing well as an opposition party, and Republicans’ governance track record since the Tea Party wave of 2010 has been pretty poor, constantly plagued by their own infighting. With any luck, rather than salting the earth, the next few years may yield the wildfire that prompts new growth in its wake. 

alright, well, I think that’s all I’ve got for now. Next episode, we’re getting back to Fisher’s Capitalist Realism. So to sign off, I’ll leave you with Hessel’s words, “To create is to Resist. To Resist, is to Create. 

‘til next time. 

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