See political scientist Barbara Koziak's book Retrieving Political Emotion: Thumos , Aristotle, and Gender (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000).
Arguably the most concise and perceptive discussion of thumos (or thymos) is Harvard political scientist Harvey Mansfield's 2007 Jefferson Lecture.
For example, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., attempted to enlist not only black rage but also white rage in non-violent protest against certain Jim Crow laws and customs. In addition to explicitly advocating non-violence, Dr. King advocated the Christian spirit of love as a motivating force for harnessing and directing the rage needed for political engagement.
Now, on the heels of the black civil rights movement spearheaded by Dr. King, so-called "second wave" feminists emerged in the 1960s and 1970s and later. The leaders attempted to enlist not only women's rage but also men's rage about certain customs and attitudes in American culture. No doubt the rage of certain feminists has involved zealotry.
Later, after the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Roe v. Wade in 1973, anti-abortion leaders attempted to enlist the rage of both women and men about the legalization of abortion in the first trimester. No doubt the rage of certain anti-abortion protesters has involved zealotry. To this day, the abortion debate is a hot-button issue in American politics.
Eventually, out of black rage and feminist rage, zealotry for identity politics emerged in academia and in the Democratic Party, which political scientist Mark Lilla of Columbia University critiques in his new book The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics (Harper, 2017).
In reaction to the ascendancy of identity politics in the Democratic Party, a kind of zealotry for white identity politics emerged in the Republican Party in the most ardent supporters of the party's 2016 presidential candidate, Donald J. Trump.
In contrast to Dr. King, the self-described atheist Ta-Nehisi Coates does not invoke the Christian spirit of love but the secular spirit of power in his polemical jeremiad about so-called "whiteness" in his article "The First White President" (meaning President Trump) in the October 2017 issue of The Atlantic, which is also available at the magazine's website:
Coates' article is an example of black rage and a certain form of identity politics. But he stops well short of urging violence. (The Atlantic would probably not publish an article that urges violence.)
I mention these examples of political rage for illustrative purposes. I do not mean that this list of examples is exhaustive. There is no doubt that former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton ran her 2016 presidential campaign on her preference for identity politics.
In a lengthy review essay about the book Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes (Penguin, 2017) in the Fall 2017 issue of The American Prospect magazine, Stanley Greenberg raise an important question for the Democratic Party to consider: "Can you simultaneously advance identity politics and class politics?"
URL: http://prospect.org/article/how-she-lost
In Hillary's 2016 presidential campaign, she decidedly advanced identity politics, as Greenberg explains. Arguably she lost white voters in certain swing states because she failed to advance class politics. In the spirit of giving her credit where credit is due, we should credit her for having the political courage to campaign on identity politics, the political cause she believes in most strongly. Nevertheless, despite her most fervent political convictions, she was a decidedly uncharismatic campaigner. By contrast, her Republican opponent was a charismatic campaigner, attracting large crowds and stirring ardent supporters. So perhaps the real lesson that the Democratic Party needs to learn from the 2016 presidential election is that an uncharismatic candidate will probably not prevail against a charismatic opponent -- regardless of her, or his, policy positions.
Now, a word is in order here about how political rage over the last half century or so evolved into identity politics. Up to, say, Senator John F. Kennedy's unexpected election in 1960, the prestige culture in American culture had been dominated by white Anglo-Saxon men from an American Protestant background. Historically, women from an American Protestant background, men and women who were not from a mainline American Protestant background, blacks, American Indians, and others were seriously under-represented in the prestige culture in American culture. JFK's election in 1960 was a watershed moment because he was a Roman Catholic Irish-American -- that is, a representative of an outsider group that historically had been seriously under-represented in the prestige culture in American culture.
Eventually identity politics emerged as a deliberate attempt to privilege and favor certain groups of people who had historically been seriously under-represented in the prestige culture in American culture. Arguably there is today greater diversity in the prestige culture in American culture than there was, say, before JFK's election in 1960.
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