Difference Between Anger and Resentment
Anger is connected with injustice, while resentment is more about personalized pettiness.
We see elements of crucial anger among the many supporters of Bernie Sanders, as well as the Black Lives Matter movement and the Indigenous-led movement to stop the Dakota Access pipeline. Anger can be a disruption that offers the possibility for critical analysis, calling out the social forces of oppression and violence in which so many current injustices are rooted.
Meanwhile, resentment operates out of a friend/enemy distinction that produces convenient scapegoats. It is the stuff of loathing, racism and spontaneous violence that often gives rise to the spectacle of fear-mongering and implied threats of state repression. In this instance, ideas lose their grip on reality and critical thought falls by the wayside. Echoes of such scapegoat-driven animosity can be heard in Trump's "rhetorical cluster bombs," in which he stated publicly that he would like to punch protesters in the face, punish women who have abortions, bring back state-sanctioned torture and, of course, much more. Genuine civic attachments are now cancelled out in the bombast of vileness and shame, which has been made into a national pastime and central to a spectacularized politics.
Reflection no longer challenges a poisonous appeal to commonsense or the signposts of racism, hatred and bigotry. Manufactured ignorance opens the door to an unapologetic culture of bullying and violence aimed at Muslims, immigrants, Blacks and others who do not fit into Trump's notion of "America." This is not about the breakdown of civility in US politics or the bemoaned growth of incivility. Throughout its history, US society has been inundated by a toxic, racist ideology that oppresses and marginalizes Black people, Indigenous people and immigrants of color, and particularly since 9/11, has singled out Muslims as targets. It is a market-driven ideology that enshrines greed and self-interest, and a sustained attack on public values and the common good, fueled by the policies of a financial elite -- much of it coded by both the Republican and Democratic political establishment.
Trump did not invent these forces; he simply brought them to the surface and made them the centerpiece of his campaign. As anti-democratic pressures mount, the commanding institutions of capital are divorced from matters of politics, ethics and responsibility. The goal of making the world a better place has been replaced by dystopian narratives about how to survive alone in a world whose destruction is just a matter of time. The lure of a better and more just future has given way under the influence of neoliberalism to questions of mere survival. As Zygmunt Bauman has argued in his books Wasted Lives and Consuming Life, entire populations once protected by the social contract are now considered disposable, dispatched to the garbage dump of a society that equates one's humanity exclusively with their ability to consume.
The not-so-subtle signs of the culture of resentment and cruelty are everywhere, and not just in the proliferation of extremist talking heads, belligerent nihilists and right-wing conspiracy types blathering over the airways, on talk radio, and across various registers of screen culture. Young children, especially those whose parents are being targeted by Trump's rhetoric, report being bullied more. Hate crimes are on the rise. And state-sanctioned violence is accelerating against Native Americans, Black youth, and others now deemed unworthy and disposable in Trump's America.
In the mainstream media, the endless and unapologetic proliferation of lies become fodder for higher ratings, informed by a suffocating pastiche of talking heads, all of whom surrender to "the incontestable demands of quiet acceptance," as Brad Evans and Julien Reid have argued in Truthout. Politics has been reduced to the cult of the spectacle and a performative register of shock, but not merely, as Neal Gabler observes, "in the name of entertainment." The framing mechanism that drives the mainstream media is a sink-or-swim individualism and a shark-like notion of competition that accentuates and accelerates hostility, insults and the politics of humiliation.
Capitalism's New Age of Bullying
Charles Derber and Yale Magrass are right in arguing in Bully Nation that "Capitalism breeds competition and teaches that losers deserve their fate." But capitalism also does more. It creates an unbridled individualism that embodies a pathological disdain for community, produces a cruel indifference to the social contract, disdains the larger social good, and creates a predatory culture that replaces compassion, sharing and a concern for the other. As the discourse of the common good and compassion withers, the only vocabulary left is that of the bully -- one that takes pride in the civic-enervating binary of winners and losers. What has been on full display in the presidential election of 2016 is the merging of the culture of cruelty, the logic of egregious self-interest, a deadly anti-intellectualism, a ravaging unbridled anger, a politics of disposability, and a toxic fear of others. Jessica Lustig captures this organized culture of violence, grudges and resentment in The New York Times Magazine with the following comments:
Grievance is the animating theme of this election and the natural state of at least one of the candidates; Trump is a public figure whose ideology, such as it is, essentially amounts to a politics of the personal grudge. It has drawn to him throngs of disaffected citizens all too glad to reclaim the epithet "deplorable." But beyond these aggrieved hordes, it can seem at times as if nearly everyone in the country is nursing wounds, cringing over slights and embarrassments, inveighing against enemies and wishing for retribution. Everyone has someone, or something, to resent.
It gets worse. In the age of a bullying internet culture, the trolling community has elected one of its own as president of the United States. Criticizing the pernicious trolling produced by political extremists should not suggest a generalized indictment of the internet and social media, since the latter have also been key tools in pushing back against Trump's egregiousness. As the apostle of publicity for publicity's sake, Trump has adopted the practices of reality TV, building his reputation on insults, humiliations, and a discourse of provocation and hate.
According to The New York Times, since announcing his candidacy, Trump used Twitter to insult at least 282 people, places and things. Not only has he honed the technique of trolling, he has also made it a crucial resource in upping the ratings for the mainstream media who, it seems, are insatiable when it comes to covering Trump's insults. Trump has done more than bring a vicious online harassment culture into the mainstream, he has also legitimated the worst dimensions of politics and brought out of the shadows white nationalists, racist militia types, social media trolls, overt misogynists and a variety of reactionaries who have turned their hate-filled discourse into a weaponized element of political culture. This was all the more obvious when Trump hired Stephen K. Bannon to run his campaign. The former executive chairman of Breitbart News is well known for his extremist views and for his unwavering support for the political alt-right. One of his more controversial headlines on Breitbart read, "Would you rather have feminism or cancer?" He is also considered one of the more prominent advocates of the right-wing trolling mill that is fiercely loyal to Trump. Jared Keller in The Village Voice captures perfectly the essence of Trump's politics of trolling. He writes:
From the start, the Trump campaign has offered a tsunami of trolling, waves of provocative tweets and soundbites -- from "build the wall" to "lock her up" -- designed to provoke maximum outrage, followed, when the resulting heat felt a bit too hot, by the classic schoolyard bully's excuse: that it was merely "sarcasm" or a "joke." In a way, it is. It's just a joke with victims and consequences.... Trump's behavior has normalized trolling as an accepted staple of daily political discourse.
One example of such vitriol was noted by Andrew Marantz's profile for The New Yorker on Mike Cernovich, a prominent internet troll. He writes:
His political analysis was nearly as crass as his dating advice ("Misogyny Gets You Laid"). In March, he tweeted, "Hillary's face looks like a melting candle wax. Imagine what her brain looks like." Next he tweeted a picture of Clinton winking, which he interpreted as "a mild stroke." By August, he was declaring that she had both a seizure disorder and Parkinson's disease.
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