The recent 鈥榠nsurrection鈥� on Capitol Hill should put an end to any liberal illusions that 2021 would usher in, in Biden鈥檚 words, a return to decency. Surreal images of the roaming the US Senate may yet become one of the defining photographs of the Trump presidency. In many ways it is symbolic of the President himself – and unashamedly atavistic yet, emboldened by , obstructive and corrosive.
Many of these themes are touched upon in Eric Lonergan and Mark Blyth鈥檚 short book . In many senses it is a timely book, published just weeks after the murder of George Floyd and in the midst of the largest global recession since the Second World War, these are fertile grounds for anger. Certainly there is very little to dispute about Lonergan and Blyth鈥檚 premise:
鈥淲e have an abject failure of policy. Rather than presenting a major programme of economic reform, the global political elite has offered nothing substantive, instead choosing either to jump on the bandwagon of nationalism or insist that nothing fundamental is wrong鈥� The political classes, bereft of ideas, are now desperately peddling old ideologies and instincts, or pursuing bizarre distractions like Brexit.鈥�
As a result of this abject failure, people are angry. They are either publicly anger or privately angry. That public anger either manifests itself in moral outrage (think, for instance, of an Extinction Rebellion protest) or tribal rage (for example, and this is used in the book, fans at a football match). Private anger, meanwhile, gives us an insight into the daily micro-stresses of people鈥檚 lives. This is the Lonergan and Blyth typology of anger.
Whose Anger?
While the authors are clear that 鈥渨e need to draw a clear distinction between legitimate public anger and cynical manipulation of tribal anger for political ends鈥� (22), their analysis often fails to live up to the task. Through the centrality of 鈥渓egitimate moral grievances in the Rust Belt鈥� in explaining the election of Trump (25) and the 鈥渞eal stressors鈥� of immigration driving the Brexit vote (111-112), Angrynomics ends up sidestepping important discussions of race for an overly simplistic explanation of class.
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