Editor’s Note: Nicole Hemmer is an associate research scholar at Columbia University with the Obama Presidency Oral History project and the author of “Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics.” She hosts the history podcast “Past Present” and created the podcast “A12.” The views expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author. View more opinion articles on CNN.
Now that the Democratic primary has been functionally narrowed to former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders, with Donald Trump waiting in the wings to contend with one of them, there is one prediction about the coming election we can make with a great deal of confidence: There will be a lot of yelling.
The election will be an angry one. But its anger will be a certain kind: cramped, masculine, muddled with fear. Perhaps that’s the only kind of anger the electorate is comfortable with. But it keeps our political options narrow, and ensures that our rage is always stoked, and never soothed.
The coming debates and rallies are likely to be high-volume affairs, orgies of Democrats’ anger at Donald Trump and at corporations, and of Trump’s vitriol against Democrats, immigrants and the media. That on-stage raging — echoed offstage in our discourse and even in comments like those made by Sen. Chuck Schumer (who later said “I shouldn’t have used the words I did”) about Trump’s nominees to the Supreme Court — doubtless matches and amplifies an anger roiling the electorate.
But anger also helps explain how we ended up, after winnowing the most diverse primary field in American history, with three white men grasping for the presidency. They’re the only demographic whose rage is considered legitimate.
For the remaining contenders, anger is a selling point among many voters as it’s a proxy for passion and strength. All three men liberally sprinkle their speeches with mild profanities, little reminders that they have not been softened too much by polite — perhaps feminine? — norms. This kind of language, from “damn” to “bullsh*t,” used to be described as “not for mixed company.” It’s even more effective these days, because it feels transgressive without really transgressing.
For Biden and Trump, that anger also has a physical component, redolent of toxic masculinity. After news of the Access Hollywood tape came out, Biden said of Trump, “If we were in high school, I’d take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him.” More recently, he said that Trump was like “the bully that used to make fun when I was a kid that I stutter, and I’d smack him in the mouth.”
Trump, too, loves to present himself as a fighter, gleefully sharing a video that portrayed him as a wrestler body-slamming the media.
Anger bolsters these candidates for a lot of reasons. It’s used to signal virility, a heartiness and strength that the three septuagenarian candidates need to harness to convince voters that, despite their age, they’re still capable of throwing a punch. In fact, the way they’ve coalesced around anger is a sign of how few emotional options are open to them, as both men and as elderly people, two groups who feel enormous pressure to avoid any signs of weakness.
They’re also tapping into a deep well of anger in the nation. We are in an age of political rage, rage that has found a home in movements ranging from the Tea Party to Black Lives Matter to the #MeToo movement. Books like “Mad as Hell,” “Eloquent Rage,” and “Good and Mad” have presented rage as a powerful, and often positive, political emotion.
That rage has trickled up to presidential politics, which stands in sharp contrast to past campaigns: Bill Clinton won largely on a message of feeling Americans’ pain, George W. Bush drew on compassionate conservatism, Barack Obama offered hope. Those primary campaigns that relied on messages of empathy, compassion and hope in 2016 and 2020 were soundly defeated, leaving rage to rule the day.
Yet while more and more women and people of color have transformed their rage into political tools, when they vie for powerful positions, they find that anger comes with a price. President Obama knew anger was off-limits to him as president, a reality he pointedly underscored during the 2015 White House Correspondents’ dinner. During the president’s speech, comedian Keegan-Michael Key stood behind Obama, reprising his role from the “Key & Peele” show as Luther, Obama’s “anger translator.” Women candidates, too, know that showing anger will get them tagged as nagging, emotional and — the big one — shrill.
Which is not to say they contain their rage. One of the most memorable moments of Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign came when Michael Bloomberg entered the race. Every time she engaged the former New York City mayor, her face lit up with anger and disdain. Her attacks effectively ended his candidacy. It seems that they effectively ended hers as well.
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Having spent seven decades as a woman in America, Warren knew well that anger carried a price, but she showed it anyway. It was, as so many things are for women and people of color running for office, a trap. Warren could limit her range of emotion and come off as cold, calculating or inauthentic, or she could show that anger — the anger felt by so many women since the Access Hollywood tape, since November 2016, since the Women’s March, since the #MeToo movement, since Brett Kavanaugh, since Harvey Weinstein — and pay the price.
