Outrage!!

Outrage.  It's the new political drug of choice.

It is a good drug.  Outrage is easy and feels good.

Keep them angry.

Fox News reporter Melissa Francis commented at a seminar I attended at the JFK School at Harvard that the signature emotion desired by Fox News was outrage.  That is what the executive producers wanted because that was what kept the audience.  They wanted to feel outraged and there was no satiating that appetite.

Fox News gets the outrage with iterations of the same story. We are being unjustly accused or attacked or disrespected.  Or, look at our accusers; who are those hypocrites to attack us?   Today, Fox's website headlines Trump blasting the "mainstream press for ignoring Clinton's uranium scandal," Bernie Sanders using a private jet, a pro-Trump restauranteur losing customers, and a Democratic congressman who "voted numerous times against vets" yet criticized Trump.

Trump intentionally generates outrage stories.  He created a story of outrage and blame by saying, in a Rose Garden news conference, that he made phone calls to the families of soldiers killed, unlike Barrack Obama.  "If you look at President Obama and other presidents, most of them didn't make calls.  A lot of them didn't make calls.  I like to call when it's appropriate."    

Of course, it got an outraged response.  It was factually untrue. Liar! Obama did make them, Obama aides reported-and on close examination by journalists it appears Trump makes them only irregularly.   Outrage on the left and in the media.  

And now, keeping the story alive, criticism by someone Trump did call saying that Trump's call was insensitive, a statement echoed by a Democratic congresswoman.   That created a new round of attacks against the Congresswoman by Trump and his allies.   How dare she politicize the making of phone calls?

The outrage serves Trump's purposes.   Trump has made evident that the politically engaged people in America think--and say--they want America to come together, but in fact division serves both left and right.  It motivates their bases.  

It also serves the left.  Progressive voters, including the ones who do not approve of this blog, do not want talk of common ground.  Common ground is increment, and increment is treason and heresy.  People claimed "outrage" and "disgust".   They ban talk of common ground.

The voters who are the swing voters in America are not some "magical middle ground".  That ground is present, but it dangerous because it is not big and it is won at too high a cost.  Claiming middle ground costs voters within your own base camp.

Readers with a mental picture of a spectrum moving left to right from Bernie to Hillary to Trump to Cruz and Rand, have a mistaken understanding.  The more accurate picture are four warring camps:  A Bernie anti-establishment left, a Hillary establishment center left, a McConnell-Bush-Romney establishment right, and a populist Trumpian nationalist right.   And amid these warring camps there are perhaps 40% of the population that is rather unengaged and unmotivated and sick of the whole thing.

Those unmotivated are the actual swing voters.

The Bernie and Hillary camps are nominally Democratic; the McConnell and Trump camps are nominally Republican.   On election day 2016 the Republican camps somewhat jelled, pulled together by the hope of nominating a conservative justice to the Supreme Court.  The nominally Democratic and Republican camps each see the political value of common cause but they also see it as a moral risk.  They would be giving up their principles.  

More important, they give up their outrage and outrage is the emotion they hope to use to get the big prize: those uninterested unmotivated voters.   The big opportunity is getting the people who would vote for you, if they voted, actually to turn out and vote.  This is not done with rational persuasion over points of policy.  It is done by making them angry at someone and hopeful with someone.  They need a enemy--self serving billionaires (Bernie) or criminal interloper aliens (Trump) or deplorable misogynist racists (Hillary)--and a candidate who says they will fix it.  They need outrage.

We can expect politics to remain a zone of outrage because it serves the electoral purposes of the people doing politics in America.  Soft spoken people like Ben Carson, or Jimmy Carter from the past, don't excite and motivate the unmotivated.

The next Democratic candidate will have charisma and will excite.  If readers of this blog are tired of the outrage I have nothing but bad news for them.  The current system demands outrage.