How Anger Trumps Anxiety

There are people who are prone to anger. They can be furious about all kinds of thing, and once their fuse is lit, they won’t listen to facts or reason. They want to hear that they are right to be outraged about immigrants, refugees, abortion, gun controls, gay marriage, being soft on criminals, not bombing hostile countries, and all that negative talk about fossil fuel. And they want someone to echo their rage and help them shout down anyone who thinks they are not entirely correct.

Then there are people who are full of anxiety. They are worried about everything, and the moment they read another distressing report, it’s added to their ‘to do’ list. They need to know what is going to be done to tackle social injustice, xenophobia, misogyny, gun crime, homophobia, neglect of rehabilitation, bombing civilians, and all that climate change denial. And they need someone who will not only understand those problems, but can prove to them that he or she will deliver all the necessary solutions.

With the angry mob, you can just press a button here and there, lead the ranting, and they adore you as one of them. It does not matter if you have nothing to offer to lift their wages, so long as you despise those immigrants, you’re alright with the gang. It does not matter if you give the biggest tax cuts to the richest few, so long as you condemn abortion vitriolically, you’re their hero. It does not matter if you have behaved abominably to women, so long as you hate gun laws with a vengeance, they’ve got your back.

But with the anxious cohort, the minute you outline one plan to solve one problem, they ask you about the next one on their list. It does not matter if you are better in so many ways than the other one, if you’re weak on one policy issue, they cannot in good conscience support you. It does not matter if you’re the only hope of holding back an avalanche of bigotry nationwide, if you’re not convincing enough in their last analysis, you don’t get their vote. It does not matter if the ideal candidate who ticks all the boxes is not an option here, if you’re not the ‘one’, they can’t help you.

Elections can be won and lost by the smallest of margins. Indeed, with some arcane system, they can be lost even if you win more votes, so long as you don’t win enough of them in the right places. And in too many of those places, alas, the hesitancy of the anxious allows the rampage of the angry to seize the day, the months, and the years to come.

Of course if the angry mob had lost, they had threatened to reject the results and back open rebellion. By contrast, the anxious are now desperately looking for some evidence that things might not be as calamitous as so many had warned if they were to abstain. Sadly, it’s going to be as bad as it gets. But that’s what happens when the obsession with waiting for the perfect candidate gets in the way of stopping power from falling into the hands of the worst.