Anger Ms. Management

The NY Times Rejected This Op-Ed

As some of you who follow me on X (@cliuanon) might know already, I found out on Saturday that the New York Times, which had solicited an Op-Ed from me rejected the 1000 words I had put together on Anger Mismanagement and liberalism.

On November 24, they published Out with the Woke, in With the Rage by DNC eminence grise, James Carville. The Times has published Judith Miller and the 1619 project, so why should I be surprised that they would kill my piece and let Bernie hating Carville trying to redeem himself with economic populism run with his piece.

It is quite possible that they discussed my idea and gave it to Carville. The hapless editorial assistant who pitched it to the board is not at fault here. She was just the messenger, and perhaps facilitator of an act of misappropriation. I certainly do not have a copyright on anger. The editorial board told her that my op-ed had no concrete proposals: they thought I was just saying, “It’s OK to be angry.” This is completely absurd as you can judge for yourselves. Here as my Thanksgiving Gift to my readers is the editorial, in its entirety. I spoke with Joshua Citarella about this issue and he said that the NY Times piece on him brought him 10% of the new subscribers that his interview with Felix Biederman harvested for Doomscroll.

While Substack is not ideal by any means, it has allowed people like Josh and me to create readerships that are intensely more engaged with our content than the millions of subscribers that the New York Times can boast. Recently, one of the big five publishing houses posted on X touting new book about the history of capitalism that they had just published. Although this house boasts 100K+ followers on X, in five hours, their post had 139 views. Something about legacy media and liberal gatekeeping has broken down: these are zombie institutions. I have known many many graduate students whose advisors have purloined their ideas as their own, knowing that the professor will be able to go to press with an idea before the underling can. After you read my piece and Carville’s, help with with this question: they want me to pitch other ideas to the Op-Ed page. Should I?

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! See you all next week.

Anger Mismanagement

In 1964, Richard Hofstadter wrote in the pages of Harper’s Magazine that American politics had become the arena of “uncommonly angry minds.” For American liberals of that era, emotional equanimity in the face of uncertainty and political and social violence was an unalloyed public good. The angriest people in America, at least according to Hofstadter, were a vocal minority of voters who supported “extreme Right” presidential candidate Barry Goldwater. Hofstadter was a “high” liberal, the kind our political class threw under the bus.

Today, most Americans who pay attention to politics are angry about something. Democrats however, have been less effective at channeling popular rage into political action. For more than fifty years, they have been trying to be the “adults in the room” with their credentials and the composure that is supposed to come with that professional training earning them centrist kudos. When faced with difficult topics, moderate Democrats tend toward condescension with a pedagogical and lawyerly veneer. They also like easy forms of outrage that do not touch the corporate interests that fund both parties. For instance, the masked men snatching people off the streets are easy targets of ire. For-profit detention center companies like CoreCivic and Geo Group that are profiting from the detention of immigrants and citizens are ignored when liberals criticize Trump’s immigration policies. Executives from both companies are elated about their Q3 earnings calls. CoreCivic began operating for-profit immigrant detention centers under the Obama administration. Biden merely dampened the growth of the sector in operating prisons.

The more we follow the money, the angrier we should become. According to a series of Rand studies, wealth redistribution from the bottom up in the past fifty years has resulted in the theft of $90 trillion dollars in wages. If this number seems unimaginable, the cases of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and of private equity induced bankruptcies of businesses like Toys R Us can bring such numbers to life. After the financial crisis, Edward deMarco at Fannie Mae refused to reduce owed principal debt for hundreds of thousands of homeowners whose mortgages were underwater. Timothy Geithner allegedly “implored” him to do something, but unlike Trump, Obama did not use his executive or private power to pressure Fannie Mae to help homeowners. Fannie did however provide low interest loans to BlackRock when that private equity firm entered the foreclosure auction market, vacuuming up homes that it in turn rented them back to foreclosed and stressed-out working Americans. Toys R Us was a well-run family business, an iconic toy store that was taken over by KKR and Bain Capital, stripped of its real estate assets, strapped with debt and then driven into bankruptcy, leaving thousands of employees across the nation without pensions or retirement savings, not to mention health insurance or severance pay.

Why did contemporary liberals and moderates jump on identity bandwagons with alacrity and leave the financial systems in place that allow for the intensifying exploitation of ordinary people? The donor class, as Jennifer Pan has shown, loves anti-racism and hates redistribution. To take on the money power requires the mobilization not the moderation of public anger, but that anger has to be directed at the proper targets. Anger does not need to be crippling: combined with a sense of collective responsibility, it can create a new politics that benefits the social whole and not the rapacious few. Anger is a natural reaction to abuse and a mode of self-defense. Childish anger results in tantrums, of which Trump’s are legendary. Moderates on the other hand, are so obsessed with “optics” and image optimization that when they do lose their tempers in public, they seem especially self-serving, petty and mean, as in the case of Katie Porter’s recent hot mic and caught on camera outbursts. By contrast, Zohran Mamdani smiled his way through his successful campaign, all the while highlighting the struggles of everyday people in New York City. He was successful at channeling popular anger into positive political energy. A powerful angry anti-monopoly, anti-private equity political movement would promise to break up and punish the firms that are stripping entire sectors of the American economy, from nursing homes to veterinary offices, from sports franchises and hospitals . If a politician can abandon their wealthy patrons, they will find succor and support in a people who have been outraged and abused. We see what the collusion of government and capital has done to our world. Do not insult us with means tested solutions to class war of the wealthy on the worker. From a business point of view, CoreCivic and Geo Group are not well-run businesses. They have a captive market: private equity managers are equally bad at managing family-owned companies that they purchase and pillage. These firms are destructive of competition and overly reliant on government contracts and negligence to remain profitable.

The Rand study confirms the popular sentiment that ordinary Americans are being pickpocketed by the rich. Its findings should make us very angry. In 1964, Hofstadter was appalled by the way that a minority of angry people were able to whip up anger against the wrong targets: African Americans, immigrants, Jews, Communists and the poor. He took apart racist conspiratorial rhetoric with an intellectual boldness that today’s moderates cannot match. Hofstadter spoke to our universal capacity for reason and urged Americans not to follow reactionaries when they took leaps of logic into fantasy worlds where evil doers like the Masons had hypnotized the masses and undermined the republic. A righteous anger aimed at the correct targets is the only thing that can dissolve the spell that conspiratorial thinking has cast over our country. A compelling vision of the public good, like the one promoted by Zohran Mamdani is the most potent progressive antidote to the power of demagogues and the puppets who surround them.