Angrynomics. Eric Lonergan

as he had been taught it. It was socialism for the rich and bankruptcy for the poor.

      Pedro was eventually fired after the rules protecting workers in the labour market were changed. His family could no longer meet their mortgage payments, and the bank repossessed their house. They moved in with Valeria’s parents, and they never had the brother or sister they had planned for Anna Maria. The story of Pedro, Valeria and Anna Maria was repeated across Spain, Greece, Portugal and Italy. Is it any wonder Europeans are angry?

      MARK: In our first conversation, we described the role of tribes and the hijacking of tribal energy by the political classes. That is the pernicious and manipulative side of angrynomics. The parable of Pedro, in contrast, suggests claims of moral outrage and legitimate grievance. Pedro and his family did nothing wrong, their elites did, and yet they had to pay for it. If that is the anger that we need to listen to, what are we listening for?

      ERIC: To tune in to that, we need to get a bit philosophical. Luckily, the American philosopher Martha Nussbaum has a brilliant book on the subject entitled Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity and Justice. At the heart of her analysis is the identification of anger as a response to perceived wrong-doing. This is increasingly supported by empirical research, both in social psychology and neuroscience.¹² Alongside “angry fans” moral outrage emerged as the most significant correlate in the big data exercise I referred to earlier, which analyzed the many thousands of news stories relating to public expressions of anger.

      Public expressions of moral outrage take a very specific form. Private anger is typically seen as a weakness, reflecting the fact that something is wrong within us. But public expressions of moral outrage are defended by justifying the anger itself. Typically, moral outrage appeals to unfairness, a failure to listen to those who are affected, and a failure to recognize the interests of those most affected. For example, expressions of anger against the imposition of austerity policies in Europe, as our parable highlights, follow this structure. The democratic process was frequently hijacked by technocrats enforcing “reforms” when there was no economic logic to support austerity.

      Angry people who rejected this narrative were right to do so. Their anger is rational and legitimate. In contrast to tribal rage, people motivated by moral outrage can often very clearly articulate why they are angry – that their interests, or those they care about, are not being taken into account, and that the perpetrators of wrong-doing are not being sanctioned. This is very different to tribal rage, which seeks not justice, but to destroy anything in its way.

      Nussbaum, very perceptively, identifies specific triggers for moral anger, such as “status-injury”. She quotes the psychologist Carol Tavris’ study of anger in America, and “finds ubiquitous reference to ‘insults,’ ‘slights,’ ‘condescension,’ ‘being treated as if I were of no account’”.¹³ I think this response resonates with our observation that anger is a demand to be heard, a demand for representation. But it is also an expression of intent and significance – I matter and you better listen to me. In the political context, this is very pertinent.

      MARK: Given that, let’s start with voice, because this is something that is central to understanding why people vote in ways that are often, patronizingly, described as “against their interests”. People are not just angered by discredited and unjust policies. They’re also quite-rightly upset because no one has listened to them, no one represents them, and because other people they perceive as part of this same elite are busy telling them what their interests “should” be.

      We described the era of neoliberalism as fostering a loss of political identity – creating a vacuum that tribal anger has filled. But an unintended consequence of the post-Cold War political convergence between parties in the 1990s and 2000s was the emergence of a lifeless and largely self-serving technocratic centre, which caused large segments of the electorate to feel voiceless and unrepresented, which was steadily reflected in declining electoral turnouts.

      Think back to Matteo Renzi, elected prime minister of Italy in 2014. This youthful new politician takes the reins of power and is ready to reform Italy, post-euro crisis. His first significant attempt at policy-making is to call a referendum on constitutional reform, which by most accounts seems like a sensible way to improve decision-making in the Italian legislature. But as Brexit showed us, if you offer people a referendum, and that’s the only chance they have had to express their voice, they’ll aim to be heard. And if it’s Tweedledum and Tweedledee in every election – you can have whatever variety of economic neoliberalism you want, but it’s always the same set of policies – then they will use that as a chance to vent their anger and frustration. The rejection of Renzi’s referendum proposal was nothing to do with constitutional reform. Similarly, Brexit to many people had little to do with the European Union. This is really more about the demand to be heard.

      ERIC: You might almost say that had there been an alternative ideology for people to express their frustration they would’ve done so – it just didn’t exist. Indeed, if communism hadn’t already been tried and shown to fail, the post-financial crisis period might have been its coming of age. Consequently, there has been nothing in successive elections that allowed people to express their discontent with the status quo. The option for non-nationalistic identity-based political change simply does not exist. Alternative visions to neoliberalism have not been offered by the established elite. So Brexit and voting for Trump becomes your chance to have a “f**k you! I want my voice heard” moment. From this perspective, public anger is a response to a lack of representation, to a real sense of being ignored and not listened to. It is also a failure to present a compelling and motivating alternative to the centrist consensus.

      What has happened over the past ten years in Europe and America is similar. The political centre was totally blindsided by a crisis that they thought could never happen. And they had no response to it except to pile misery on the very people who didn’t cause it. Unsurprisingly, those people got very angry about that, and that anger has been amplified and hijacked in multiple ways.

      From the American Midwest to the North of England, from Italy and Spain to Greece and Portugal, all these countries have experienced serious economic trauma over the past decade, and the political classes not only offered no alternative, but told their citizens that it was their fault: “You borrowed for a house you could not afford”, “There has been an orgy of spending that we need to stop”, etc. So when there was a chance to vote for an alternative vision, as for example in Greece in 2015, or in the UK in 2016, or Germany in 2018, it should come as no surprise that that is what happens.

      But this story has deeper roots than the 2008 crisis and its economic legacy. Specifically, a lack of voice is related to the sense that the nation state has been neutered by globalization. At some level, it is not just that the population at large feel unheard, and the empirical research shows that they are not listened to, but that their traditional representatives also seem resigned to their situation: “Globalization made us do it”, “There is no alternative”, etc. This certainly seems to be a major concern, and the rise of nationalist politicians seems to be the result. The lack of voice paired with a perception of futility is a toxic mix. It’s like voting for populists in Italy and then figuring out that they can’t do very much either. The result undermines democracy itself.

      MARK: As I try to think about it, you have markets, whose reach is global, or at least as far as the division of labour, technology and finance allows them to go, and then you have democracy, which is inherently local, bound by this thing called the nation state and the people, the citizens, that constitute it. This generates an inherent tension between the openness of the global economy and the responsiveness of the state to the democratic wishes of the public. The more open you are, the less control you have. The less control you have, the less you can respond to what the global economy demands that you do. The economist Dani Rodrik usefully calls this the “political trilemma” of the global economy, where globalization, democracy and sovereignty are mutually incompatible in such a way that you can only ever have two out of the three.¹⁴ And once you have accepted globalization, you can either have democracy or sovereignty, but not both.

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