Reject the outrage industrial complex

Primary season is behind us, but this election year is just getting started. For the next seven months, we’re going to have to deal with squawking politicians, ads, debates, rallies and endless news coverage. I’m dreading it. And I’m not alone. Some of my friends and family have also expressed eye-rolling angst at the antics of campaign season. As early as last August, contributing columnist Joshua Whitfield wrote in these pages that he was already getting that here-we-go-again feeling. And last Sunday, Ken Hersh, CEO and president of the George W. Bush Presidential Center, wrote about what we can all do to keep our heads amid the insanity. This column will be an extension of those ideas.

Of course, the alternative to campaign season is even worse. American elections in their current form are unpleasant, but they are better than empty elections or no elections at all. Just ask voters in Hong Kong or Venezuela.

So, many of us have come to treat elections like a trip to the dentist. It has to be done periodically. We know it’s good for us. And we know bad things will happen if we don’t do it. So we endure the unpleasantness.

There are structural changes that would turn down the heat — things like ranked choice voting and redistricting reform — but those are heavy lifts that don’t appear to be happening any time soon.

Luckily, there are also personal habits that can help. Over the next several weeks, Hersh and I will explore them, taking turns unpacking our best advice for weary campaign watchers. Think of these ideas as campaign-season hygiene. Like brushing and flossing, there are a few things we can do to keep the unpleasantness from getting downright painful. The first one is to reject outrage.

Outrage

American political discourse is increasingly dependent on shock and outrage, especially online. That’s by design.

A Wall Street Journal investigation in 2021 revealed how Facebook’s algorithm promotes divisive, outrageous content. Here’s the nugget that has stuck with me: When I react to a post on Facebook, the platform ranks an angry emoji as five times more valuable than a “like.”

That’s because, Facebook engineers realized, anger is a stronger emotion than affection. So an angry reaction represents stronger “engagement” with content. Stronger engagement means more time on the site, which means more opportunities for Facebook to show me ads or sell my information to third parties, which is how they make money.

The upshot: The business model for social media platforms is dependent on making people mad. The platforms that began as a way to keep up with friends have morphed into an outrage-industrial complex.

It’s not just Facebook, more research has revealed. And it isn’t confined to social media, either. The cable news shouting heads and chyrons crying for emotional responses reveal how this pattern has seeped into other media. Newspapers are not immune. Though I certainly think the written word is a more fact-driven medium than broadcast or social media, clickbait-style headlines are easy to find.

The extent to which Americans spew vitriol at one another this election season is the extent to which the peddlers of outrage are manipulating us. That’s what Hersh meant when he advised readers to “turn down the volume” last week.

The outrage manipulation goes beyond one election cycle. Cable news changed our political discourse in the 1980s. Talk radio did so in the 1990s. And the internet did so in the early 2000s. (Remember the Drudge Report?) Social media’s decade was the 2010s, so the first generation of Americans to come of age during the social media disruption to our national discourse is emerging now. Is it any wonder college campuses are dumpster fires of hate?

Out-group hate

The outrage-industrial complex works because of a deeper, human tendency toward something sociologists call out-group hate.

In one of the most famous social experiments in this field, 22 Boy Scouts in Oklahoma were divided into two cabins during a weeklong camp in 1954. Even though the groups were intentionally similar — “They’d been previously matched as closely as possible for things like height and weight, athleticism and popularity outside of camp, previous camp experience and musicality, and so on,” Scientific American noted — each group quickly developed suspicion, and then outright hatred for the other group. The cross-camp rivalry descended into vandalism, theft and threats of violence.

Humans identify with groups. We are a herd species. And it’s not hard for the mutual support of an “in group” to twist into hatred for “out group” people.

Our media consumption often trains us toward bad political hygiene here. A 2020 study published in the journal Science, found that out-group hate has become more powerful than in-group loyalty as a predictor of voting behavior.

“A poisonous cocktail of othering, aversion and moralization poses a threat to democracy,” researchers found.

Years ago, when I worked at a local church, I remember visiting an elderly parishioner in a senior living home. He is a kind and compassionate man, the kind every church has, who works behind the scenes on thankless tasks to care for others. All during the visit, his favorite cable news station was on the TV. We managed to ignore it and talk about his late wife, grandchildren and church happenings. And then the TV flashed a still image of the face of a politician from the party he disagrees with. His head snapped around to face the screen. He lost all interest in our conversation. And he said, to no one in particular, “I hate that woman.”

I waited silently for his reverie to end, and when it did he was the same kindly old man I had known for years.

Reflecting on that moment now, it seems to have been a glimpse into the kind of affective formation provided by partisan news. His response was automatic, Pavlovian, ingrained by long hours of training.

It’s very hard to tell when we’re being formed in this way. Our media shapes our emotions, our responses to the world. We like to think we’re just tuning in to stay informed, but it’s hard to separate information from formation.

And it’s the most politically engaged among us who are most prone to this kind of shaping, according to Pew Research. A decade ago, Pew was already warning us that out-group hate and ideological purity tests were taking over our political discourse. “Partisan animosity” increased substantially between 1994 and 2014, and the share of Americans with a “highly negative view of the opposing party” more than doubled in that time.

“Most of these intense partisans believe the opposing party’s policies ‘are so misguided that they threaten the nation’s well-being,’” Pew reported.

For or against?

What’s particularly disappointing about out-group hate is that it robs our politics of what we might call “for-ness.” Parties stop being “for” anything and instead define themselves by what or whom they’re against.

That is how Texas Republicans, who used to be for limited government and free markets, can support onerous government loyalty tests for companies that promote renewable energy. Renewables are what Democrats support, so Republicans must oppose them, even if it means abandoning their own values.

Lest I be accused of imbalance, here’s an example from the political left: The groundbreaking 2016 documentary 13th is a compelling examination of the ways in which corporate and political interests have exploited race-based fear throughout American history. When my son was required to watch one documentary for his high school civics class, I made sure it was that one.

But there’s a moment in 13th where out-group hate outstrips the “for-ness” of racial justice. The film explains how, in the 2000s, Republicans embraced criminal justice reform to reduce mass incarceration that disproportionately affects Black men, shifting their “tough on crime” message to diversionary programs. These included former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who is quoted in the film. But rather than celebrating that development, progressives interviewed for the documentary — including Angela Davis, Cory Greene and Glenn E. Martin — bemoaned it because the reform came from the wrong party. Republicans can’t be trusted with this issue, they said. Mistrust of the opposing party is more important than fixing the problem which is the point of the whole film.

There’s nothing wrong with loyalty to a party. But when that loyalty is usurped by hatred for those outside the party, it perverts allegiance, and “for-ness” goes out the window.

Just say no

What if, instead, we all just refuse to be outraged?

When we encounter a party, a policy or a politician we disagree with, what if we leave the emotion behind?

I suggested that approach to another church group recently. At a men’s ministry gathering, I reminded attendees that they have agency over their emotions. They have the power to respond to news and politics with thoughtfulness rather than anger. They were stunned. One guy literally scratched his head. No one is telling people that right now.

That is, no one except our nation’s founders. Men like Thomas Jefferson and John Adams understood that our experiment in political self-governance would fail without the virtue of personal self-governance. They believed that reason and calm self-mastery were the key to personal and political happiness, according to author Jeffrey Rosen.

Rosen’s book, The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America, reminds us that America’s Founding Fathers would have seen right through the outrage-industrial complex.

“‘The due Government of the passions has been considered in all ages as a most valuable acquisition,’ Abigail Adams warned her son John Quincy Adams, emphasizing in particular the importance of using reason to subdue ‘the passion of Anger’” Rosen wrote recently in The Atlantic.

That’s not to say we should be apathetic or disengaged. Quite the opposite, the Founders would urge. We should vote. We should read about the issues of our day from a wide variety of sources. (More on that in a future column.) We might even put out a yard sign or donate to a political campaign. We could write an op-ed or letter to the editor. We can do all those things without engaging in out-group hate.

We can subvert the outrage-industrial complex. It’s the first step in a program of campaign season personal hygiene that would do us all good.

Editor’s note: On March 17, The Dallas Morning News published a column by Ken Hersh, CEO and president of the George W. Bush Presidential Center, which gave advice for citizenship habits that can help readers navigate this election year. This column is one in a series that expands on those ideas.

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