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[City Journal] America's Unruly Temper
A new book by the President of the National Association of Scholars (NAS) argues that America’s emotions have spiraled out of control.
Wrath: America Enraged. By Peter W. Wood. Encounter Books; 231 pages; 28.99$
To state that American politics is increasingly driven by anger has become so trite as to sound cliché. For Peter Wood, political scientists’ routine observation of that fact is too little, too late. Too late, because politics is merely channeling an anger that existed immanently prior — “we made ourselves susceptible to the lure of anger”, he writes, “before it was recruited as the dominant idiom in our politics”. Too little, because the anger that Wood argues came to dominate the nation’s temperament after World War II has lately tipped into wrath, a special degree of anger that “aims at obliterating its foe”. Wrath, Wood contends, is the driving emotion behind, on one hand, the January 6th Capitol Hill riot, and on the other the anti-Trump mobs harangued by Rep. Maxime Waters to harass Trump administration officials. “Anger”, Wood writes in the cover, “now dominates American politics”.
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