Anger and the Academic

 We academics are accused of two things: that we are too dispassionate and that we tend to suck all the emotion out of our theories.  Well, not all of us, but folks like me, who are either soft rational choice types or more strict rational choice types.  The occupation of parts of Ottawa by far right extremists has caused me to think about this a bit.

First, I am about as angry as I have ever been about political stuff.  I hit some peaks during the Trump Administration especially when we saw pictures of little Muslims kids in handcuffs.  And during some of the violence aimed by police at those protesting police brutality.  Am I angry because these assholes have pissed on the war memorial?  Because they defaced the Terry Fox statue?  Because they burned a Canadian flag?  Because they have been carrying swastikas?  No, that stuff is annoying and offensive, but it does not cause me to have a semi-blinding rage.  Perhaps it is the combination of how incredibly stupid these folks seem to be (no, the Governor General and the Senate don't have these powers and most of the covid regs are provincial) and how craven the Ottawa cops have been.  That these folks are not only getting away with bullying the city and its residents but that they are being taught by the police that they can keep doing it and even do it in other parts of the city.  

Second, regarding how we political scientists often treat this stuff, we tend to assume that folks are acting rationally and go on from there, assuming away often the emotional stuff.  A friend, Stuart Kaufman, sought to correct this with his book Modern Hatreds.  While ancient hatreds is a bad way to explain stuff, frequently becoming a rather racist account, modern hatreds blends the psychology of emotions with more structural stuff.  That security and insecurity are emotional dynamics. In this case, the deplorables are people who are angry and resentful (mostly because white folks are seeing that non-white folks are doing well and that makes them feel like they are losing their status) and that mobilizes enough of them to hang out here.  They can do so because of a few structures: the ease with which outside trolls can fund this stuff so that the assholes here can get gas and such; the right-wing party politics I have discussed before; the principal-agent problems within local and provincial law enforcement (who's in charge and who knows what the officers on the ground are doing--providing aid and comfort to the occupiers?); etc.  So, it is not just raw emotion at work, but the blinding stupidity of the claims and demands have much to do with emotion.  

Indeed, one of the strange dynamics of the past ten years is how much the right is motivated by the desire to trigger the Libs.  In the US, this has ultimately been suicidal as refusing to wear masks, refusing to get vaxxed is more about pissing off the center/left as it is about any principled position about "freedom."  It may be emotionally satisfying to piss off your opponents, but if doing so risks the lives of oneself, one's friends, and one's family, well, that is pretty dumb.  But hey, if some grifters can make money off of it, then why not?

Perhaps my takes here are biased by my anger.  But so far, the behavior of these folks seem to justify my anger quite a bit.  And, yes, they win because I have been triggered.  Woot for them, I suppose.  Pretty sure that will be a Pyrrhic victory for them.  And since they are idiots, they won't understand that, so the last laugh will be mine, I suppose.