How dark passions came to rule US politics

Duelling fears, hatreds, resentments are undermining the emotional foundations on which liberalism depends.

- David Brooks

Sometimes when I have nothing better to do, I think back on the US elections we had in the before times when, say, Mitt Romney ran against Barack Obama or John Kerry ran against George W. Bush. I try to figure out why politics and society in general felt so different then.

It's not because we didn't have big disagreements back then. The Iraq War kicked up some pretty vehement arguments. It's not because we weren't polarised. Pundits have been writing about political polarisation since at least 2000 and maybe well before.

Politics is different now because something awful has been unleashed. Political theorist William A. Galston defines this awful thing in his fantastic new book, Anger, Fear, Domination: Dark Passions And The Power Of Political Speech. Even before the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, it was obvious that the dark passions now pervade the American psyche, and thus American politics.

A core challenge in life is how do you motivate people to do things to vote in a certain way, to take a certain kind of action. Good leaders motivate people through what you might call the bright passions - hope, aspiration, an inspiring vision of a better life. But these days, and maybe through all days, leaders across the political spectrum have found that dark passions are much easier to arouse. Evolution has wired us to be extremely sensitive to threat, which psychologists call negativity bias.

US President Donald Trump is a man almost entirely motivated by dark passions - hatred, anger, resentment, fear, the urge to dominate and he stirs those passions to get people to support him. Speaking before a Conservative Political Action Conference in 2023, he warned of "sinister forces trying to kill America", by turning the nation into a "socialist dumping ground for criminals, junkies, Marxists, thugs, radicals and dangerous refugees that no other country wants".