It is time that we witness almost disarmed the crisis of traditional democratic models seeing them unable to effectively address and recompose the economic and social problems in which people struggle, a condition that has the power to fuel a vicious cycle in which individual frustrations become a useful resource for others to achieve their own political ends.
In this, communication, even in its new forms, seems to have become a central weapon in organizing and directing resentment. In particular, according to some analysts:
populism would be a discursive strategy, which actually coincides with politics… [and in which] the dilemma between people and elites, between the dominant and the dominated, is ubiquitous. On it, however, it is necessary to set up an appropriate ideological construction and thus a ‘claim’ of representation, which adds up to a common enemy, recomposing the dominated, with their disparate motives of resentment and their demands for justice: the people is an ’empty signifier,’ to be filled in from time to time (Mastropaolo 2023, p. 303; see Laclau 2018).
Some elements of this social disquietude can thus be found in the reasoning that in early December 2024 Paul Krugman, economist and Nobel laureate, carried out in announcing the end of his association as a columnist for The New York Times – causing, moreover, some uproar (Krugman 2024; Angelini 2024; Sole 24 ore 2024; Allegri 2024).
He had begun writing about economics for the famous newspaper in 2000, at a time when, in his view, there was great optimism in the United States and the Western world. Today, ending his engagement, he evidently lets the disappointment that American liberals are experiencing after the outcome of the recent presidential election shine through, emphasizing the dominance in the current world of “anger and resentment.”
Not that things, according to him, were perfect before:
Still, people were feeling pretty good about the future when I began writing for this paper. Why did this optimism curdle? As I see it, we’ve had a collapse of trust in elites: The public no longer has faith that the people running things know what they’re doing, or that we can assume that they’re being honest… It’s not just governments that have lost the public’s trust. It’s astonishing to look back and see how much more favorably banks were viewed before the financial crisis. And it wasn’t that long ago that technology billionaires were widely admired across the political spectrum, some achieving folk-hero status. But now they and some of their products face disillusionment and worse; Australia has even banned social media use by children under 16. Which brings me back to my point that some of the most resentful people in America right now seem to be angry billionaires (Krugman 2024).
Undoubtedly, Krugman’s journalistic commitment has coincided with the enormous change in the media system due to the rise of the Internet, and his references to the role that online platforms, and their owners, find themselves playing with respect to public dynamics regarding politics’ destinies and resentment’s climate are quite on target. In his latest work, Ted Striphas underlines how the cultural algorithms often manage to “monetize hate”:
While it’s true that social media is more than a forum for vitriol, who can deny the atmosphere of “normalize[d] public viciousness,” … whose lingering odor you smell, even if only the faintest whiff, whenever you go online? Without diminishing the ways in which algorithmic culture assists us in the day to day, it seems reasonable to conclude that, in some fundamental respects, the solution has become the problem (2023, p. 227).
In recent decades changes in the way we communicate, inform and entertain ourselves have been phenomenal and have restructured our aesthetic and expressive experiences in depth, with new media articulating and expanding their dimensions, in a process in which we find the most people included.
Really, we are experiencing a true digital plenitude that has dismantled any hierarchy of value between what we might have called high and low cultures in the past by offering everyone the opportunity to find themselves in some elective community (Bolter 2019). However, one of the most problematic sides of this new condition/fragmentation – a real raw nerve – is in the difficulty of protecting quality information and designing spaces where everyone can converge and debate.
In this sense, the current communication architectures and their governance, subjected to mostly commercial logics, are proving inadequate to fuel the most general possible debate regarding common problems and the ways to solve them through a necessary political intermediation while, at the same time, the traditional tools of assistance in the formation of public opinion (press, public TV and radio) are being scaled down and are suffering a deep economic crisis.
To be clear, current societies experience real problems – economic, social, environmental – that cannot but be reflected in the content of communication, and its new forms have the merit of not hiding them. But here, in Krugman’s reasoning, there seems to be the regret of one who feels disappointed for having believed, along with many of us, that the very new media age could bring an advance on the ways in which these affairs could be better managed in the general interest. Instead, the necessary energies also find in it ways to disintegrate and divert into dynamics in which the very foundations on which to establish shared confrontation are endangered.
To better understand the current state of mind of an American liberal, it is perhaps worth watching a film that, in 2023, caused controversy and great stir in the United States. In Civil War, director Alex Garland imagines the country in an impending civil war – an idea evidently spurred both by the tragic events of 2021, with the physical and symbolic assault on Capitol Hill, and by the tone and allegations of fraud, conspiracy, and corruption that have been going on for years by Trumpian Republicans.
In any case, recalling the condition of civil war as an impending danger – which is more or less a return to a state of nature of all against all – might be an exaggeration only if oblivious to what we have already faced in a past perhaps a little too distant to remember.
The issue of the stability of institutional architecture and powers – normative devices that should unite us – is fundamental if we want to get to the heart of today’s anxieties that lead to anger and resentment because they were born, at the dawn of our modernity, precisely to mitigate them and allow the unfolding of a peaceful coexistence.
Evidently the individualistic ideologies in which we are increasingly immersed are preventing us from thinking of ourselves as people who live in a plot in which reason and emotion are intimately connected and interdependent on our political institutions, which we should certainly improve but not destroy. Despite all the limitations that the various configurations may have, they were created to address the tragic implications resulting from one of our most insidious anthropological characteristics, mimetic desire (Girard 1979), ensuring us the possibility of living together in increasingly complex communities.
Some time ago, commenting on other problematic events, we repeatedly recalled the reflections that the media philosopher John Durham Peters (2005) developed regarding us as Westerners and our characteristic of continuing to “court the abyss” taking for granted, ideologically, the balances on which we have founded our existences up to now. His invitation is to always evaluate the new contexts and their degree of danger by examining the roots of the issues and solutions that, in that particular problematic area, have marked our social path.
And it is precisely to this end that sociologist Stefano Tomelleri (2023) undertook to explore the constitutive anthropological and sociological assumptions of resentment by discovering how philosopher Thomas Hobbes, in the early days of our modernity, was able to relate the desire for revenge, rivalry and resentment among people to the result of mutual confrontation and power plays among men embedded in certain institutional arrangements.
The English philosopher writes The Leviathan (1651) at a time when England is in a civil war and men seem to have fallen back into a state of nature:
Hobbes uses the expression ‘homo homini lupus’ mainly to make us understand that the human condition without a political-institutional order would be untenable. Humanity’s situation of violence is not an event that belongs only to a remote and natural past; rather, it arises from an internal and always possible drift of social relations. Any constituted political-institutional order can always precipitate into the senseless war of all against all (2023).
In Hobbes’ own words:
Nature hath made men so equal, in the faculties of the body, and mind [that] the difference between man, and man, is not so considerable, as that one man can thereupon claim to himself any benefit, to which another may not pretend, as well as he. (1651, p. 82).
From this, Tommeleri notes, comes the belief that there is an equality of law, whereby, with respect to the other, it is possible to have equal claims regarding the same thing. Seeing the conduct of others, one feels legitimized to claim what others desire, a behavior that opens up to socially risky procedural logics: “men fight, first, for a property, for a material good, and then for the fear of losing it, and later for a trifle, even just for vainglory” (2023).
For Hobbes, this spiral of violence also risks increasing because the presumed equality of rights can be accompanied by an equality of desires: “From this equality of ability, ariseth equality of hope in the attaining of our ends. And therefore if any two men desire the same equality thing, which nevertheless they cannot both enjoy, they become enemie” (1651, p. 83).
It is this combined arrangement that explains how human social experience is characterized by being both cognitive and emotional:
To this war of every man against every man, this also is consequent; that nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and nothing is wrong, justice and injustice have there no place. Where there is no unjust. common power, there is no law… for one man calleth ‘wisdom’, what another called ‘fear’; and one ‘cruelty’, what another ‘justice’; one ‘prodigality’, what another ‘magnanimity’; and one’gravity’, what another ‘stupidity’, &c.*… The desires, and other passions of man, are in themselves no sin. No more are the actions, that proceed from those passions, till they know a law that forbids them (1651, p. 85, p. 27).
Ultimately, political-institutional orders, often so mistreated and experienced individually as distant and cold things, turn out to be glues and lifebloods for communal living. As Tommelieri points out, the Hobbesian analysis of the condition of equality in the state of nature has the merit of capturing the poignancy of the relationship between emotions and the political-institutional order (normative order):
This relationship is initially uncertain and indeterminate. In fact, for Hobbes, not only without a common power there is no man who can establish what is right or what is not, but above all it is also impossible to agree on what we ourselves perceive, feel, and experience. Without a common power we are not able to mutually and unanimously judge our emotions… This aspect of Hobbes’s theory of emotions is not an accessory trait with respect to the central theme, for which without a common power there could be no normative order (individuals, in fact, tend to act against each other). It is in this profound connection between emotions and normative order that we understand why the human condition would be intolerable without a political-institutional order (2023).
References
Allegri, A., 2024, “Viviamo nell’era del risentimento”, Il giornale.it, 12/12.
Angelini, L., 2024, “Krugman lascia il New York Times dopo 25 anni: l’ultimo editoriale, dall’età dell’ottimismo a quella del risentimento”, Corriere.it, 12/11.
Bolter, J. D., 2019, The Digital Plenitude: The Decline of Elite Culture and the Rise of New Media, Boston, The Mit press.
Garland, A., 2023, Civil War, DNA Films.
Girard, R., 1979, Violence and the Sacred, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press.
Hobbes, T., 1651, Leviathan, Oxford, Oxford University Press 1996.
Krugman, P., 2024, “My Last Column: Finding Hope in an Age of Resentment”, New York Times, 12/9.
Laclau, E., 2018, On Populist Reason, New York, Verso.
Mastropaolo, A., 2023, Fare la guerra con altri mezzi. Sociologia storica del governo democratico, Bologna, il mulino.
Peters, J. D., 2005, Courting the abyss. Free Speech and the Liberal Tradition, Chicago, University Of Chicago Press.
Sole 24 ore, 2024, Trovare speranza nell’epoca del risentimento: l’ultimo messaggio di Krugman per l’addio al New York Times, 12/10.
Striphas, T., 2023, Algorithmic Culture Before the Internet, New York, Columbia University Press.
Tomelleri, S., 2023, La società del risentimento. Alle origini del malessere contemporaneo, Milano, Meltemi, digital edition.
