Don’t Progressives Understand We Are Angry?

I write a lot about narratives. I complain about narratives too. Too often, the narrative about any public subject becomes more toxic than the problem itself. Some problems never get solved because the narrative about them is all wrong. I find myself arguing about narratives more than I do actual policy with people. In the game of perception, the best perception wins.

The title of this article comes from a discussion I had a while ago with a conservative reader who, exasperated in our discussion of current events, shouted out, “Don’t progressives understand we are angry?” I didn’t have a reply at the time and the discussion ended after that moment, but that quote stuck in my head for a long time. And I’ve been trying to come up with some kind of answer.

The easy answer is that Progressives aren’t concerned about the anger of people who disagree with them. They sincerely believe that they are agitating for a better society for everyone, even the people who disagree with them. But I also think there is something deeper at play.

Progressive Messaging

When we think about narrative in the news media, we have to think about how people find out about certain movements, how those movements get attention and why. One of the problems with Progressives is that they are decently good at getting attention but often for the wrong reasons. Progressives are good at bombastic slogans, and the focus ends up on the slogan and less on the policy behind the slogan. This has been a problem for decades.

Progressives have great policy ideas that could benefit people, but they are not great at messaging. Defund the Police was a terrible message born of a genuinely great idea. Part of this is because the Democratic Party has become the party of the urban elite. Some would say that’s a bad thing. I find it to be very similar to how 1972 McGovern voters who were also Saab owners. It was an odd correlation but indicated that McGovern appealed to an educated electorate of a certain class. Nixon blew McGovern out of the water because McGovern was seen to be out of touch by regular people. For Progressives, poor messaging leads to the same effect, especially with non-college educated voters. In both 1972 and 2024, Democrats would lean into progressive messaging that suited a certain part of society that isn’t nearly enough of a majority to win a national election.

What’s worse, is that these slogans and poor messaging often filter down to the regular person, and they simply sound absurd. Today you find these things being thrown around Twitter and other social media platforms. DEI has become a derisive byword for anything to do with diversity or racial issues (at its worst use). The bad message becomes a popular battlecry against the progressive idea and the social implications of this are so powerful, people might agree with a policy but vote against it simply because the story being told about a certain policy has gone sour. Although this can certainly bite the Republicans sporadically (remember the Birthers), all in all, they are better at messaging and, most importantly, telling a positive story about their policy. Trump excels at this too. No one knows how to craft a better narrative.

I think much of the anger, both in the media and the voting booth, comes, not from the policy itself, but the story being told about the policy.

Progress or Just Woke

Folks on the right are angry about a changing social order and economic devastation outside major cities. In their world, they say no thank you to pronouns, no, thank you to agreeing with LGBT rights, and no, thank you to racial equity. However, it is not that people don’t agree with these things. When pressed, most people are not overtly racist or homophobic. But they are mad about the way these things social subjects are discussed, which turns everyone into some kind of “victim.” In the recent past we have lived through the “social justice warrior,” “diversity,” “woke,” and “DEI.” Like so many other things, the narrative around these topics has become bigger than the topic itself. DEI has become a pejorative term on social media for a quiet sort of racism that looks down on initiatives that are seen to exclude white males due to their “privilege.”

Is any of this real progress, or is it merely performative? There are arguments for both. For myself, I think many good efforts often get bowled over by the surrounding narratives, and we end up talking about how we are talking about the problem rather than addressing the real problem. I also think there is a personality problem. Activists are superb at activating people and taking on causes that are being ignored, but they aren’t as good as comms for the public. They don’t know how to tell a story that will resonate with a normal person who isn’t already activated on a certain issue. We’ve seen this most recently with the George Floyd protests and the now-infamous, “Defund the Police.” Great slogan but terrible policy and the result was, in no small part, the election of Trump for a 2nd term.

Of course, the bigger question is if any of this is real progress or just “woke” nonsense that should be ignored. And the other secondary question is who the progress aims to benefit. The reality is that much of our discussion around progress has been based on identity politics, which has been dividing American politics for 20 (or more) years and, over the past decade, has sharply divided the country along partisan lines. Old wounds around race, sex, sexuality have been opened for fresh examination, and it still seems like we are not confronting them as much as we would hope. But the reality is that identity politics only helps certain segments of society. The best way to counter it is to appeal to those who are not centered in the “woke” conversation, and that is precisely what Trump and co. have been doing since 2016 and did in 2024 with great aplomb.

Anger and the Right

If the 2024 election taught us anything, it is that many Trump voters are angry. They are angry at the Trans movement, woke, DEI, Black Lives Matter, Pandemic lockdowns, and most of the entire Democratic program since at least Obama. As someone told me, “it’s been fuck whitey since 2008.” That is sobering. COVID-19 did not help things, for sure, but that seems to be the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back, not the first thing. Voters were made about the rising cost of living too, and that trend repeated itself globally. The vitriol on social media was particularly toxic and hasn’t recovered since President Trump took power.

However, there is a bigger story at play here too. I’ve noticed that people on the left tend not to demonstrate their anger in the same way as people on the Right. If we think back to the title of this article and what started this whole conversation, the person who told me this was exasperated, “Don’t Progressives understand we are angry?” I think one of the reasons we’ve ended up in this political place is because the Democratic Party has not offered solutions to people’s real problems. While people hit the streets for George Floyd, there was a milquetoast response to the rise in a cost of living as the Biden White House tried to downplay the post-Covid inflation and supply shocks. Those who wanted Bernie Sanders to get the nomination in 2016 will be shouting that we should have had Bernie all along and that would be the solution to the problem. However, they forget that is a New Yorker who lives in Vermont and is an avowed democratic socialist. Good luck to anyone trying to sell that in Iowa.

However, there are major portions of the Sanders program that did make it into Democratic messaging. The problem is that the Biden White House did not deliver these things in a timely manner and I would argue that based on what we said in 2016, Biden’s term might have been too late to stave off the anger. All of this reinforces my idea that the left (such as it is) is in retreat in this country and that it will be a long time until people are ready to search for an alternative. If Democrats are smart, they will have a solution ready for the people when they have come down from their anger and are ready to get America back on track.