Political outrage seems to be everywhere, from social media to everyday conversations.
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Remember the kid in school who was always negative and complaining about everything? I usually avoided that kid, and maybe voters are starting to turn off all of this political anger, too. I think they call it “fatigue” as Scott McKay points out:
I was at lunch Wednesday with one of my non-political friends, and — as often happens, and I swear I’m not the one driving this — a topic of conversation turned political.
My friend brought up an exhausting pattern which, we agreed, is ramping up in both volume and frequency. Namely, that we as a society are jumping from one unhinged rage to another over things which don’t justify the level of vitriol and over-emotional screeching they’ve produced.
Four of these factored prominently in the conversation, but a fuller picture could include several more. Just this year we had the Renee Good fiasco, the Lindsay Clancy trial, the Cornell 7 orgy controversy, and now the Shane Gillis-gymgirl dustup.
My friend noted that in all of these cases — and, again, there have been several others — it’s generally women who have gotten most torqued up about the topic at hand, and in particular it’s a certain subset of women who are doing it. And TikTok and Instagram are full of rage-bait videos of people going berserk over things which either don’t merit such a reaction or where the truth is a whole lot more complicated than they’d like to make it.
And it was my friend, and not me, who suggested that none of these moral panics are organic, and that this burgeoning rage engine has already exhausted normal folks.
I think my friend is probably right. Outrage fatigue is a real thing. I think outrage fatigue played a role in Donald Trump’s 2024 election — though it was the fatigue normal folks had over the cultural aggressions of the radicals in society.
Whether it was Drag Queen Story Hour or trans kids or Tren de Aragua or the abuse of the FBI or countless other things demoralizing them, the normals had enough — and didn’t care what the aggressors had to say about how horrible a person Trump is.
As a normal guy, who loves politics and to share opinions, I understand that we have reached a point where all of this political rage is not normal. Once upon a time, I would get together with friends for lunch and our rage was about the umpire who missed too many pitches last night. Once in a while, a friend was angry because his girl got upset because he wouldn’t answer her text in 30 seconds. Or another time, a guy was mad because the apartments wouldn’t fix the AC on time. The normal stuff to get angry about.
Today, there is always someone at the table who wants to convince us that Trump is a threat to democracy and will cancel the elections. He becomes obnoxious when he won’t shut up or keeps sending negative texts about Trump. Most of us keep reminding him that our lunch is to talk about real stuff, not just Trump. He can’t let go. Trump is Hitler, you know, and came to power by winning an election.
Where is all of this going? I don’t know for sure, but I do think this fatigue is real. It’s one of the reasons that people are keeping their politics private, not putting political signs in their yard, and not talking to pollsters.
Furthermore, I hear from single guys that they avoid certain women who are just too political no matter how nice they look in jeans. And I hear from young men that they are dating girls from other countries because American college girls are just too political. As one said recently, I don’t go on a date to argue about Roe v. Wade!
Maybe normals like me have had enough with all of this rage! Or maybe some need to go see a psychiatrist and get Trump out of their heads.
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