RAGE IN THE MACHINE: QUANTIFYING ANGER IN AMERICA / THE ECONOMIST

Rage in the machine

Quantifying anger in American politics

The country is awash in indignation

A pro-ICE counter-protester yells at an anti-ICE protester during a demonstration. / Photograph: Getty Images

IN JUST THE past two months Donald Trump has described unnamed Democratic candidates as “jihadists” and “radical lunatics”. 

He has mocked opponents’ weight and appearance, said he hated Adam Schiff, a Democratic senator from California, and referred to James Talarico, the Democratic Senate candidate in Texas, as “Tal-a-freak-o”. 

He has also attacked former Republican allies, calling Tucker Carlson and others “losers”, while describing Marjorie Taylor Greene as “neurotic”.

The president’s rhetoric is insulting, combative and angry. 

Of course, he is hardly the first politician to cultivate outrage.

Spiro Agnew, Richard Nixon’s vice-president, delighted in attacking the press. 

Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House, was a master of ginning up resentment. 

For decades righteous indignation has been the resting state of Bernie Sanders, an independent senator from Vermont. 

But new research suggests that American politics is angrier than ever.

Economists at Harvard, HEC Paris, Paris-Saclay and University of California, Berkeley set out to explore the evolution of political fury. 

They trawled more than 150 years of congressional speeches and millions of social-media posts, categorising their emotional character using artificial intelligence, including large language models and natural-language processing. 

For each text they assigned a score for eight emotions—anger, sadness, pride, gratitude, fear, disgust, joy and hope—as well as for the overall level of emotion.

Their paper finds that angry statements in Congress shot up during Mr Gingrich’s leadership in the 1990s, before receding in the early years of this century. 

More recently such statements have become ever more common, rising by 50% since 2013 (see chart). 

Voters are more irate, too. 

From 2013 to 2025 the share of policy-related sentences expressing anger in voter tweets rose by 35%. 

In comments on Reddit, an internet forum, it rose by 46%.

The paper’s authors are careful not to attribute the rise in anger to any single cause, though there are plenty of theories. 

Steven Webster, a political scientist at Indiana University, emphasises America’s deepening partisanship. 

Fewer Americans have friendships that cross the political aisle and America’s political tribes don’t even consume the same news sources. 

According to the Pew Research Centre, since 2016 there has been a sharp rise in the share of Democrats and Republicans who not only oppose one another’s ideas but also view members of the other party as immoral and dishonest. 

The share of partisans who say that the other party makes them “angry” climbed by almost 30 percentage points, to 76%, between 2016 and 2025.

“Regardless of where it starts, it is going to be a reinforcing feedback loop,” says Stefanie Stantcheva of Harvard University, who co-authored the research on political messages. 

She points to data showing that angry tweets by members of Congress tend to receive 59% more retweets than emotionally neutral ones. 

Anger can mobilise voters more effectively than other emotions. 

A corrosive cycle ensues. 

Political scientists have shown how rage undermines trust in government, reinforces polarisation and reduces voters’ commitment to democratic norms, even when the source of anger is detached from politics itself.

Dr Stantcheva and her colleagues found that respondents primed with negative emotions were less favourable towards immigration and free trade, and more favourable towards economic redistribution—perhaps a sign of rage at the rich. 

“When you’re angry, the categories you’re retrieving are grievance and blame,” says Dr Stantcheva.

Donald Trump shouting. / Photograph: Alamy

As politicians vie for attention ahead of November’s midterm elections, many are making anger a central part of their campaigns. 

In April the news site Axios reported that nearly 50 Democratic campaign ads included the word “fighter” or “fight”. 

Bob Chew, an independent candidate for Senate in Colorado, has run an ad showing him throwing a lamp, a table and a vase across a room to express his rage over affordability.

A few candidates are taking a different tack. 

Josh Turek, a Democratic Senate candidate, says he will be “fighting for Iowa”, but also speaks of “the need for hope and positivity and optimism”. 

Mr Talarico talks about elevating service over selfishness. 

Last year Zohran Mamdani won New York’s mayoral race by pairing populist policies with relentless cheer. 

Americans are still ticked off—a growing share say they support change. 

Some want to deliver it with a smile; many others with a furrowed brow.