Quotes: 3 June 2026
Theme today: Dark Passion (and some good ones) in Politics
[W]hat moved them [Americans who participated in politics] was ‘the passion for distinction’ which John Adams held to be ‘more essential and remarkable’ than any other human faculty: ‘Wherever men, women, or children, are to be found, whether they be old or young, rich or poor, high or low, wise or foolish, ignorant or learned, every individual is seen to be strongly actuated by a desire to be seen, heard, talked of, approved and respected by the people about him, and within his knowledge.’ The virtue of this passion he called ‘emulation’, the ‘desire to excel another’, and its vice he called ‘ambition’ because it ‘aims at power as a means of distinction’. And, psychologically speaking, these are in fact the chief virtues and vices of political man. For the thirst and will to power as such, regardless of any passion for distinction, though characteristic of the tyrannical man, is no longer a typically political vice, but rather that quality which tends to destroy all political life, its vices no less than its virtues. It is precisely because the tyrant has no desire to excel and lacks all passion for distinction that he finds it so pleasant to rise above the company of all men; conversely, it is the desire to excel which makes men love the world and enjoy the company of their peers, and drives them into public business.
Emotions matter in politics, sometimes in systematic ways. The emotions that affect political decisions and outcomes are mostly negative: anger, Cartesian indignation, hatred, fear, resentment, envy, guilt, and shame. Only one positive emotion, enthusiasm, seems capable of affecting political behavior.
Resentment in politics is the externalization of envy. If there is one thing authoritarian governments do especially well, it is the way in which they mobilize resentment as a weapon. Democracy, on principle, is based on the public’s acceptance of regular cycles in which winners and losers exchange places, sometimes unexpectedly. Authoritarians, by contrast, promise stability and equality. They offer placidity by promising, without favor or exception, to make losers of everyone outside of the ruling group. By reducing all citizens to the same miserable condition, they build a constituency among those who are willing to endure oppression as long as the people they hate have to endure it as well. Resentment is about leveling rather than leadership, about vengeance rather than virtue.
A Large Portion of the Electorate Chose the Sociopath - The Atlantic
By Tom Nichols
The politics of cultural resentment, the obsessions of white anxiety, are so intense that his voters are determined not only to preserve minority rule but to leave a dangerous sociopath in the Oval Office. Even the candidacy of a man who was both a political centrist and a decent human being could not overcome this sullen commitment to authoritarianism.
Their evidently natural rights to life, liberty and security, already challenged by deep-rooted inequality, are threatened by political dysfunction and economic stagnation, and, in places affected by climate change, a scarcity and suffering characteristic of pre-modern economic life. The result is, as Arendt feared, a ‘tremendous increase in mutual hatred and a somewhat universal irritability of everybody against everybody else’, or ressentiment. An existential resentment of other people’s being, caused by an intense mix of envy and sense of humiliation and powerlessness, ressentiment, as it lingers and deepens, poisons civil society and undermines political liberty, and is presently making for a global turn to authoritarianism and toxic forms of chauvinism.
I have in mind here Martha Nussbaum’s Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013). Although she repeatedly acknowledges the permanent presence of the dark passions in our nature, she is more confident than I am that liberal politics can generate and sustain a form of civic love that is strong enough to overcome them. A decade ago, she traced the fact that India was a “highly successful democracy” to the enduring influence of Gandhi and Tagore. In view of developments since then, especially the rise of religious passions and Narendra Modi’s anti-liberal policies, she would probably want to revise this judgment. The dark passions have displaced civic love, not for the first time and surely not the last. More broadly, she seems to believe that politics requires, and can be hospitable to, the emotions and connections that shape our private lives (p. 397). As a general proposition, I disagree, for the reasons Max Weber lays out at the end of his Politics as a Vocation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946).
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Nor is the desire for domination necessarily linked to any of the dark passions—anger, hatred, humiliation, resentment, or fear. Leaders driven by the urge to dominate can arouse these passions among actual and potential supporters without experiencing them to the same degree (or at all). The soul of the potential dominator can be icy cold.
Instead of bemoaning the influx of emotions into politics, we should value democracy’s capacity to give voice to fear, pain, and anxiety that might otherwise be diverted in far more destructive directions.
In addition to ambition and avarice, a series of other malignant passions occur throughout The Federalist Papers, including pride, vanity, envy, jealousy, fear, resentment, self-love, and love of power.
The Return of Marco Polo’s World
[Samuel] Huntington disdains “rational-choice theory,” the reigning fad in political science, which assumes that human behavior is predictable but which fails to take account of fear, envy, hatred, self-sacrifice, and other human passions that are essential to an understanding of politics.
In troubled times, and not only in troubled times, people seek outlets for anger and resentment, for fear and hatred of the “other” in their midst.