In the past two months, ISRF has held two meetings of our Political Affect research group. The second of these was on the topic of Drive in both psyche and society, brought to us by the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany.

I left the next day for Portugal, where among other things I watched Lisbonnais dealing with a total Iberian power failure by sharing bus space and cash and heading to parks for an afternoon and evening of group conversation.

Jardim do Torel, Lisbon, April 28, 2025, photo by author.

As I was returning to London, Nigel Farage’s right-wing party, Reform UK, not only won a by-election but also dominated local elections.

One lesson is that we can’t generalize to other countries from the public anger that shapes U.S. and U.K society today. We can’t generalize about a sense of entitlement to use the public realm to dump one’s anger. I don’t feel the same reflex in Portugal, which I’ve regularly visited for 20 years, or France, where I’ve lived in the past.

A second lesson is that we do need to ponder anger as a dominant political affect in these two Anglophone societies.

A case in point is Reform UK’s success in the Runcorn and Helsby by-election, where they turned last year’s Labour margin of nearly 15,000 votes to a 6-vote loss for Labour. Reporting found that the constituency is upset about asylum seekers and about relentless non-stop economic decline. Many see the Labour Party as having “done nothing but lie to us.” Labour has certainly done nothing to start rebuilding Britain’s struggling medium and small-sized towns. In addition, the government houses some asylum seekers in local hotels, which Reform UK leader Nigel Farage has made a continuous scandal.

Two political parties, Reform and the Conservative Party, instructed voters to draw a causal inference between these two bits of data. They say immigration is a major cause of distressing economic decline. The inference is false: for starters, asylum seekers constitute 0.37% of the local population.

Then, instead of correcting the false inference that wrongly blames asylum seekers for the area’s economic decline, and constantly slamming false Reform campaign information, the Labour candidate joined the attack and promised to close the best-known asylum hotel. Labour thus validated Reform and Tory bullshit (in the philosophical sense). A phony debate took place about who is most serious about (illegally) running asylum seekers out of town.

In addition to locking in policy failure, bullshit encourages anger as the affect to which the political system must react rather than demystify, defuse, or dismantle. The society is trapped in anger politics. Its political debates subtract knowledge from the world rather than adding to it.

The irony of anger politics is that it flows from a failure of government to engage with voter affects in the first place. Anger is the voters’ response to the refusal of authorities to engage with their feelings about how government is really doing.

A Runcorn Reform voter, Mike Kneale, explained to Guardian reporters Josh Halliday and Olivia Lee that he’s voted Labour all his life but never again. He says, “We need to stop the fucking boats. The pensioners need winter fuel allowance back and if you look around the town we’ve got barbers, dodgy cigarette shops, charity shops everywhere. You go try buy a pair of shoes in Runcorn—you can’t!”

There’s of course no logical connection between Kneale’s first two sentences. It wasn’t migrants who cut the winter fuel allowance: it was Starmer and his chancellor who did that.

At the same time, Kneale has a point. He is expressing anger at his total lack of power to fix anything in the community where he’s lived his life. He is right about one big thing: Starmer has done nothing to help Runcorn. How else, besides voting against the Labour candidate, can he get Starmer’s attention or seek an alternative to his neglect?

And yet anger’s version of personal agency means that British politics remains driven by knowledge failures and the destructive policy that results. Knowledge failure is typified by this false causality in which “the migrant has stolen my community.” I paraphrase Slavoj Žižek’s remark, trying to explain the disintegration of Yugoslavia, that the other is he who has stolen my enjoyment.

The racialised other, the migrant other, drive U.S. and U.K. politics by creating a derangement of perceived loss and victimisation that now seems to most people, certainly politicians, to be unchangeable.

And yet we cannot submit to this. The false causality is a disaster for the British public’s capacity to avoid racist and neocolonial affects towards the struggles of people much like them from other societies.

It’s a disaster for British policy, since it makes racism and xenophobia into political third rails that no politician can touch. 

It’s a disaster for public knowledge: Farage’s scapegoating of asylum seekers effaces the effects of war, climate change, and global capitalism about which Farage will do nothing.

What did we learn in our Political Affect discussion that could block this political doom loop?

One theme was the importance of treating a widespread sense of everyday helplessness. This point emerged in part from our discussion of Biao Xiang’s paper, “Double Alienation: Grounding Critical Consciousness in Critical Times.” He begins,

The world population in the early 21st century has no shortage of critical consciousness. Many people are convinced that the status quo is unsustainable and unjust. A typical manifestation of the critical consciousness is the sense of alienation, namely the feeling that one cannot reconcile the self with what is going on, to the extent that one feels one is losing one’s world.

In China, the term alienation (异化yihua) is sometimes used by technicians, teachers, government officers, and even factory workers, to describe their working conditions in social media and public discussions. They feel that they have no control over what they do, see no meaning in their labour, and that they are turned into tools and denied dignity.

And yet, the people Xiang has studied do not respond by attacking the source of the alienation but by giving up on changing it. Alienation is then doubled through the feeling that since one can do nothing about it, one “doubles down” on work: “since I have no control over my work, let me control myself to work harder to execute tedious tasks efficiently. Consider the familiar figure of the academics who complain about the absurdity of the game of publishing, but at the same time play the game and try hard to publish as quickly as possible.”

Xiang concludes that in spite of the attractions of double alienation—it makes the world real through subjugating discipline—the teachers and other workers he studies are looking for a way out.

The way out is a “regrounding from below” as a start on finding a path for oneself. “No path will ever emerge if one does not put one’s feet on the ground first.” How to find a ground “has to be explored in practice,” which the teachers and others are indeed doing in part through work activities.

Another Max Planck Institute scholar, Jagat Sohail, gave a paper on migrants in Germany, and told a story about one that stuck with me. Originally from Egypt, this migrant had established himself successfully in Berlin—had legal residency, a job, and so on. But he wants to move on now, and settle in England instead.

This seems mad at first: he doesn’t speak English and he doesn’t know anyone living in Britain, but still he wants to go. It feels irrational to leave a good situation and become precarious again, on purpose.

But Sohail emphasized the freedom that he thought he would find there—in the arrival? in the journey?—that perhaps was eluding him in Germany. I decided this idea of the further journey is not a ground but may be a clearing for a future grounding.

All these cases—the anti-migrant voter, the human rights lawyer become prime minister, the teacher, the migrant—reflect a widespread crisis of personal agency. It’s hard for any of us to feel agency in relation to vast, unaccountable systems of politics, finance, and communication.

Anger at a finite target restores a sense of agency without the demand that one achieves material change. And it also reinforces the personal isolation that is core to the problem.

I’ll mention one other theme of our Political Affect workshop, which was the radical dependence of the individual subject on intersubjectivity. To wrench this a bit, any solution to a crisis of personal agency will be social.

This is not a new insight to a new problem. For us, it emerged from a discussion of Hegel. For other theorists, it emerged in the 1960s and 1970s. Writing in the early years of the Thatcherite revival of the neoliberal individualist, Stuart Hall always insisted that the solution is cultural, and lies in the development of a “new cultural order.” We face, he wrote, “the choice between becoming historically irrelevant or beginning to sketch out an entirely new form of civilization."

In The Culture of Narcissism (1979), published in the same year Thatcher started her premiership, Christopher Lasch detailed the ways social systems generate generally passive people who “seethe with an inner anger.” He concluded,

In order to break the existing pattern of dependence and put an end to the erosion of competence, citizens will have to take the solution of their problems into their own hands. They will have to create their own ‘communities of competence.’ Only then will the productive capacities of modern capitalism, together with the scientific knowledge that now serves it, come to serve the interests of humanity instead. (page 235)

Thatcher’s movement came to be called neoliberalism, and it did block the widespread creation of these self-formed communities of competence. It forestalled the forms of agency that emerge from them—agency to define one’s own goals and to invent the ground on which they are pursued.

The current chaos gives us yet another chance to succeed at creating new knowledge communities and Hall’s new cultural order that will result. We will only succeed if we can do it across the barriers of formal education that have been used to stigmatise both collectivity and knowledge.

Jardim do Torel, Lisbon, April 28, 2025, photo by author.