Valeria got her first job as a schoolteacher in a local school. In 2001, their first child, Anna Maria, was born.
Unsurprisingly, the Spanish housing market was much debated in Pedro’s office. Young families like his were struggling to afford to buy properties like those of their parents. Prices had been booming for almost ten years. Some economists were saying there was a bubble. Pedro wasn’t sure. He worried about the coastal property boom, but in towns and cities where he and Valeria wanted to live there would always be demand for good properties. Spain was in the European Union and had just joined the euro. Interest rates were lower than ever before, and the euro represented stability relative to Spain’s past.
Pedro wanted to take out a big mortgage and buy a three-bedroom apartment in Cadiz, which they could just about afford. Valeria wasn’t sure. Wouldn’t it be wise to save more and perhaps wait for property prices to calm down? Pedro, and her parents, convinced her otherwise. “He has a good job in the bank, and you are a public employee, with high job security. Take out the mortgage and make a nice home for Anna Maria.” They signed the deal in 2002.
Over the course of the next ten years, their plans fell apart. Pedro and Valeria saw the value of their house collapse. Initially, Pedro held on to his job, protected by Spanish labour laws, but his salary was cut. Despite working in the public sector, Valeria first saw her salary reduced by 30 per cent, and was then made redundant in another round of budget cuts.
Pedro and Valeria had never been interested in politics. They had open-minded attitudes about most things in life. They liked modern Spain and Europe. But Pedro also knew enough economics to know that you are not supposed to respond to a recession by making even more people unemployed in order to restore investor confidence – a policy called “austerity”. When unemployment is high, high school economics says to cut taxes and increase spending. This “punishment” coming from the EU, was motivated by some perverse desire for retribution and was a dishonest attempt to deflect blame.
In reality, his bank, like all other banks, had miscalculated. They had assumed that property prices would always rise like they had in the past. He also knew that German banks had been encouraging banks like his to borrow from them and finance the property boom. The story being peddled by European politicians and central bankers of prudent Germans and spendthrift Spaniards was a lie. The German banks were bailed out by the European Central Bank, but it was public-sector workers in Spain, like his wife, who paid the price through budget cuts.
This wasn’t the rational, liberal, open-minded European Union he believed in. This wasn’t even capitalism as he had been taught it. It was socialism for the rich and bankruptcy for the poor.
Pedro was eventually fired after the rules protecting workers in the labour market were changed. His family could no longer meet their mortgage payments, and the bank repossessed their house. They moved in with Valeria’s parents, and they never had the brother or sister they had planned for Anna Maria. The story of Pedro, Valeria and Anna Maria was repeated across Spain, Greece, Portugal and Italy. Is it any wonder Europeans are angry?
MARK: In our first conversation, we described the role of tribes and the hijacking of tribal energy by the political classes. That is the pernicious and manipulative side of angrynomics. The parable of Pedro, in contrast, suggests claims of moral outrage and legitimate grievance. Pedro and his family did nothing wrong, their elites did, and yet they had to pay for it. If that is the anger that we need to listen to, what are we listening for?
ERIC: To tune in to that, we need to get a bit philosophical. Luckily, the American philosopher Martha Nussbaum has a brilliant book on the subject entitled Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity and Justice. At the heart of her analysis is the identification of anger as a response to perceived wrong-doing. This is increasingly supported by empirical research, both in social psychology and neuroscience.12 Alongside “angry fans” moral outrage emerged as the most significant correlate in the big data exercise I referred to earlier, which analyzed the many thousands of news stories relating to public expressions of anger.
Public expressions of moral outrage take a very specific form. Private anger is typically seen as a weakness, reflecting the fact that something is wrong within us. But public expressions of moral outrage are defended by justifying the anger itself. Typically, moral outrage appeals to unfairness, a failure to listen to those who are affected, and a failure to recognize the interests of those most affected. For example, expressions of anger against the imposition of austerity policies in Europe, as our parable highlights, follow this structure. The democratic process was frequently hijacked by technocrats enforcing “reforms” when there was no economic logic to support austerity.
Angry people who rejected this narrative were right to do so. Their anger is rational and legitimate. In contrast to tribal rage, people motivated by moral outrage can often very clearly articulate why they are angry – that their interests, or those they care about, are not being taken into account, and that the perpetrators of wrong-doing are not being sanctioned. This is very different to tribal rage, which seeks not justice, but to destroy anything in its way.
Nussbaum, very perceptively, identifies specific triggers for moral anger, such as “status-injury”. She quotes the psychologist Carol Tavris’ study of anger in America, and “finds ubiquitous reference to ‘insults,’ ‘slights,’ ‘condescension,’ ‘being treated as if I were of no account’”.13 I think this response resonates with our observation that anger is a demand to be heard, a demand for representation. But it is also an expression of intent and significance – I matter and you better listen to me. In the political context, this is very pertinent.
MARK: Given that, let’s start with voice, because this is something that is central to understanding why people vote in ways that are often, patronizingly, described as “against their interests”. People are not just angered by discredited and unjust policies. They’re also quite-rightly upset because no one has listened to them, no one represents them, and because other people they perceive as part of this same elite are busy telling them what their interests “should” be.
We described the era of neoliberalism as fostering a loss of political identity – creating a vacuum that tribal anger has filled. But an unintended consequence of the post-Cold War political convergence between parties in the 1990s and 2000s was the emergence of a lifeless and largely self-serving technocratic centre, which caused large segments of the electorate to feel voiceless and unrepresented, which was steadily reflected in declining electoral turnouts.
Think back to Matteo Renzi, elected prime minister of Italy in 2014. This youthful new politician takes the reins of power and is ready to reform Italy, post-euro crisis. His first significant attempt at policy-making is to call a referendum on constitutional reform, which by most accounts seems like a sensible way to improve decision-making in the Italian legislature. But as Brexit showed us, if you offer people a referendum, and that’s the only chance they have had to express their voice, they’ll aim to be heard. And if it’s Tweedledum and Tweedledee in every election – you can have whatever variety of economic neoliberalism you want, but it’s always the same set of policies – then they will use that as a chance to vent their anger and frustration. The rejection of Renzi’s referendum proposal was nothing to do with constitutional reform. Similarly, Brexit to many people had little to do with the European Union. This is really more about the demand to be heard.
ERIC: You might almost say that had there been an alternative ideology for people to express their frustration they would’ve done so – it just didn’t exist. Indeed, if communism hadn’t already been tried and shown to fail, the post-financial crisis period might have been its coming of age. Consequently, there has been nothing in successive elections that allowed people to express their discontent with the status quo. The option for
