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Anger ManagementLessons from an improbable collaboration.

By Dahlia Lithwick
Posted Monday, April 2, 2007, at 4:02 PM ET

Wondering what's all the rage for spring?

Rage.

George Will wrote an excellent column on the subject last weekend, deconstructing the "the politics of disdain." Howie Kurtz also wrote about rage last week, decrying the ugliness of postings on political blogs. And if you have an inbox, you've probably seen the Bloggingheads meltdown starring law professor and blogger Ann Althouse, railing against the bloggers and journalists who attack her.

There's no doubt that as the ideological divide in this country grows and new technologies expand, we'll spend more time being furious and bitter and enraged. And, as Will suggested last week, that anger soon takes on a life of its own. It flattens our reality and distorts our understanding of the world.

But look at what else Will had to say about the causes of anger (as opposed to the effects, about which I agree). His piece about the outrages of political outrage points fingers at Paul Krugman, and Bill Clinton, and Howard Dean, and all San Franciscans, with nary a flick to the role played by Karl Rove, Rush Limbaugh, and the spear-chuckers from the political right who've elevated rageful discourse to an art form. (If Will thinks his nod at rage parodist Ann Coulter constitutes "balance," he's kidding himself.)

Know what would have made Will's piece great, as opposed to just smart? He should have co-authored it with Paul Krugman. Their argument could have been the same. The analysis would have been more careful.

Consider the example highlighted by Kurtz, who wrote about hateful comments posted on the blogs Little Green Footballs and the Huffington Post. In both cases posters wished that failed assassination attempts on Jimmy Carter and Dick Cheney, respectively, had succeeded. Both Arianna Huffington and Charles Johnson (founder of Little Green Footballs) disavowed these comments—although one of them did feel the need to insist that posters on the other side were worse. But you know what would have impressed the heck out of me? If they'd issued a joint statement that readers advocating the death of public officials are not welcome in either forum.

Don't get me wrong. I can appreciate the Hegelian allure of screaming epithets at one another in an effort to get to the bottom of thorny questions. But political discourse in this country stopped being "discourse" when we all stopped speaking or listening to anyone who disagreed with us. George Will cites Peter Wood, anthropologist and author of A Bee in the Mouth: Anger in America Now, in noting that this kind of speech does not persuade. It's not even an attempt to persuade. It's just "performance art." And while performance art surely has its place in America, I'm not confident we ought to be relying exclusively upon it to debate the surge in Iraq.

But what if pundits had to collaborate with someone from the other side? Just once a year. Topic of their choosing.

A few weeks ago I co-authored a piece for Slate with Jack Goldsmith, who once worked for the Bush Justice Department (not my most favorite job description these days). The collaboration came about in part because the whole U.S. attorney purge had degenerated into what felt like a choose-your-own-adventure book: Op/Ed A ("scandalous ... partisan ... corruption") vs. Op/Ed B ("pleasure of the president . . . Clinton started it").

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Dahlia Lithwick is a Slate senior editor.
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Remarks from the Fray:

As someone who has been routinely critical of Lithwick's writing, I think this piece was relatively well-done -- and recognizes in her own writing some of the lazy partisan tendencies that have invited criticism, which one hopes will lead Lithwick to be a better columnist.

That said, I think Lithwick misdiagnoses the disease. While outrage-as-tool screeds are indeed troubling, the most troubling part is not outrage per se but the flaws contained in such writing -- blindness to contrary facts, ignoring obvious argument flaws, imputing implausible positions, dismissal of disfavoured sources, acceptance of authority based on agreement, etc. In other words, cultivating outrage corresponds with careless thinking, writing, and (in a loose sense) scholarship.

Lithwick's (fairly sensible) prescription -- collaboration -- seems to indicate that the problem is not outrage but the sloppiness that accompanies it. Collaboration may not mute outrage so much as it may force care by virtue of a skeptical audience. Lithwick's description of her own collaboration ("On the phone last month, he mentioned some interesting stuff about congressional history. I said no way. He said indeed.") shows that what she was getting was not so much muting of opinion, but solid facts that she would not otherwise have sought out. She would never have encountered the historical facts on her own, and if she had, she would have discounted them. Collaboration with Goldsmith did not force her to be civil so much as it forced her to consider facts that her ideology would otherwise have caused her to miss. Likewise, by collaborating with an opponent, one is likely to tighten one's argument logic, because zeal can turn a blind eye to logical fallacies.

None of which is to say that Lithwick is the only person with such problems, or that her concern about the level of discourse and over-use of outrage are out of place. In fact, I think her idea of mandatory collaboration (or at least recommended collaboration) is a very good one. If nothing else, it accomplishes the same as the old trick parents use to divide a piece of cake (one kid cuts, another one chooses, you end up with equal slices) -- you will tend to get a sparer, more unvarnished, more logical, and more solidly factual account of a controversy. In my mind, that makes for better journalism and better discourse. But in general, careful research and critical thinking will go a long way towards accomplishing the same thing. "Outrage" is mostly troubling to me because it inhibits those traits, not so much because of the decibel level.

--HLS2003

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