The Politics of Resentment: A Genealogy by Jeremy Engels (review)

It has become almost cliché to say we live in resentful times; nonetheless, Jeremy Engels's The Politics of Resentment: A Genealogy represents a welcome contribution to the ongoing conversation about citizenship in troubled times. With the concept of the public good in disrepair and liberal democracy struggling, many are wondering how politics came to be this way. Along with books like Carol Anderson's White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide, Kathy Cramer's The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker, Elizabeth Anker's Orgies of Feeling: Melodrama and the Politics of Freedom, Thomas Mann's and Norman Ornstein's It's Even Worse Than it Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism, and Matt Lewis's Too Dumb to Fail: How the GOP Went from the Party of Reagan to the Party of Trump, Engels's book sheds light on the roots of the now-dominant conservative argument of victimhood. Relying on a wide set of sources ranging from rhetorical theorist Kenneth Burke, historian Jill Lepore, political scientists Joseph Lowndes and Danielle Allen, and philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, and Walter Benjamin, Engels's object scope is temporally broad and textually narrow, examining ancient Athens and the American founding while closely focusing on a few major, more recent speeches, such as Richard Nixon's famous "Vietnamization" oratory and Sarah Palin's "America's Enduring Strength," which was occasioned by Jared Loughner's shooting of Gabrielle Giffords.

Engels organizes the book around three major essays: "Reimagining the People," "The Rise of the Politics of Resentment," and "The Rhetoric of Violence," and the introduction focuses on defining democracy and victimage. Engels emphasizes that democracy is "dangerous," not because democratic mobs might kill or maim without principle, but because in democracy "political power" is not "given by god or fiat but in fact should be premised on popular input and dependent on the generation of good in common" (8). A functioning democracy is characterized by "the power to act collectively to create a political world that provides for citizens' needs and sets them up for success" (9). This definition counters the neoliberal "fantasy of a pre-social individual who is fully formed before social interaction and who, consequently, is in complete control of his [sic] destiny" (113).

The author contrasts this "no guarantees" definition of democracy with contemporary understandings of resentment as a political emotion while not adopting the totalizing position that resentment is intrinsically bad. Engels defines resentment as having three characteristics: "the perception that one has suffered an unwarranted injury . . . and thus a judgment of moral wrong; a feeling of hostility at the perpetrator of the injury; and the manifestation of that hostility, in words or deeds" (25). That people would be resentful is not surprising. In fact, precisely because "power is never distributed equally throughout society and citizens are rarely given access to all they need to thrive," (11) the mere presence of resentment does not indict a polity. Instead, resentment could constitute the common good as a "unifying emotion through which a demos becomes itself in opposition to an elite" (13). Politics becomes about a seemingly infinitely reproducible cycle of blame directed at individuals rather than systems.

The ambitious first essay, "Reimagining the People," attempts to track two concepts in two time periods, resentment and "the people," in both classical thought and the American founding. According to Engels, "Athenian democracy in the fourth century was remarkably stable" because of the power of resentment: the nonelite (many of the polis) demonstrated a willingness to use power against the elite oligarchs (31). Shedding light on why rhetoricians rarely praise resentment—or sometimes critique "extremist" rhetoric—Engels argues Aristotle unnecessarily narrowed the definition of the Greek term pthonos, which "meant not just 'envy'"; but also 'resentment' and 'indignation'" (33). By defining the term more narrowly as simply envy, Aristotle "worked to subtly disarm and disqualify the...