The Epistemology of Democracy

Abstract

This chapter explores one aspect of the current affectively charged political climate: “the politics of resentment.” This expression is meant to capture a political outlook or perspective shaped by the reactive attitude, or moral emotion, of resentment. Such an outlook is characteristic of those who feel “left behind” or experience themselves as having become “strangers in their own land.” Their resentment is a bitter response to a perceived loss of status and to apparent (or real) threats to the social world within which they occupy a position that secures their self-respect. Those who engage in the politics of resentment fear slipping down the social ladder, often see their economic conditions deteriorate, and experience a loss of entitlements previously conferred to them by their dominant ethnic or gender identity. The chapter has two main aims. The first is to offer an account of the emotional outlook characteristic of the politics of resentment that explains this resentment and its connection to cruel and wilful hopes. The second is to encourage scholars who wish to understand and address some of the main dangers facing Western democratic institutions to focus on the emotional dimension of political life rather than exclusively on its more cognitive components.