One of the remarkable things about our political and cultural battles is how many of them are fought on behalf of other people.
For instance, there are plenty of Americans with deeply personal investments in the plight of Israelis or Palestinians, due to familial or historic ties. But millions of Americans have no direct, personal connection. This doesn’t mean they shouldn’t care about any of it, far from it. But the fact remains: A lot of the anger, vitriol and resentment in our country is often abstracted, symbolic, even theoretical.
Remember the 2019 brouhaha over the Covington High School students outside the Lincoln Memorial? Some kids in red MAGA hats were surrounded and harangued by demonstrators.
The fact that demonstrators and counter-demonstrators have been yelling at each other for centuries, if not millennia, and that 99% of the people setting their hair on fire about it had no direct ties to the event seemed not to matter. America is full of people getting furious on behalf of other people.
To be fair this is not new, but thanks to social media and cable news, what were once occasional flare-ups, are now almost daily grist for a whole outrage industry, hungry for opportunities to tell us why we should be full of resentment and anger about things that directly affect them very little, if at all.