When Politicians Fuel the Rage

A Valley Viewpoint Narrative

There is a difference between leadership and agitation. Leadership lowers the temperature. Agitation spikes it—and then pretends the fire just happened. In modern politics, too many elected officials have stopped pretending this is accidental. Rage isn’t a side effect anymore; it’s the product. It’s harvested, packaged, and sold nightly to a base that’s been trained to confuse fury with courage.

Anger travels faster than reason. Outrage converts better than nuance. Fear keeps people glued to screens and loyal to slogans. Politicians have noticed. When politicians fuel the rage, they don’t just win attention—they poison the atmosphere the rest of us are forced to breathe.

Rage doesn’t come out of nowhere. It grows out of real frustrations: stagnant wages, housing costs, cultural whiplash, institutions that feel distant or indifferent. Those grievances are legitimate. Exploiting them is not. But exploitation is easier than governing. It requires no policy depth, no tradeoffs, no adult conversations. Just find a villain, simplify the problem to the point of dishonesty, and point aggressively.

Immigrants. Elites. Cops. Teachers. Judges. Journalists. Corporations. “The other side.” Pick one. Rotate as needed. Keep the crowd angry and the donations flowing.

Language is the accelerant. Words like enemy, invasion, traitor, war, rigged, and corrupt aren’t chosen accidentally. They’re designed to move people from disagreement to hostility. Once you convince people they’re under siege, compromise becomes treason, facts become optional, and institutions become expendable—unless they’re doing exactly what you want.

And then comes the performative outrage from the people supposedly in charge.

When the mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey, publicly told federal immigration authorities to “get the f*** out” of his city, it wasn’t bold leadership. It was theater. Cheap, viral, profanity-laced theater dressed up as moral clarity.

Whatever your position on immigration policy or federal enforcement, that line didn’t solve a single problem. It didn’t explain the law. It didn’t protect vulnerable residents. It didn’t improve coordination or safety. What it did do was exactly what rage politics always does: spike emotions, harden camps, and turn a complicated legal and humanitarian issue into a street fight with applause breaks.

Supporters were told they were heroes. Opponents were cast as villains. Everyone else got the message loud and clear: governing has been replaced by posturing, and shouting is now a substitute for competence.

This is how contempt gets normalized. When leaders swear at institutions instead of working within them, they teach people that rules only matter when convenient. When profanity replaces precision, credibility is traded for claps. Rage becomes the brand. Performance becomes policy.

The irony, of course, is that rage is a terrible governing tool. You can’t pave roads with it. You can’t staff hospitals with it. You can’t fix housing shortages, reform immigration law, or balance a budget by yelling into a microphone. Governing requires patience, expertise, compromise, and—worst of all—telling your own side “no” once in a while.

That’s why rage politicians never actually want solutions. Solutions end the outrage cycle. Solutions require shared responsibility. Rage, on the other hand, is renewable. There’s always another enemy, another insult, another crisis to monetize.

The downstream effects are predictable. Civic life corrodes. School boards turn into cage matches. Town halls become shouting contests. Neighbors stop trusting neighbors. Courts, journalists, and civil servants become targets rather than referees. And eventually, for a few people who have been marinating in this rhetoric long enough, words stop feeling sufficient. After all, if everything is war, why act like it isn’t?

None of this is to say anger has no place in politics. Moral anger has driven real progress—civil rights, labor protections, anti-corruption reforms. But moral anger is disciplined. It points upward at injustice and forward toward solutions. Manufactured rage punches sideways and downward, offering catharsis instead of change.

The real test of leadership isn’t whether someone can rile a crowd. That’s easy. A megaphone and a grievance will do. The test is whether they can calm a crowd without lying to it, tell hard truths without sneering, and channel frustration into something productive rather than destructive.

A democracy cannot survive forever on adrenaline and insults. Eventually, it needs trust, restraint, and leaders who understand that their words don’t just win news cycles—they shape behavior.

The rage will always be there. The question is whether our politicians will keep lighting the match—and then acting shocked when things burn.