The late British philosopher Roger Scruton thought deeply about the politics of anger. On the one hand, he believed it was valuable and necessary. “Resentment is to the body politic what pain is to the body,” he wrote. “Bad to feel it, but good to be capable of feeling it, since without the ability to feel it we will not survive.”77 The problem, Scruton argued, is when “resentment loses the specificity of its target and becomes directed to society as a whole,” Scruton concludes. At that point resentment becomes “an existential posture” adopted not “to negotiate within existing structures, but
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