For those blissfully unaware of the issue, the latest superhero movie features a female protagonist, and the actress who plays her has expressed some mildly feminist views. So?

Well, for a significant number of men all of this is apparently extremely threatening. Mobs swamped internet sites like rottentomatoes.com with negative reviews before the movie opened, i.e., before they could even have seen it; YouTube filled up with attack videos and predictions that the film would be a disastrous failure.

Marvel rage recognizably drew on the same pathological pettiness as straw rage and hamburger rage. As it happens, the movie appears to be a big hit and is receiving favorable audience scores. This shows that the men afflicted with this syndrome are a fairly small minority.

But it’s not a minority without influence. Nunes was, for a time, among the most important politicians in Washington. CPAC sets the agenda for the party that controls the White House and the Senate. The recently revealed radio rants of Fox News’s Tucker Carlson could have come straight out of one of those bizarre anti-Brie Larson screeds.

The point is that demented anger is a significant factor in modern American political life — and overwhelmingly on one side. All that talk about liberal “snowflakes” is projection; if you really want to see people driven wild by tiny perceived slights and insults, you’ll generally find them on the right. Nor is it just about racism and misogyny. Although these are big components of the phenomenon, I don’t see the obvious connection to hamburger paranoia.

Just to be clear: To paraphrase John Stuart Mill, I’m not saying that most conservatives are filled with rage over petty things. What I’m saying instead is that most of those filled with such rage are conservatives, and they supply much of the movement’s energy. Not to put too fine a point on it, pathological pettiness almost surely put Donald Trump over the top in the 2016 election.

At this point you probably want to know what I think we should do about it. The truth is that I don’t know. I guess there’s some case for using taxes rather than regulations to control pollution, since you won’t be telling people directly what to do. But one suspects that the people I’m talking about will still find something to be hysterical about.

At the very least, however, we should realize what’s happening. It may be comforting to believe that politics is driven by more or less rational considerations of costs and benefits. But the reality is that a lot of it is driven by unreasoning rage.

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