Of course, this country has known a KKK conservatism characterized by actual, not metaphorical, mob impulses and real, brutal violence. Anyone who has read Gone With the Wind knows that the American right has a long, ugly tradition of grievance politics. The novel's neo-Confederate vision of history is based almost entirely on outraged indignation. The South, for Margaret Mitchell (and not just Margaret Mitchell), was cruelly targeted by the North. The KKK was, in her view, a group of somewhat misguided but honorable freedom fighters battling against injustice. And, as in our time, outrage sold well—Gone With the Wind became the biggest bestseller of the 20th century, and inspired an even-more-massive hit movie.

But neo-Confederate propaganda is racist and awful and evil because of its ideology, not because it expresses that ideology through outrage. Linda Williams argues in her book Playing the Race Card that neo-Confederate grievance outrage, as exemplified by Birth of a Nation, was actually a mirror of, and built upon, abolitionist anti-slavery outrage. Birth of a Nation, Williams says, deliberately reversed the imagery and arguments of Uncle Tom's Cabin—which, like Gone With the Wind, was a massive, multimedia hit. Both abolitionists and neo-Confederates created narratives that identified an injustice, which in turn prompted an outraged demand that that injustice be rectified.

Williams doesn't actually call these demands for justice "outrage." Instead, she uses the term "melodrama." Melodrama, Williams says, is not a new Internet distraction from the real work of politics. On the contrary, it is central to the democratic project. Pre-democratic modes, like Greek tragedy, emphasized the importance of bowing to fate; the response to injustice is a lowered head and the recognition that sometimes your dad is just going to sacrifice you to the gods, so make the best of it. In contrast, Williams says, “melodrama always offers the contrast between how things are and how they could be, or should be.” Melodrama greets injustice not with tragic acceptance, but with a demand for restitution; it embodies the fundamental democratic demand for a just and equitable society.

When Americans said taxation without representation required revolution, they were creating a melodramatic narrative. When the Gamergate agitators (surprisingly absent from Slate's set of outrage essays) insist that criticizing sexism violates the ethics of games journalism and must be stopped, they are creating a melodramatic narrative. Those narratives can be more or less logical; they can be used in the name of noble causes or vicious ones. But the melodrama, or the outrage, is not new. It helped found the country and continues to be the basis for Americans politics, from debates around health care to debates around torture to debates around immigration reform. Americans are an outraged and melodramatic people, and always have been, for good and ill.