What You Need to Know About Anger When You’re Fighting Fascism

Trump was just re-elected in the United States, and we could be entering an era where the most extreme anti-humanitarian forces in the country run unfettered.

Leftists and liberals are outraged at the people who voted for fascism, misogyny, and white supremacy. Trump voters are often motivated by anger as well. So in order to move forward from here, I think we all need to understand anger better.

Anger is Healthy

In a culture that’s squeamish about and suspicious of emotions, a lot of us have gotten the impression that anger itself is the problem. For instance, a client once told me that she didn’t want to feel angry because it was unhealthy. But as she got to know her anger, she discovered that it was like a traffic light, telling her to stop and set a boundary. Suddenly, it didn’t seem so unhealthy, and she started to listen to her traffic light in daily life.

This agrees with the general consensus among people who work with emotions: that emotions are messengers, and that the message of anger is “A boundary has been violated. Do something about it.”

The thing about messengers, though, is that their responsibility ends when you read the message. They’re not in charge of whether you do what the message suggests. And so, just because anger is healthy, doesn’t mean you have a blank check to act on it any which way.

Anger is an Opening to Strength

It turns out that when you allow yourself to fully feel your anger, without fighting it, distracting from it, or trying to vent it out of you because you can’t stand the way it feels, then it changes¹.

Instead of feeling like you’re holding a hot potato that you need to chuck at someone before it burns your hands, you start to feel really good, actually. Strong. Alive. Grounded. Capable. Energized and ready to act. The first time I felt it, I was amazed that anger — an emotion I usually find incredibly uncomfortable — could lead me somewhere so fun.

Real Strength is Pro-Social

When my clients go into this state of strength, they almost always point out that it doesn’t feel brittle or rigid. This kind of strength is strong and stable, yet also flexible.

In comparison, a client said that the usual way he tries to be strong can put people off. It’s not the best mode for him to go into when he’s working in a team. But this effortless, flexible kind of strength is different. He said that with this kind of strength, he could be a follower or a leader.

The off-putting way he was referring to is what I’ll call fake strength — the way we attempt to compensate for the lack of real strength. Fake strength is rigid and doesn’t play well with others. It’s the reason anger gets such a bad rap.

But when anger becomes real strength, it doesn’t have to wreck relationships. Recently, I felt a burst of real strength during an argument with my husband. So instead of restraining myself and carefully planning out my words like I often do, I took a chance and blurted out “I’m really pissed off!” and explained why.

I expected to get defensiveness and anger in return, but instead I got a relaxed “You make a good point.”

I was so shocked that I actually asked “Why did you take that so well?” He laughed. It wasn’t that I had scared him into compliance, and it wasn’t even that I had persuaded him to my point of view. It was just that real strength had allowed me to authentically express my anger without trying to control him.

That’s because real strength is the ability to stand your ground without pushing anyone else over. To stand tall without climbing on top of others. To hold your boundaries without pushing everyone away. The more people come into their real strength, the better it is for everyone.

Stop Thinking So Hard and Feel

In a way, this isn’t news. Our culture already recognizes that there’s a third option between being a jerk and being a pushover. People say that you can be passive, aggressive, or the best option, assertive. They say that parenting styles can be authoritarian, permissive, or the best option, authoritative.

The problem is, our culture teaches us to figure everything out through conscious, rational thought, as if you can work out the appropriate action to take from your anger like it’s a math problem.

This math problem approach leads to overly rigid understandings of boundaries. Have you seen people on social media saying that you shouldn’t do emotional labor for your friends, or cutting friends out of their life over minor infractions? Have you felt like something was off about it, but found it difficult to explain the problem using boundaries math?

That’s because life isn’t a math problem. We’re not machines. We’re messy animals with neurons in our guts and memories in our kidneys, apparently. That’s why the way I was taught to bring people into real strength is not to have them do the math about what’s right and fair and the right mix of hard and soft, but to have them feel their feelings. Navigating boundaries is a full-body sport.

What Real Strength Might Look Like In Our Organizations

I’m still coming into my real strength, and I don’t have all the answers. But I want to look at a couple of examples of what real strength, fake strength, and no strength look like in politics. First, a problem near and dear to my heart: how to work with others for political change.

During Trump’s first term, I organized dozens of people to canvass and phonebank for leftist city councillors, and all of the candidates we endorsed in my city won. Then I ran for the steering committee of my volunteer organization, was elected, and passed some important policies to make the org more inclusive and democratic.

Sounds great, right? It was harrowing. I have never been bullied anywhere near as badly as when I was volunteering all my free time to make my city a slightly better place — and all by people who disagreed with me only slightly. Friends who went through it with me say they’re still healing from it.

That was my wake-up call to realize that we can’t ignore our inner work and just focus on laws and candidates and union contracts. Our movements are only as good as we are.

So here’s what I’ve learned about how fake strength, no strength, and real strength play out inside leftist organizations:

The fake strength approach:

Fake strength trades on fear, and leftist fake strength trades on the fear of being a bad person and being rejected by your social group.

This fear is highly effective at getting fellow leftists to fall in line. But it ultimately poisons the movement.

The left doesn’t have the most money or the most hard power. What we have on our side is that we want what’s in the interest of the most people. People power is our only hope. But when the air in our communities is thick with the fear of social ruin, and forgiveness is off the table, then building trusting, resilient relationships becomes impossible. “Solidarity” starts to sound like a joke.

Meanwhile, we need our movements to grow, and fear of rejection doesn’t work on people who don’t already want our approval. So our most forceful attempts at persuading outsiders to join us often ring hollow to them. Fake strength isn’t actually compelling to people who aren’t afraid.

And of course, on a philosophical level, fake strength is against what we stand for. If we wanted to live in a world where people threaten each other into obedience, we’d be authoritarians.

The strength-phobic approach:

Some people want to just embrace everyone. They might also want to avoid imposing their will on anyone, to the point of rejecting all leadership.

Unfortunately, this gets people the exact opposite of what they want. They want an organization free of bullies, but their lack of strength allows bullies to come in and take over.

In a world full of fake strength, real strength offers much-needed protection.

The real strength approach:

There’s no one way that real strength plays out in organizations, because it responds to each unique moment rather than following a rigid rule. But I can tell you that real strength always deals in the truth. And it’s a big, complex world, so there is a lot of truth.

There’s so much truth that a person can be wrong and also forgivable.

There’s so much truth that a person can be well-meaning and also need to be kicked out of the meeting.

And most perplexingly, there’s so much truth that two good people can see the same exact situation and come to different conclusions about the right move.

All this truth opens up new possibilities that we tend to miss when we’re looking through the narrow lens of fake strength. But even when you do need to take a stand and part ways with someone, real strength allows you to do it without stewing in hatred.

What Real Strength Might Look Like Across Party Lines

After any loss, we all tend to talk about whether to try to win our opponents over, or condemn them. Take for example the disillusioned young men that apparently defected to Trump after exposure to outrage-fueling misinformation. What should we do about that?

The fake strength approach:

Some don’t want to get curious about why these men voted the way they did. To them, the answer is that they’re bad people who deserve nothing but our condemnation.

The thing is, they don’t fear our condemnation; they revel in it. 

This approach is like refusing to live in the world where they’re winning and retreating to the moral plane, where they’re losing. But we’re needed in the real world. We need to face our anger, and the painful truth of what’s happening, long enough to find our real strength.

The strength-phobic approach:

Wouldn’t it be nice, then, if we could win them over? If love really did conquer all? If hearing each other out would clear the air?

I think it’s great to believe that anyone can change, but often when people put their hopes in that strategy, they’re doing it out of a distaste for anger and strength. When people try to change someone’s behavior without using strength, they tend to resort to the codependent tactic of giving more than they’re actually comfortable giving in the hopes that it will inspire reciprocation. But there’s a reason codependency burns people out: the tactic doesn’t actually work.

Real strength is perfectly compatible with love, empathy, and hope. But it still means standing your ground.

The real strength approach:

I was taught not to bother trying to persuade political opponents, and just focus on standing firm and mobilizing supporters. Usually I think that’s right, but I think toxic masculinity is spreading to a degree that matters beyond elections. If we’re going to see fewer school shootings and less domestic violence, for instance, we need to do not just political work, but culture work. And so I got to thinking what that would look like with real strength.

And I noticed that bullies have an inherent weakness: bullying doesn’t make people happy and secure. Bullies can get the external things they want – the money, the attention, the levers of power. But ultimately, people only want external things because they think those things will make them feel better inside. And abusing people is just not fertile ground for feeling deeply satisfied with yourself. 

Think about it: the most toxic men are the ones who are constantly worried about things like whether drinking lemonade makes them gay. They can never relax, because their fake strength is built on fear.

So I wonder if the best way to approach this demographic is through non-judgmental conversations about whether the manosphere is actually making them feel the way they want to feel. I’m betting that it’s keeping them addicted, believing that somehow it will lead them to feel vindicated, respected, and secure, but that it never quite happens, and that living in bitterness feels pretty awful.

If they got interested in real strength, it would give them the feelings they crave, but not at the expense of other people.

How to Embody Your Real Strength

The pathway to real strength is to make friends with your anger. You can’t get to it by rejecting anger as unhealthy and burying it. You also can’t get to it by using the fact that anger is healthy as an excuse to hurl that hot potato in someone’s face as soon as it lands in your hands.

You need to feel the hot potato.

Weirdly, when you’re not fighting it, it doesn’t burn you.

Of course, that’s easier said than done, and I will think about ways to help people explore their strength. If you’re interested, please drop me a line at presley-at-partswithpresley-dot-com. This isn’t the focus of my business, but I feel like it needs to be done.

In the meantime, start to notice anger and strength in yourself and others:

• What do you do when you start to feel angry? How do you push it down or out of you?
• What do you do when others show anger? Do you flee, fight, or fawn?
• When someone is taking a stand, feel in your gut for whether it’s feels like flimsy fake strength, scary fake strength, or compelling real strength.

The more you can notice what’s true, the more you can stand for what’s true.

In solidarity,

Presley

1. I learned this from the Aletheia coaching school, which got it from The Diamond Approach. I wouldn’t have believed it until I experienced it and saw my clients experience it without being told to expect it. ↩︎