The Problem with Perpetual Rage Mode


Take the headline you undoubtedly saw, or had forwarded to you on social media if you interact much with people on the left, which proclaimed that the American Health Care Act—House Republicans’ Obamacare reform—makes sexual assault a pre-existing condition.


The amendment itself—and I had to search around for a while to find its actual text rather than somebody’s short-stroke summary of it—make no mention at all of sexual assault or rape.


In other words, this headline is so misleading that even Politifact rates it as “Mostly False.”


“Pre-existing condition” is not a value judgment. It does not imply that the pre-existing condition is the patient’s fault, or that this person is somehow unworthy of receiving medical treatment. It is a merely factual description—but one that has special relevance when it comes to talking about insurance. When you require insurance coverage for a pre-existing condition, it’s no longer insurance. Insurance is a financial mechanism for hedging against an unknown future risk—not a way of seeking compensation for damage that has already occurred.


So are Democrats making this claim about sexual assault because they want to lobby for free medical treatment for victims of sexual assault—a worthy cause they just discovered five minutes ago? No, they’re doing it because evoking sexual assault victims, as opposed to sufferers of any other kind of pre-existing condition, packs a special emotional wallop. And then when somebody responds by carefully and rationally explaining what’s really going on and why pre-existing conditions can’t be covered if health insurance is going to function properly—as I just did above—that person suddenly looks like a callous, insensitive heel. How can he approach the issue with such cool logic? How can he be so insensitive to the victims?


The Appeal to Emotion is a fallacy that’s thousands of years old, but what makes this particular case a microcosm of today’s style of argument is one extra twist. If the purpose of the Appeal to Emotion is to make logical analysis seem insensitive, the purpose here is to make the user of logic seem insensitive specifically to women. Which fits right in with the target audience’s prejudices. Of course those evil people on the right, those old white men reveling in their patriarchal privilege, would be callously indifferent to the suffering of women. Of course they would want women to bear the blame for their own sexual assault. It’s just like The Handmaid’s Tale. We knew it all along!


This fits into a larger problem with how the left tends to interact with everyone else while they’re in Perpetual Rage Mode. As someone who attempts to interact with the other side pretty regularly on social media—and not always just to score rhetorical points—I’ve begun to notice a distinct pattern. People on the left will interact with someone on the right just long enough to be able to find some sign, some slip of the tongue, some violation of accepted speech codes (like not being a prig about Cinco de Mayo) that allows them to dismiss that person as racist, sexist, homophobic, or just insensitive—which provides an excuse to ignore anything he has to say. The conclusion is always the same: all arguments from the right can be dismissed without consideration because they come from bigots.

They need to stop doing this, and not for our sake—if you’re on the right, you’re probably used to coping with an omnipresent background radiation of political hostility—but for their own sake. It is a spectacularly unconvincing method of argument that drives people back into their own social media “filter bubbles.” It doesn’t convince anyone. It just convinces them not to talk to you any more. And then you end up on an evening in November, stunned at the fact that so many people voted for a candidate whose sole political function is to stick a finger in your eye.


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