George Will has written an interesting column that sums up the problem with the anti-war movement:

The blogosphere often is, as one blogger joyfully says, “an electronic primal scream.” And everywhere there is the histrionic fury of ordinary people venting in everyday conversations.

Many people who loathe George W. Bush have adopted what Peter Wood describes as “ecstatic anger as a mode of political action.” Anger often is, Wood says, “a spectacle to be witnessed by an appreciative audience, not an attempt to win over the uncommitted.”

Wood, an anthropologist and author of “A Bee in the Mouth: Anger in America Now,” says the new anger “often has the look-at-me character of performance art.” His book is a convincing, hence depressing, explanation of “anger chic” ” of why anger has become an all-purpose emotional stance. It has achieved prestige and become “a credential for group membership.” As a result, “Americans have been flattening their emotional range into an angry monotone.”

Wood notes that there is a “vagueness and elasticity of the grievances” that supposedly justify today’s almost exuberant anger. And anger is more pervasive than merely political grievances would explain. Today’s anger is a coping device for everyday life. It also is the defining attribute of an increasingly common personality type ” the person who “unless he is angry, feels he is nothing at all.”

That type, infatuated with anger, uses it to express identity. Anger as an expression of selfhood is its own vindication. Wood argues, however, that as anger becomes a gas polluting the social atmosphere, it becomes not a sign of personal uniqueness but of a herd impulse.

[…]

The politics of disdain ” e.g., Howard Dean’s judgment that Republicans are “brain dead” and “a lot of them never made an honest living in their lives” ” derails politics by defining opponents as beyond the reach of reason. The anger directed at Bush today, like that directed at Clinton during his presidency, luxuriates in its own vehemence.

Today, many people preen about their anger as a badge of authenticity: I snarl therefore I am. Such people make one’s blood boil.

Mwalimu Daudi made the following comment about this article :

“the author makes the point better than I ever could about the rise of ‘anger as virtue’ – a phenomenon that we see is driving the anti-war movement.”

I think there is something to that. Instead of learning to control their anger like adults, those in the anti-war movement are venting their anger in progressively dysfunctional ways. Just as a 2 year old will ratchet up the tantrum to greater and greater fury when you ignore her, so to the anti-war movement is ratcheting up their tantrum to greater levels of fury because Bush is ignoring their cries of “Bring home the troops.”
I would have to think that eventually all this anger has got to burn itself out after awhile. Maybe that’s why there aren’t as many protesters as the years progress. People can’t sustain a constant level of anger without feeling fatigued.