For Rosa Larocca, a middle-aged headmistress who can switch from a warm smile to a stern look in seconds, it’s all about politics. “The people want a different type of republic and they want [French President Emmanuel] Macron to go,” she says. “What we want are referendums.”

For Shanoon Redovanc, a bespectacled retiree sporting a black woolen hat, it’s about living standards. “This is not just about Macron,” he insists. “I’ve spent two winters without heating because I am scared of the bill. What we all have in common is the search for a life with dignity.”

And for Karl, an unemployed musician with a bushy ginger beard, it’s about social justice. “Poor children ... end up poor. Rich children ... end up rich. The inequality is there,” he points out. “How can this stand when the national motto is ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’?”

Camped around small fires in the middle of a traffic circle in eastern France one damp afternoon last week, the gilets jaunes (yellow vest) protesters who have thrown the country into crisis voiced a dizzying variety of demands. Without leaders and difficult to engage in talks, the yellow vests nationwide are united by little more than anger that their needs and opinions have been ignored.

Stephane Mahe/Reuters

Protesters wearing yellow vests watch French President Emmanuel Macron on a TV screen in Bouguenais, France, on Dec. 10.

But that anger runs deep – fueled by the same sort of socioeconomic malaise that has driven social upheaval in the US and Britain. “It comes from a long way back,” says Christophe Guilluy, a social geographer who has tracked the sentiment for the past 20 years. “Macron is paying the price for 30 years of government inaction.”

The president sought on Monday evening to pacify rebellious spirits. In a televised address to the nation he announced an increase in the minimum wage and different forms of tax relief, and urged employers to pay a tax-free Christmas bonus. He also pledged “an unprecedented debate” on ways to improve French democracy and make government more responsive to public opinion.

It was not immediately clear what effect that would have on the protest movement. But the president acted on a broad front, in acknowledgement of the fact that the demonstrations that began as protests against a fuel tax hike have spread to challenge the very nature of French society.

‘The truth is that we are broken’

The protesters, who have occupied traffic circles across France and staged occasionally violent demonstrations for the past month, are not unlike US voters who support President Trump, or British citizens who voted for Brexit, suggests Mr. Guilluy, author of “Twilight of the Elites.”

They come mainly from the middle and lower classes of society and live in the countryside or smaller towns where jobs are scarce, far from economically dynamic cities. They are “members of a weakened middle class who no longer find their place, either economically or culturally, in society,” says Guilluy. “They are peripheral France.”

Because they live far from the cities, and are often seen as losers in the process of globalization, “they are off the radar for the media and the political elite,” he adds. “They are no longer the reference point for politicians that they used to be.”

Karen Norris/Staff

On the traffic circle in Kingersheim, a suburb in the industrial town of Mulhouse, Ms. Larocca knows what he means. “The French people are revolting because they don’t feel heard, considered, or respected,” she explains.

Segher Hamitouche, a tall, skinny man who has been out of work for the past five months, living on his wife’s disability benefit, shares that view. “The press makes us out to be the ones who break things,” he says. “The truth is that we are broken.”

It is no accident that the movement has adopted the yellow vests, the hi-visibility fluorescent yellow vests that all drivers must keep in their cars in case of accident. “The message is clear,” says Guilluy. “We are visible again. We exist.”

Elsewhere in the world, that cry has made itself heard at the ballot box. But in France it spilled over onto the streets because the normal democratic channels are not working, says Guy Groux, an expert on social movements at the research center of the Institute of Political Studies (IEP) in Paris.

“It is very worrying for democracy,” he says. “France is suffering a crisis of representation because the French do not trust the people who are meant to be representing them.”

Calls for radical change

France’s political parties are the least trusted organizations in the country, enjoying the confidence of only 9 percent of the population, according to the latest annual survey by the IEP research center. The media and trade unions are also at the bottom of the list, at 24 percent and 27 percent respectively.

In contrast, 72 percent of the French public supports the yellow vests according to a poll conducted last week for the BFM TV channel.

Only 16 percent of the French think that political leaders take their opinions into account, the IEP survey found. In contrast, 83 percent believe politicians ignore them – a figure that has remained essentially unchanged since the first such poll was conducted in 2008.

That translates into some radical proposals from some of those occupying the Kingersheim traffic circle. “We need to look at everything again from zero, starting with the constitution,” argues Huguette Specht, a waitress and mother of four. “We want a political program that puts the people first, where their point of view counts.”

Benoit Tessier/Reuters

A protester waves a French flag during clashes with police at a demonstration by the France’s ‘yellow vests’ only have one common message: anger at government movement in Paris on Dec. 8.

Rebuilding trust would likely take years. The government is hoping that more immediately achievable measures on the economic front will assuage the yellow vests’ anger.

Many of the protesters in Kingersheim focus their discontent on their purchasing power, eroded over a decade of stagnant wages for unskilled and semi-skilled workers.

Bérangère Gabriel is one of them. A 34-year-old mother, she has cycled through a series of temporary “McJobs” as a cleaning lady, a cashier, a babysitter, a waitress, and a landscaper. At the moment she is unemployed, raising a child on state benefits totaling 700 euros ($800) a month.

“I am skipping lunch so that my son can eat,” she says. “That is not normal.”

Karl, the musician, says he is 2,000 euros ($2,280) in debt, more than he can manage on his social security income of 800 euros ($912) a month. “My generation started from behind,” he says. “Our parents left us nothing; we came into nothing and fell straight into debt. Every month we are juggling our bills, deciding which to pay, which not to pay.”

In a country where the globalized capitalist system has made cities and most of their residents wealthier, the Kingersheim protesters represent the citizens who feel left out and ignored.

“In one sense, they have already won,” says Guilluy. “Nobody can say anymore that they are not there.”

Tim Ireland/AP

A pop-up shop organized by pro-Europe activists outside Parliament on Dec. 10 offers "Brexit Fudge," suggesting British Prime Minister Theresa May's solution for Brexit provided a half-baked outcome. Facing defeat, Ms. May delayed the vote on the withdrawal agreement.

They came on buses and trains, carrying British and English flags and homemade signs. Elderly veterans wore their uniforms and medals. Young men handed out political flyers.

As the crowd swelled under leaden skies, a wail of bagpipes signaled the start of the march. A march for Brexit – a clean break from the European Union – and against Prime Minister Theresa May and any other politician who dares to defy the 17.4 million Britons who voted in 2016 to leave. “Hard Brexit, Traitor May,” read one flag.

Sunday’s pro-Brexit march by UKIP, a populist anti-EU party, was modest in numbers, less than 5,000 at its peak, and easily outnumbered by a counter-protest by left-wing groups. But it was the first stirrings of what could be a broader backlash to an idea now gathering force in Britain: that the exit from the EU should be delayed or shelved altogether.

On Monday, an EU court ruled that Britain could reverse its withdrawal unilaterally before March 29, 2019, the date of its departure. Hours later, Ms. May abruptly postponed a critical vote due Tuesday on her proposal for leaving the EU after failing to persuade lawmakers to support it. She vowed to reopen talks with EU leaders, but didn’t set a deadline for another vote.

This political impasse has fueled cross-party calls for a second referendum as a way out.

That prospect is a red flag to the men and women who marched Sunday against a “Brexit Betrayal” that many say would be the final straw. Some invoked the yellow-vested rioters in France, echoing the warnings by May’s allies that Britain risks civil unrest if Brexit is cast aside.

Street battles a la française are not very British, says John Ware, a retired joiner from the Midlands who joined Sunday’s march. “We’re too polite,” he says. But such forbearance has its limits. “When pushed too far, we will react,” he says.

Anti-Islam agenda

Having faded away after the initial Brexit referendum, which fulfilled its mission, UKIP now has a cause to reanimate its base. Added to this combustible political mix is a tilt by UKIP toward an anti-Islam agenda under a new leader who has embraced far-right celebrities.

This time, UKIP is channeling a more overt nativism, akin to the far-right populist parties that have steadily gained power across Europe, from Sweden to Italy to Germany. And it has cast aside its fig-leaf of respectability by giving a platform to militant cultural warriors. It’s a move that may cost it support as it animates a more extreme base.

Matt Dunham/AP

Brexit supporters hold placards and protest across the street from the Houses of Parliament in London, Monday, Dec. 10, 2018.

“The march was an attempt to weaponize Brexit by the far-right in the UK,” says Nick Ryan of Hope Not Hate, an anti-racist monitoring group.

Even before Sunday’s rally, which featured Nazi-era signs and violent iconography, former UKIP leader Nigel Farage announced his resignation from the party he co-founded. Other UKIP members of the European parliament have followed suit.

This exodus underlines the tensions within UKIP and may sap its ability to harness broader pro-Brexit anger, says Robert Ford, a professor of politics at Manchester University who studies populist parties. Its decision to lurch rightwards appears poorly timed, he says.

“They’ve marginalized themselves really at the moment when they could have come back into the conversation,” he says.

Still, the febrile politics of Brexit, and the ruptures that any reversal could cause, make it impossible to write off UKIP or, potentially, another insurgent party. Mr. Farage reportedly has been in talks with anti-EU donors about setting up another party, possibly with defections from May’s right flank.

In the event of a halt to Brexit, “I think it’s plausible we’ll see a severe amping up of all the kinds of polarization we’ve seen in the last few years,” says Mr. Ford.

An opening for UKIP?

When Britain went to the polls last year, UKIP got less than 2 percent of votes, down from 13 percent in 2015, its high water mark. While its previous surge in the polls didn’t translate into seats in Parliament, due to Britain’s winner-take-all system, it rattled the center-right Conservative Party, whose then leader David Cameron promised to hold a referendum on EU membership.

Recent polls put UKIP closer to 8 percent. Should the main parties swing behind a second referendum on Brexit, UKIP is certain to spy an opening.

Writing in the pro-Brexit Sun tabloid newspaper last week, columnist Rod Liddle savaged the “treachery and betrayal” of May’s government. “The people of the UK will not forget the names of those who have sold us down the river. And one day, sure enough, we’ll have our revenge.”

How much such blood-curdling rhetoric is political theater is hard to gauge. But a reversal of Brexit would take Britain into uncharted waters.

Last week, May warned members opposed to the proposal that to hold another referendum after promising that the last one would be binding would be undemocratic.

“This House voted to give the decision to the British people and this House promised that we would honor their decision,” she said. “If we betray that promise, how can we expect them to trust us again?”

On Monday, amid jeers from opposition MPs, May again pushed back. “If you want a second referendum to overturn the first, be honest that this risks dividing the country again,” she said.

‘We’re not racists. It’s about control.’

Among the speakers at Sunday’s UKIP gathering was Tommy Robinson, a controversial anti-Islam activist with a criminal record. Some marchers said they didn’t agree with his inclusion and wanted to stick to defending Brexit, including stricter curbs on immigration.

“We’re not racists. It’s about control,” says Steve Burn, echoing a slogan of the Leave campaign. He complained that Mr. Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, was hijacking Brexit for his own campaign against Islam.

Brexit supporters bristle at claims that they were misled into voting to leave the EU against their economic interests. Much of the stronger support for Brexit comes from deprived districts in England and Wales that have suffered decades of deindustrialization and social dislocation.

Like others interviewed at Sunday’s march, Maureen McCoy said this was her first time at a political protest. That morning, she had joined 45 others from Wigan in northwest England on a five-hour bus ride to London. She carried a handmade sign, “This Stupid Northerner Knew What She Was Voting For.”

Pausing to find her friends in the crowd, she shook her head at May’s fitful negotiations. “We just need to get out. It was a straightforward in/out referendum,” she says.

Inside the Arrivals hall of Thessaloniki airport, a young man sits in the corner charging his phone, irritation flickering across his face.

It takes him hours to align battery power, internet connectivity, and the presence online of a smuggler.

While he waits, hundreds of people land in quick succession from German and other cities. For many Syrian refugees, these low-cost flights mark the end of their search for safety in Europe.

“I worry the smuggler will come online and I won’t catch him,” says Ahmad, a Syrian Kurd who just arrived from Bonn. He says he paid 1,500 euros to fly from Germany to Greece on fake Greek documents.

Ahmad, a pseudonym, fled to Istanbul in 2012 after a barrel bomb barely missed his house. In 2015, swept by the enthusiasm of Europe-bound cousins, he took the Balkan route to Germany. All he carried then, as now, was a backpack.

“Things didn’t work out for me,” he says, keeping an eye on airport police. “I was expected to work or study, but frankly I didn’t manage to do either.”

Since 2016, thousands of disappointed Syrian refugees have left Europe. No one has counted their exact numbers, but many of them are thought to have joined the 310,000 others who have returned home from Turkey and Lebanon this year to both government- and opposition-controlled areas.

Why would individuals who just a few years earlier were so keen on a new start in Europe, who shredded their savings, took on debt, and risked their lives on the Mediterranean and Balkan routes, now turn back? To find out, the Monitor spoke with Syrians in Berlin and Cottbus, Germany, and in Athens and Thessaloniki, Greece.

Time and time again, refugees cite delays in family reunification, limited job opportunities, feelings of isolation, and culture shock. Almost every one of the 100-plus Syrian refugees this reporter spoke to knew at least one friend or relative who had left Europe this year.

Left behind

Outside the Syrian Embassy in Berlin in October, Maryam is reeling with rage because her husband has taken off with two of their four children to the Syrian coastal city of Latakia. She tears up recounting how her son and daughter, only 8 and 5 years old, crossed the borders of Greece, Turkey, and Syria on foot.

“Men leave on their own or with their families because it takes years for papers to fall into place,” Maryam explains later while changing the diapers of her youngest. “The main reason people leave is that they don’t feel safe here. They feel uncertain about the future.”

Dominique Soguel

A Syrian mother and her child outside the Syrian Embassy in Berlin, Sept. 25, 2018.

The reasons for that are many. Most Syrians in Germany have received only one-year renewable temporary protection documents, rather than full refugee status that paves the way for permanent residency. Gains by the anti-immigrant party AfD and shifting government policies are another source of concern.

Syrians can also feel vulnerable within their homes, an unintended consequence of the way Western gender and parenting norms are presented in integration courses. Parents worry, for example, that authorities could take their children away if they use corporal punishment on them.

“The idea of losing your children, after everything else, is too much,” says Maryam.

The way back

The return route – based on interviews with Syrian refugees and smugglers – is well trodden. It often involves crossing the treacherous waters of the Evros, or Maritsa River, which forms a natural border between Turkey and Greece: wide and shallow in areas, narrow and choppy in others.

Every day, says a Greek bus driver in Thessaloniki, moments after a handful of Syrians had scrambled aboard, 12 to 15 refugees head in the direction of towns on the Turkish border.

The overall phenomenon is hard to measure. Germany does not track Syrians who go to Greece, which is within Europe's 26-nation Schengen free travel zone. Greek authorities primarily focus on refugees coming in to Europe. International aid workers say there is no clear picture or data on outgoing clandestine movements in the other direction.

But they are significant. “I crossed the river with nearly 200 people in January,” says Aboud, an illiterate 24-year-old who returned to Istanbul from Germany after struggling with language classes and everyday bureaucracy.

Refugees’ struggles

In interviews in Europe, Syrians from different regions, class backgrounds, and education levels stress their struggles to find work, housing and a sense of community. Some criticize outreach efforts focused on women and children, saying they upset traditional family dynamics and values.

In the northeastern German town of Cottbus, two Syrian fathers, Ali and Kamal, kill time at a drab mall. Both of them are natives of the northwestern Syrian town of Binnish. Ali says he has eight friends who have returned to the opposition-held enclave of Idlib. He often considers doing the same.

“Even if you are a prophet here and want to try to raise your child the right way, it is impossible,” Ali explains. “There are too many bad influences.”

Dominique Soguel

Cottbus, Germany, on September 26, 2018. Syrian refugees Ali and Kamal have found integrating and parenting in a new country a real challenge.

He casts a sharp glance at two German teenage girls who greet Syrian male friends with a hug. “You know how important the honor of our girls is to us,” he continues. “Here, by the age of 14, it is gone. I brought my children to save them from bombs, but I don't want them growing up here.”

That worldview is not representative of all Syrians. Kamel, a middle-aged man in the grip of nostalgia, says he wishes he could be “air-dropped” into Syria, but realizes that a brighter future for his children lies in Germany.

“I came here because I didn’t want my children enlisted to fight for anyone,” he says between cigarettes. “My son now speaks flawless German and he is an apprentice mechanic.”

By contrast, the two fathers barely speak 20 words of German between them after three years in the country.

Generational gap

The appetite for return is mixed among younger Syrians, reflecting different experiences of the conflict and the nature of their ties back home.

In a lively community center for refugees in Berlin, 20-year-old Anas says he would “go back tomorrow” if he could afford to. His mother and sister still live in Damascus, the Syrian capital. The fact that one of his friends returned the previous year without problems gives him hope. “Why should we deprive ourselves of our country just because he [President Bashar al-Assad] stays in power?”

Sitting next to him is Mohammed, who barely survived the siege of Eastern Ghouta and now uses an electric wheelchair. He cringes at such statements. For him, as for most Syrian refugees from hard-hit areas once held by the opposition, return is inconceivable while Mr. Assad is in charge.

“European governments want us to go back, and yes, some people do want to go back,” says Mohammed. “But I am staying put.”

The United Nations refugee agency UNHCR and the International Organization for Migration still deem Syria unsafe. Both are uneasy at the way some politicians in countries with large Syrian refugee populations are increasingly raising the issue of return, and reconstruction in Syria.

Dominique Soguel

Mohammed (l.) and Anas, Berlin, September 24, 2018: Two Syrian young men who live in Berlin and have sharply contrasting views on the notion of return. One fled to avoid conscription in the army and misses his mother in Damascus. The other also misses his family but having barely survived the siege on Eastern Ghouta considers return absolutely impossible as long as President Bashar al-Assad is in power.

State-sponsored return

In Germany, the extent of Syrians’ interest in return is being tested through low-key official return programs, an option offered at the federal and regional level. The Federal Office for Migration and Refugees reports that by August, 325 people had voluntarily traveled to Syria, excluding departures financed solely by regional authorities.

“Syrians were really happy when you handed them the tickets,” says Maik Schwiegershausen at the state office for refugee affairs in Berlin, which had offered a much warmer welcome than other parts of Germany and Europe. He notes that those returning are generally families rather than single men, who might risk forced military conscription or detention on arrival.

In a bid to push lucrative real estate projects, the Syrian government passed a decree in April that would allow it to expropriate property from owners who did not register the property in person within 30 days.

“The Syrians who are here want to return eventually,” Mr. Schwiegershausen says, and the decree prompted some to go back in order to safeguard their homes and land.

The notion of return tempts men like Atef, a former chauffeur from Damascus now living in Berlin, who battles depression and has almost no social contact outside his family. But he worries about how Syrian authorities would treat him.

 “If there was not this issue of fear, most Syrians would go back,” he says. “There is an element of fear because you don’t know how you will be received. The fact that you asked for asylum abroad could be held against you – you betrayed the nation.”

Those who act on the idea of return generally tell few people of their decision, keeping a low profile before and after the journey.

“For most people the decision to go back is a snap decision, a reaction to a particular experience, a problem with his wife, a negative encounter with neighbors or authorities,” says Khaled, a refrigerator repairman from Aleppo living in Berlin. “The decision is kept secret because it could create a problem for the person with authorities here and also there.”

“Everybody is stressed,” he adds, pointing to Germany’s new hard-line interior minister and noting that a ban on expulsions to Syria might expire at the end of this year.

In transit

The dynamics are different in Greece, where many Syrians are stuck because of tighter border controls. Here the government is sympathetic to refugees but strapped for cash. Few refugees interviewed in mainland Greece found culture shock a problem, but they are deeply uncertain about the future.

Greece is a transit country rather than a destination for migrants and the prospect of having to stay in the Mediterranean nation is a hard pill to swallow for traumatized Syrians. Those who accept the idea that reaching northern Europe will be financially or logistically impossible, either ask for asylum or return the way they came.

Before the war, Abdulrahman Abu Ayman made colorful sand bottles that he sold in Souq al-Qamaqiya in the Old City of Damascus. He was badly wounded when a tank shell collapsed his house in Ghouta, killing seven of his relatives.

He made 14 failed attempts to fly out of Athens to northern Europe with fraudulent documents. Deflated and defeated, he applied for asylum in Greece in April. He was shocked not to get an asylum hearing before mid-2020. That delay was the last straw, he said a few days before leaving for Turkey.

“Refugee status, recognition takes time,” says Luca Curci of UNHCR in Thessaloniki. “It is inevitable once you are uprooted: Uncertainty is the name of the game.”

Offer of amnesty

A Syrian government amnesty in October covering men who deserted the army or avoided military service has caught the attention of refugee draft dodgers.

Omar Omar, whose father runs a construction company near Damascus, hopes to benefit. When he was called to serve, his family spirited him out of the country. He crossed from Turkey to Greece on a rubber boat.

Dominique Soguel

Syrian young man who left his country to dodge military service but has had such a tough time in Greece - living for more than a year in a miserable island camp and now squatting in a building in Athens - that he has made plans to return to Syria. Photo taken on October 14, 2018 in Athens.

Now Omar is one of dozens of squatters living in an abandoned building in Athens. It’s a step up from the island camp where he spent more than a year in conditions so desperate he says he tried to commit suicide. He and two friends who reached Norway and Germany, along with another who stayed in Turkey, have made a pact to return to Syria this year.

“We’ve all been in Europe for years, unable to build a future,” he says. “We are better off going back, biting the bullet of military service and then starting our lives. We might serve and not survive, but at least at the end of the road, if we do survive, we have a life in our country.”

Bin Laden or Ali Baba

Back in Thessaloniki, two young men relax on a bench in what Syrians call “pigeon square.” They enjoy the Mediterranean breeze as they try to forget their sorrows, but technology keeps trauma within easy reach. 

Salih al Mashtoud opens his phone and scrolls through a series of grim photographs. The first batch captured the aftermath of an air strike that leveled his house. 

“You tell people a fraction of your story, and they don’t believe you,” says Mr. Mashtoud, pausing to look at a picture of his cousin’s mangled corpse. “If a Syrian has the good fortune to arrive in one piece in Europe, they don’t buy their story. Young men who left to avoid killing each other are treated like security threats.”

Both men report being at the receiving end of hostile remarks and actions. “The minute you have a beard, they call you Bin Laden or Ali Baba,” explains Bilal, a Palestinian Syrian. “If they don’t think we are terrorists, they take us for thieves.”

Mashtoud lives in a refugee camp and has an appointment with asylum authorities in 2020. He has no intention of waiting and “wasting another two years” of his life. He is preparing to head back to Syria.

Unlike Omar in Athens, Mashtoud has no confidence in government promises of amnesty. He knows a number of deserters who came forward and disappeared. But he wants to rejoin his mother who has been living on her own since 2016, when his father was detained.

“I am going to turn myself in to the regime,” he says. “If I make it, I make it. If I don’t, too bad. The dead are dead.”

Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/AP

Ben Bergquam, left, who supported Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh, argues Oct. 4 with protesters who opposed the nomination after allegations of sexual misconduct emerged. Half of Democrats say the Republican Party makes them ‘afraid,’ a Pew Survey reported. Nearly as many Republicans say the same of the Democratic Party.

Anger has long been seen as a particularly dangerous emotion.  

Poets and theologians in the West have long warned of anger’s social devastations. Homer sang of a rage “black and murderous, that cost the Greeks incalculable pain” in “The Iliad.” The Roman Stoic Seneca called anger a “hideous and wild” emotion that “drags the avenger to ruin with itself.” Roman Catholics have considered it one of the seven deadliest of sins.

Such traditional warnings are part of the reasons many Americans today feel a deep sense of unease, perceiving that the nation is now descending deeper into what many call a politics of rage. It threatens what observers have for centuries seen as America’s boundless optimism, its particular civic faith that the future can be better and that Americans have a duty to make it that way.

“For all her material comforts and ubiquitous technological devices, America is a profoundly uneasy place today,” says Jeff Deist, president of the Mises Institute, a libertarian think tank in Auburn, Ala. “This results directly from what we can only call the politicization of everything – from where you live and what kind of work you do to whom you date to whether you get married.”

Such a “politicization of everything” is a malady creating self-segregating, politically homogenous communities throughout the country, where even neighborhoods are becoming red or blue.

Politics has been straining more friendships and marriages, surveys say. Republican pollster Frank Luntz was troubled to find in one of his surveys exploring political dialogue that about a third of the 1,000 voters surveyed said they stopped talking to a friend or family member after the 2016 election. More than half of Democrats say the Republican Party makes them “afraid,” a Pew Survey reported in 2016. Nearly as many Republicans say the same of the Democratic Party.

Just two decades ago, the conservative thinker William Bennett wrote a cri de coeur about “The Death of Outrage” over President Bill Clinton’s sexual indiscretions. He argued that a culture of apathy and irony that ignores such immoral behavior would cut to the very fabric of democracy, a delicate political system that requires citizens with a sense of civic virtue.

It sounds almost quaint today, even as crime has now reached historic lows and the US economy remains the most stable and wealthy in the world.

So how have we come to this moment? One answer may lie in the difference between what could be called righteous anger and its self-righteous counterpart. Psychologists identify “narcissistic anger,” a response in which which every perceived slight or indignity is an outrage and an assault on an individual’s oversized sense of identity. 

Rough-and-tumble history

This is not to say that Americans before the 21st century were shy and slow to wrath. 

Historians note that America’s rough-and-tumble political traditions have long been replete with expressions of rage. Eruptions of political violence, too, are nothing new, being a feature of the American political experiment from the start.

Anger is a great motivator for all group movements, in fact. “We could talk about the beginning of the country and the anger that the early revolutionaries from Thomas Paine to even George Washington – who, at certain moments, mustered up, stirred up, and brought to the surface the anger simmering in the colonies,” says Nancy Koehn, a historian at Harvard Business School in Cambridge, Mass. 

Though complex and volatile, the human emotion of anger has been relatively easy to foment and exploit by those with political power, experts say. “But the politics of rage ultimately outstrips its instigators’ ability to control it,” says Professor Koehn. “Anger has been used across the political spectrum throughout history, but I think it’s been stirred up particularly vehemently in our present moment.”

And this present moment is in the midst of a digital revolution that has not only transformed human communications and the availability of information; it has also had a particular impact on the public nature of human rage. 

“What I think exacerbates anger, or at least is part of the heart of the problem and part of the complexity of the problem, is social media,” says Mark Smaller, past president of the American Psychoanalytic Association and an expert who studies online bullying and the rise of incivility. “People can respond through social media online on the one hand in a way that is sort of anonymous, and people can behave online in a way that they would not necessarily behave if they’re face to face with somebody.”

“And I think social media promotes a certain kind of group psychology that can easily promote or facilitate divisiveness,” Mr. Smaller says. 

Without the natural regulating effects of face-to-face encounters, the physical rush of unmediated fury can also easily become addictive, scholars say, drowning out the more demanding emotional responses of empathy and moral reflection.

Social media as ‘lighter fluid’

Anger has thus in many ways become an emotional contagion, polluting what is now a key part of the democratic public sphere, experts say. 

“We never had that particular lighter fluid of social media available as a conduit, as a flame creator, in the history of global politics,” says Koehn, author of “Forged in Crisis: The Power of Courageous Leadership in Turbulent Times.” “We’ve never seen that before, so it can spread so quickly, and the boundaries of decorum and acceptability are becoming so nonexistent.”

And social media companies and content providers, experts note, have created platforms in which outrage is good for business. 

“Social media systems – they gauge success simply by time-on-site,” says Tim Weninger, professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, who studies disinformation and fake news. “Their metrics don’t gauge time-on-site being happy or being altruistic or sharing only factual information; they just gauge time on site.”

Professor Weninger strongly disagrees that any of his friends or colleagues who work at social media companies would ever design a system that explicitly takes advantage of the addicting properties of outrage. 

“A site is supposed to be value neutral,” Weninger continues. “Or at least, the values here are ad revenues and time on site. So if a social media company is making a change in their platform, it’s most likely because they found out, hey, we can get another 30 seconds on the site from users, which means this much more revenue. That’s all they really care about.”

Social psychologists and political scientists make subtle distinctions in the ways human beings express anger. “Narcissistic rage” can be both addicting and all-consuming for an individual, and on social media, expressions of such rage can spread like a contagion. 

Still, when people can regulate and better control their expressions of anger, a “righteous anger” can be an appropriate response of an individual encountering injustice – the idea behind “Evil only triumphs when righteous people do nothing.” Such an anger is also both politically useful and often necessary to motivate a group with shared values and goals, scholars say.

The ancient thinker Aristotle, in fact, saw a place for anger in politics. “Anybody can become angry, that is easy,” he wrote in “The Art of Rhetoric.” “But to be angry with the right person, and to the right degree, and at the right time, and for the right purpose, and in the right way, that is not within everybody’s power, that is not easy.”

“Anger is a really interesting emotion,” says Alan Lambert, professor of psychology and brain sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, who studies anger in politics.

Unlike most other negative emotions, such as fear or sadness, which are part of the “avoidance center” in the brain, anger is an “approach” emotion that actually motivates people to act on and to try to fix perceived problems in their environments.

“A major finding across several decades of research in social science is that the most common and robust trigger of anger is perceived injustice,” says Professor Lambert. “It can sometimes trigger other emotions, but anger is always central to that kind of perception.”

Which makes it an effective “action-oriented” emotion, he says.

But the issue isn’t necessarily the kind of anger rooted in righteous indignation against injustice, but the explosive expression of “narcissistic rage,” experts say.

"In a certain way, narcissistic rage is anger that is deregulated from a social context,” says Smaller, now a practicing therapist. “Now it’s personal, and transformed into a personal injury, which we call in our business a narcissistic injury.”

“And it’s often hard to solve that injury,” he continues. “So what we’re seeing today in political discourse, and in discourse amongst family members during Thanksgiving or over the holidays, is not just a different point of view, but how can you have that point of view and still value me?

“If you’re in the middle of a narcissistic rage kind of reaction, sometimes it feels like the only way I can express this rage is to make somebody feel the way I feel,” Smaller says. “In other words, the narcissistically injured person may want somebody else to feel that kind of pain or injury, too. And with the availability and access to guns, that rage can easily get transformed into potentially violent behavior. And, yeah, we’re living in very scary times because of that.”

Signs of optimism

Part of the solution, some observers say, is to re-cultivate the civic virtues that foster democratic debate, and a civility that tempers righteous anger and makes the addictive properties of narcissistic rage less acceptable in online public discourse.

“I think Trump’s election dealt a blow to American optimism, especially among baby boomers, ’60s veterans, and people who have attained influential positions in academia and the media, but it has not killed it among young people,” says Mark Naison, professor of African American studies and history at Fordham University.

“Many young activists, filled with a belief their generation can make a difference, have won electoral victories no one thought possible,” says Professor Naison, founder of the Bronx African American History Project, one of the largest community-based oral history projects in the US.  

True, there are many adult liberals who are filled with outrage. “But in New York City, the election victories of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Max Rose for Congress, and [others] – all of whom people thought were 100-to-1 shots against established candidates – shows a level of passion and energy among young people that can only be attributed to their optimism.” 

Naison also points to the energy and passion of the students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., who have been active in national gun control movements. And although anger played a large role in motivating voters in the 2018 election, as a record number of 126 women will take their seats in Congress next year, many of the movements behind them are filled with a sense of purpose and good old-fashioned American optimism. 

Others, however, worry that in the midst of such a moment of rage in American politics, the most successful public figures are those who most artfully can express and evoke human rage. Today there’s no one playing the role of a public “countervailing force” who provides a leadership rooted in optimism, says Koehn, the professor at Harvard Business School.

“In the past, there were people who were really preaching, literally preaching, about the dangers of anger, and offering another way to approach positive change,” she says, citing the ethos of the civil rights movement and the message of Martin Luther King Jr. and other leaders throughout history.  

“And from my vantage point,” Koehn says, “who is the force arguing now for calm, reason, forgiveness, nonviolence – you know, against the dangers of anger and mass outrage?” 

Whenever I return from visiting my family in Germany, colleagues and friends ask if things have changed. After a quarter of a century of traveling back and forth, I no longer flinch at the question. I’ve learned that my well-read friends are not caught in an equation I used to see play out in movies and in jokes: Germany equals Nazis equals Holocaust. They are avid listeners to news, readers of newspapers, reportage. What they want to know is whether the pictures on TV match what I saw when I was there. When I first lived in the United States their question meant this: Does the country look different to someone returning from abroad now that the Berlin Wall is down? Today they mean this: Does the country look different now that there are so many refugees?

Can you really tell the difference, they want to know, just walking down the street?

I tell them about black teenagers smiling and waving from bicycles as my mother slowly drives us past them on one-lane Black Forest roads, about cartwheeling children supervised by women in burqas in Wiesbaden’s stately central park. I tell them about untangling conversations in seven langua­ges as my train chugs up narrow mountain valleys to the town where my parents live. I tell them about riding the commuter rail through industrial cities along the Rhine, about how we pull into Ludwigshafen’s airy station hall.

Glass walls dome over the rails, allowing travelers on arriving trains a view of the city decelerating beyond. Passengers waiting on the platform spool by our windows as we slow; they reach for bags, hug relatives and friends. 

And then I hear yelling: blurred noise at first – anger, outrage rising to high pitch. Words peel off as we roll by: “We don’t want you here!”

In the split second when my window frames the source of the shouts, I see a man grab another’s sleeve. The man he grabs yanks his arm away and turns toward the train. Seconds later, doors swish open and rage pours in far down the corridor: “Go back to where you came from!”

A chorus of murmurs floats in with the shouts, surrounding, soothing, holding: “Calm down, calm down.”

A man, not young, not old, half-runs by my elbow and drops onto a seat two rows ahead of mine. Less than a second and he springs back to his feet, turns, sits back down facing me – no, not facing me: He’s facing the train’s corridor that extends behind me toward where he came in. Whites flash around his irises; his breath is heaving, heaving under his blue coat.

A woman – short, stout, gray-haired, bespectacled – follows on his trail and stops by his seat. She pats his wrist, white hand on brown skin: “I am so sorry,” she says. “Please, please don’t let it get to you.”

The panting man nods toward her, briefly. Does he understand? His gaze flits back down the train car where profanities rise and fall. She sighs and turns. My eyes follow her cranberry coat to where she came from. The train lurches, picks up speed. 

I twist my head, glancing over my shoulder and down the corridor. The woman remains standing, holding onto a metal pole for balance. Behind her, dozens of travelers have risen from their seats. They stand along the aisle casually, as though they’d meant to spend this leg of their journey standing anyway. They fill the gap between the rows of seats, blocking the source of curses from our view, buffering, holding space. 

They don’t talk; they don’t look at anyone. It’s as though they were simply dreaming out the windows where trees and power lines are swishing by.

“Yes,” I say. “Yes, things have changed.”

AP/file

Armenian volunteers are in a state of readiness in the separatist Nagorno-Karabakh region.

One rare tool in diplomacy is to not let diplomats play a leading role in resolving conflicts between nations. An alternative approach, known as “track II diplomacy,” entails informal contacts between individuals and groups such as academics, artists, athletes, or simply residents across a hostile border.

Such people-to-people exchanges can build up goodwill and trust. They are sometimes key in ending bullet-for-bullet exchanges.

The two Koreas are trying it. India and China, after a tense military standoff last year, are firming up plans for people-to-people contacts. Last month, 150 young people from Arab and European countries met in Qatar to find common ground on issues that divide their “civilizations.”

Now Armenia is exploring whether it can resolve a territorial dispute with Azerbaijan by using a “people-oriented” approach, according to the International Crisis Group (ICG). The two former Soviet states have been at odds since a war in the early 1990s over the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave and seven surrounding districts. Official distrust is high. Compromises seem illusive.

“We can change our approach,” one Armenian official told ICG. “Instead of discussing only political demands, we could begin to focus more on people and their needs, from two sides.”

What’s new in the conflict is that Armenia experienced a peaceful revolution last April that brought in a much more democratic government led by a journalist-turned-politician, Nikol Pashinyan.

The new prime minister is looking for creative ways to end a virtual state of war that holds back the economies of both countries. Many in his new government came out of civil society and have seen the power of grass-roots activism.

Since April, officials from both sides have made some contact. Their defense officials have restored lines of communication along the border. Their foreign ministers have met three times. But to break a diplomatic logjam, attitudes within each country need to shift.

Humanitarian gestures would help, starting with a release of prisoners or coordination on demining civilian areas near the front lines. Armenians could reach out to the Azerbaijanis displaced by the conflict.

As the long Israeli-Palestinian conflict shows, not all people-to-people contact or humanitarian gestures will lead to peace. Ethnic or religious identities that drive a conflict are not easily transcended by wider views of common interests and values. Yet the latest approach to the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict is worth watching.

Often it takes nonpolitical contact or humanitarian gestures between peoples for progress. As the late American journalist Edward R. Murrow stated, “The real link in the international exchange is the last three feet, which is bridged by personal contact, one person talking to another.” By tender acts, peace can arrive from the bottom up.