There is another way to consider what moves something. Not why does it move, but how. An analogy might help us think about cause differently.

Have you ever laid awake at night and perseverated over something? Not just one thing but many, like an unbroken stream of worries? People who struggle with generalized anxiety (like me) may recognize at once what I mean. There comes a point when you realize the worry is not exactly about anything. It's projected onto things, as if a thing is the cause—a reason to worry. When really, the anxiety is an energetic arousal in search of an outlet, frantic for a way to vent, and the thing is providing that—an excuse to worry. A narrative, or a cover story.

It's a different way to think about the relationship between content and feeling. Does content drive anxiety, or does anxiety rove for justifying content? It's another explanation of cause.

In Part II, we observed that the latter—feeling on the prowl for content—best describes New Populist anger. Aggrieved entitlement is the primary agenda, and the point is hyper-arousal—to stay injured, agitated, on the verge of provocation and itching for the next target. Content awaits assignment, I said. Anger before content, not the reverse.

Political economist Will Davies calls this trigger-happy rage “fast anger.” Compared to “slow anger,” which builds over time as a considered and cumulative response, fast anger flashes as a physical reflex consumed by the immediate present. It is ‘hot-blooded’ or volatile, “automatic, pre-conscious … somatic, reactive and performative,” he says, prone to spiraling toward violence. This is the sort of anger by which anger management governs, lighting that short fuse of outrage again and again. The question is, where does all this excitability come from?

If New Populism consists mainly of a sensory signature, we need an account of cause that starts with feeling rather than explaining it by content. How is the sense of aggrieved entitlement activated, intensified, and distributed—in a word, energized?

New Populists call it a class feeling, and Chapter 11 suggests we are primed to believe this even when the evidence points elsewhere. To pick up the sensory trail, we must turn down the volume on what they say. Put aside cries of ‘class!’ and ponder how so many become enthralled with New Populism.