The Outrage Economy vs. the Heavy Heart
Why performative MAGA anger is hollow, why your discouragement is real, and what perseverance actually looks like from the inside.
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I want to be honest with you about something, because I think we’ve reached a point in this country where honesty about our inner lives is a form of resistance in itself.
Some mornings I wake up heavy. Not in a dramatic, movie-scene kind of way. Just heavy. I read the news, I scroll through what the latest hustler in a flag pin said on television, and I feel the weight of it settle somewhere. Some days that weight turns into anger. Some days it turns into sadness. And some days, if I’m being really honest, it turns into a quiet, gray resignation that whispers, what is the point.
If you’ve felt any of that, I want you to know you’re not broken. You’re paying attention.
I thought a lot about whether to write this, because there’s a script in politics and public life that says you’re supposed to be relentlessly hopeful, relentlessly on-message, relentlessly “fine.” And I’ve played that role plenty. But I don’t think it serves any of us anymore. I think what serves us is the truth, and the truth is that a lot of the people I trust most — the ones still in this fight for the long haul — are all quietly fighting their own private bouts with discouragement. And they keep showing up anyway.
When I was sitting on the January 6th Committee, I lived a version of this cycle almost daily.
There were days I was full of rage. Real rage. The kind where you sit in a hearing room listening to testimony about police officers being beaten with American flags and you can feel your jaw tightening and your heart pounding and you think, how is this a thing we are having to prove. In that hearing I showed emotion…my wife texted me a few seconds prior to my questions “Tell them they won.” That struck me, it did again just typing that. And I choked up. After all of that, the right went on TV to ridicule me, and to this day Trump calls me “cryin’ Adam.” The attack doesn’t bother me, what it says to our youth…”emotion is weakness”…does.
Then there were days of genuine optimism. Days where a witness said something that cut through, and I’d look around the room and think, we’re doing it. People are seeing it. History is going to remember this the way it actually happened. I’d leave the Capitol lighter than I came in.
And then there were the resignation days. The days I’d turn on a television and watch a well-paid personality on Fox News calmly, professionally lie about what I had just lived through. Not spin it. Not frame it sympathetically for their audience. Lie. And I’d feel something collapse in my chest, because you realize in those moments that there is an entire industry committed to rewriting the thing you sacrificed your career to document.
Rage. Optimism. Resignation. Sometimes all three before lunch.
I used to think the cycling itself was a weakness. That a stronger person would pick a lane and stay in it. I don’t think that anymore. I think the cycling is what it looks like to be a human being with a conscience living through a chapter of history that has no interest in making you feel okay.
Now contrast that with what I see from the loudest voices on the other side right now.
They have the presidency. They have majorities. They have entire networks built as extensions of their ideology. They have billionaires funding their infrastructure. They have, by any objective measure, won the round.
And they are still, every single day, furious. Still victims. Still under siege. Still warning their audiences that some shadowy “them” is about to take it all away.
I want you to really sit with that, because I think it’s one of the most revealing things about this era. If having the White House doesn’t make you smile — if controlling the House and the Senate and the courts doesn’t make you smile — if being the dominant cultural force in half the country doesn’t make you smile — then what, exactly, would?
Nothing would. That’s the answer. Nothing would, because the anger isn’t a response to conditions. The anger is the product. The grievance isn’t a symptom of losing. It’s the business model. There’s no amount of winning that satisfies it, because if it ever got satisfied, the whole operation would shut down.
That’s a tragic way to live. I mean that. I don’t say it to score a point. I look at some of these people and I genuinely feel something close to sadness for them, because a human being who cannot allow themselves a moment of gratitude, a moment of peace, a moment of enough — that’s a person who has traded their own inner life for a paycheck or a platform. And they will never get it back as long as they stay in that machine.
Here’s what I want you to hear, though, and this is the part I really need to be vulnerable about.
Being on the right side of this doesn’t make you immune to the hard days. It doesn’t. I left elected office and a lot of people assumed the weight would lift. It didn’t, not really. I still have mornings where I feel like I’m shouting into a canyon. I still have nights where I replay things I could have said better, fights I could have fought harder. I still have stretches where the volatility is daily — up at breakfast, down by dinner, up again by the time I put my head on the pillow.
Some of the articles I’ve written that people tell me meant the most to them were written on days I felt like giving up. Not “giving up” in any dark or dangerous way — I want to be clear about that — but giving up in the sense of what’s the point of saying this again, who is even listening. I wrote them anyway. I hit publish anyway. And then I’d get a message from a stranger or a friend I always assumed was on the other side, and it would remind me that the act of not going silent is, by itself, a contribution. You don’t have to feel heroic to do something that matters. You just have to do it.
So no, the point of this isn’t that we’re supposed to be stoic warriors who never falter. The point isn’t that real conviction looks like constant composure. The point isn’t that if you’re having a bad week, you’re failing the movement.
The point is the through line.
The through line is that over time — over weeks, over years, over the long arc of a life — you kept going. You had your rage days and your resignation days and your why-am-I-even-doing-this days. And you kept going. You let yourself feel it, and you didn’t let it end you, and when the cloud passed you got back up and did the next right thing. That is what perseverance actually looks like from the inside. It is not a straight line. It is a jagged, stubborn, human scribble that happens to trend forward.
Something I come back to a lot: we are lucky to have these emotions.
That sounds strange, I know. It feels like the anger and the sadness and the grief are the tax we pay for caring. And in a way, they are. But the alternative — the flat, grievance-powered performance I see from so many of the people dominating our politics right now — isn’t peace. It’s hollowness dressed up as strength. I’d rather feel it all. I’d rather wake up heavy some mornings because I love this country and I’m scared for it, than wake up numb and outraged on cue because that’s what the algorithm rewards.
Complicated emotions are not a bug of being a thoughtful citizen in a frightening time. They’re the receipt.
And we are in this together. If you are reading this and you’ve had a week where you couldn’t watch the news, where you snapped at someone you love, where you cried in your car, where you wondered if any of this matters — you are not alone and you are not weak. You are in a very large, very quiet company of people who have not stopped caring, and who are doing the unglamorous work of not letting their hearts harden.
That’s the work. That’s actually the work.
Feel the anger. Feel the sadness. Let yourself have a resignation day when you need one. Then come back tomorrow.
The through line is what saves us. The through line is us.
Keep going. I will too.
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