Outrage Is Not Governance
by: Jessie Simmons
Category: Social Reflection, Opinion
There is a growing sense that something in this country is off, not just politically, but emotionally and institutionally. We are angrier than we have ever been, quicker to assume intent, and far less willing to sit with uncertainty. Outrage has become the default posture, and while it often comes from a genuine place of concern or grief, it is increasingly driving us toward conclusions before facts, and escalation before understanding. The demand today is not just for accountability, but for immediacy. We want answers now, judgments now, and resolution now, even when the systems designed to produce legitimate outcomes are intentionally slow. That impatience is beginning to matter more than we want to admit.
Outrage, by itself, does not govern. It pressures, it signals, and it mobilizes, but it does not investigate, legislate, or adjudicate. Historically, outrage served as a catalyst that pushed institutions to act, then receded while those institutions did their work. Today, outrage rarely recedes. It lingers, compounds, and hardens into identity. When every event is framed as an existential crisis, process begins to look like obstruction rather than protection. Courts are tolerated only when they validate our conclusions. Investigations are trusted only when they confirm what we already believe. Anything slower than our emotional timeline is treated as illegitimate.
This is where the real danger lies. The rule of law is not designed to move at the speed of social media or cable news. It is designed to move deliberately, because legitimacy depends on accuracy, due process, and restraint. When we lose patience for that, we do not strengthen accountability, we weaken it. We start substituting rhetoric for evidence and certainty for proof. Words like murder, fascism, occupation, and enemy stop being legal or descriptive terms and become tools of escalation. Once that happens, backing down feels like surrender, even when facts evolve.
What makes this moment especially difficult is that much of the system is still functioning, even as public trust erodes. Federal courts are still asserting their authority. Judges are still issuing orders that bind administrations. Separation of powers still exists, strained but intact. Agencies still operate within statutory frameworks created by Congress. States still do not have preemption over federal law. These are not signs of collapse. They are signs of institutions holding under stress. But those quiet functions do not compete well with outrage, because they are not emotionally satisfying and they do not deliver instant resolution.
Congress, meanwhile, remains the clearest institutional failure in the room. Decades of inaction on major issues like immigration have left the executive branch operating with blunt tools built long ago. Each administration uses those tools differently, but the architecture itself is largely unchanged. When enforcement produces conflict, tragedy, or controversy, outrage is directed everywhere except at the body that refused to modernize the system. That misdirection feels emotionally rewarding, but it does nothing to reduce harm or prevent recurrence.
There is also a personal cost to all of this that we rarely acknowledge. Constant outrage is physiologically taxing. It keeps people in a permanent state of threat response. For those with trauma histories, it can be destabilizing and harmful. Choosing not to live in that state is not apathy or indifference. It is self regulation. It is a refusal to let one’s nervous system be weaponized by rhetoric that demands perpetual activation as proof of caring.
We have not lost the ability to govern, but we are testing the limits of our tolerance for how governance actually works. We are relying on institutional muscle memory built over generations while eroding the cultural norms that allow it to function. We are confusing intensity with legitimacy and immediacy with justice. Outrage for the sake of outrage solves nothing. Accountability requires facts. Reform requires legislation. Legitimacy requires process. If we abandon those in favor of emotional certainty, we will eventually discover what we gave up only after it is gone.
Choosing calm, measured analysis in an angry moment is not disengagement. It is a deliberate commitment to a system that only works if enough people are willing to defend it when it is slow, uncomfortable, and unsatisfying. That may not be the loudest stance, but it is the one that keeps a country functioning.
