Dominant-Group Anger and the Grammar of Injustice

Anger is traditionally treated as an undesirable force in political debate and in politics more broadly. This scepticism reflects not only broader doubts about the role of emotions in public life, but also the presumption that anger is inherently destructive (e.g., Nussbaum). By contrast, recent philosophical defences of anger—most prominently Srinivasan’s—tend to legitimize it as a response to perceived injustice. Yet contemporary politics increasingly shows anger functioning as a major mobilizing force even among members of socially and politically dominant groups, particularly on the right (the events of January 6th provide a salient example). Crucially, these groups often justify their anger precisely by appealing to perceived injustice. This is paradoxical: although dominant actors are not typically the paradigmatic subjects of injustice, their self-understanding nevertheless mirrors the justificatory structure Srinivasan attributes to politically valuable anger. They present themselves as victims, frame social change as injury, and sometimes rhetorically appropriate the position of marginalized groups in order to claim entitlement to anger as a political power. This paper asks how we should approach dominant-group anger without dismissing it as illegitimate by stipulation. I argue that such dismissal is untenable for two reasons: not only is this anger politically real and experienced as anger, but it is also framed—often explicitly—through claims about justice and injustice. In this sense, dominant actors’ anger paradoxically mirrors the justificatory structure that Srinivasan takes to ground the political value of anger, even when their justice-claims are contestable. The upshot is that we cannot settle the legitimacy of such anger simply by appeal to the agents’ structural privilege; instead, the phenomenon forces a broader theoretical question: what counts as injustice, and how should conflicting claims to injustice be adjudicated? The paper thereby offers a framework for analysing and responding to this form of anger while opening further debate about justice, recognition, and the normative limits of political anger.