The recent campaign to recall Wisconsin governor Scott Walker should teach people in Hawaii an essential lesson: anger works, and it works in a good way. To be more vital and consequently more democratic, Hawaii politics needs more anger because Hawaii’s problem is that people here are so disengaged from political life. Considering the past failures to engage people in politics in Hawaii, anger is definitely a good thing. Looking at Wisconsin helps us to understand why.

Anger increases political engagement. As Craig Gilbert, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s Washington, D.C. Bureau Chief, put it in his analysis of the emotional, contentious Wisconsin recall effort, “An angry citizen is an active citizen. That’s what pollsters believe. That’s what scholars have found. And that’s what 16 months of petitions, rallies and recalls suggest.” The research that Gilbert references shows that anger generates political involvement more than does any other emotion, including anxiety and enthusiasm.

Anger catalyzes people to think about the link between their own problems and the broader world. It has been a long time since large numbers of people in Hawaii were fully engaged in politics this way, maybe not since the late 1960s. (See Tom Coffman’s wonderful book To Catch a Wave for a vivid picture of what Hawaii political campaigns were like back then.)

The Differences Between Hawaii and Wisconsin and How These Differences Highlight the Need for More Anger

Wisconsin is politically ultra-competitive while Hawaii is about as non-competitive as a state gets. In Wisconsin, elections for governor and for every national office are regularly competitive. Not so in Hawaii. The Badger State electorate is close to equally divided between Democrats and Republicans while in Hawaii there are far more Democrats than Republicans. Control of the Wisconsin legislature regularly moves back and forth between the two parties, but never in Hawaii. Though in the recent past Wisconsin has had more Democratic than Republican governors, the present governor, Scott Walker, is an archconservative. President Barack Obama carried the state in 2008 and is likely to do so in 2012, yet in the 2010 Wisconsin U.S. Senate race a novice tea party Republican beat the incumbent and very liberal Democrat.

Competition in Hawaii? A little here, a little there. Right now there is a competitive race for Honolulu mayor, U.S. Senate, and one of our two congressional districts, but in the state’s only other congressional district the winner of the Democratic primary will win the general election by a virtual default. Hawaii state legislative races this year will be lopsided, as they have been in the past. The results will be the usual boatload of Democrats and kayak load of Republicans. In 2010, a great year for Republicans nationally, Hawaii Republicans did worse than ever.

At election time, especially presidential elections, Wisconsin is inundated with candidates. Presidential candidates never come to Hawaii. Maybe Hawaii gets a bigwig or two to speak in behalf of a candidate, but bigwig-wise, Wisconsin gets Mitt, Hawaii gets his son. Late in the 2004 Presidential race when a single, misguided poll actually showed that George Bush had a chance to carry Hawaii, Dick Cheney made a sudden, short, and previously unplanned visit here. The media here treated this quick meet and greet as if it was the Lincoln-Douglas debates.

And political ads? You think we are inundated in Hawaii with political ads? Check out Wisconsin. The number of Wisconsin ad buys makes Hawaii’s commercial television stations look like PBS.

Fewer contests go hand and hand with low voter turnout, so, not surprisingly, the two states differ most dramatically regarding voter turnout and political participation. Wisconsin politics, not just in the recall but also generally, is in Craig Gilbert’s words, “a participatory sport.” If Wisconsin politics is a sport, then by comparison people in Hawaii are couch potatoes. Wisconsin regularly is one of the highest voter turnout states in the nation. Hawaii is regularly near or at the bottom. Hawaii politics is a calm backwater. There are occasional ripples, but they don’t last.

The recent Walker recall was exceptional even by Wisconsin standards and makes the comparison between Hawaii and Wisconsin even starker. Gilbert describes this campaign as “the War for Wisconsin…a spectacular activist eruption featuring the largest protests since Vietnam, one of the biggest petition drives in election history and a recall movement without precedent in American history.” Voter turnout was extraordinary even for that state, especially in light of the fact that this was a special election where turnouts are typically very, very low. The recall turnout was far higher for this special election than Hawaii’s turnout for any elections.

Regarding other forms of engagement, one in five Wisconsin voters donated money to this campaign, far greater than the national average. Much is made about the huge amount of money that rich Walker supporters like the Koch brothers put into the campaign. But most of the 20 percent of the electorate who gave money were not rich, a bright light in the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent campaign finance decisions. One in six Wisconsinites attended a demonstration or rally, twice the percentage in 2012 and three times more than 2010.

Competition, participation, civic engagement, everyday people giving time and money to politics, these are all good, democratic things that Hawaii lacks.

Two-and-a-Half Cheers for Anger

Nick Valentino, whose research Gilbert discussed in his Wisconsin analysis, says, “If anger is a way to increase participation, then it is hard to argue that’s a universally bad thing.”

That is not a strong endorsement of the value of anger, but it is an endorsement. Craig Gilbert also gives anger two cheers. Gilbert shows that anger was the main driving force in making a very politically active citizenry even more politically active.

Both Valentino’s and Gilbert’s ambivalence is quite sensible. Events surrounding the Wisconsin recall show these risks. One small incident is particularly powerful because on the surface it seems so ordinary and non-political. Two days before June 6 recall election, there was a gas explosion at a Milwaukee home. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that five firefighters were injured in the blast. Normally this is a sad but routine story. Typically, reader comments about these stories praise the firefighters’ courage and express prayers for a speedy recovery. In this case, however, the comments turned into a nasty debate about public employees, the key issue in the recall.

“Two more FF’s [firefighters] on disability for how long?” A commentator on the fire story said. “They were doing the job that they get trained to do. They knew the risks and assume them when they take the job. Dozens of workers are killed every year. They don’t get to retire at 50 years of age or get disability for life or until they can collect over-inflated pensions.”

Responses to this were filled with rage. “Your level of classlessness and epic disregard for people other than those with your warped political beliefs is epic…. I pray for their quick recovery, you tool.” “Scott [Walker] wouldn’t give his life for his own family. He’d run with his tail between his legs.”

There is something uncomfortable and even creepy about those exchanges because they seem so excessive. What’s next, a national health-care debate over a city animal control officer who got bitten by a rabid dog? This exchange is about more than intense political differences. The exchanges reflect moral outrage, and moral issues are far more combustible and harder to handle. The exchange is unseemly because it sucks what are normally uncontroversial, non-political, uncontested issues into a high stakes political whirlwind.

In Hawaii the risk of excess is worth taking because what we have in this state is not political civility but rather political apathy and because other more decorous less partisan strategies to make people care have met with such little success. Voter turnout campaigns based on patriotism and civic responsibilities have not stemmed the tide of low voter turnout. As a rule, people don’t decide to participate in the political process engaged with the political process because some organization says it is civically responsible or because some rock star says that it is cool. They do so because they decide that there is a political problem affecting their lives and because they can easily register to vote. Thanks to a new law that makes online voter registration legal in Hawaii, turnout should increase a bit over the next few years, but that is just a tiny part of a solution to the much bigger problem of political disengagement.

Anger is the prescription drug of democratic politics. You need it to get better, but there may be some dangerous side effects. So can we have a more vibrant politics in Hawaii without these side effects? Not really, but that’s democracy. Even when it is working well, democracy is an emotional business. It is time to second that emotion.

About the author: Neal Milner is Professor of Political Science at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He is also a political analyst. He headed the UH Manoa Ombuds Office from its beginning in 2006 until the office was shut down in 2009.