The politics of resentment offers both a genealogy a historical search for family resemblances that tracks our unfruitful resentments back to earlier rhetorics of victimage as employed by nixon for example and a sense of possibility politics need not be driven by a sense of victimage indeed even politics that champions the rights of downtrodden masses and the masses are nearly always downtrodden need not fester with resentment in a pragmatist vein engels urges us to look for ways . Indeed because the modern politics of resentment divides the demos in the interest of capital effectively paving the way for privatization deregulation corporate rights and personal versus social or collective responsibility and because the shooting occurred amid a deregulated gun market and slashed public funding for mental health care palins disavowal of any responsibility . The politics of resentment offers both a genealogy a historical search for family resemblances that tracks our unfruitful resentments back to earlier rhetorics of victimage as employed by nixon for example and a sense of possibility politics need not be driven by a sense of victimage. The politics of resentment a genealogy by jeremy engels in the days and weeks following the tragic 2011 shooting of nineteen arizonans including congresswoman gabrielle giffords there were a number of public discussions about the role that rhetoric might have played in this horrific event