Politics & Power Quote by Frank Luntz

Luntz isn’t diagnosing emotions so much as diagnosing a market. As the GOP’s most famous message-tuner, he frames “anger” and its cousins as a kind of rhetorical product line: communicated, practiced, refined. That verb choice matters. Feelings aren’t spontaneous here; they’re cultivated as political technique. The line quietly shifts responsibility away from policy failures or structural incentives and onto a class of performers inside the party who have, in his telling, chosen negativity as a brand.

The list itself is doing work. “Anger, disappointment, regret, pain, sorrow, suffering” stacks synonyms the way an ad stacks features, building a drumbeat of grievance until it feels exhausting. By the time he lands on “That’s not what the American people want to hear,” he’s offering a classic Luntz move: translate ideology into audience research. “The American people” becomes a single focus group, invoked as an authority that can overrule factional warfare. It’s populism without the policy.

The subtext is a warning about diminishing returns. Post-Obama and especially post-Tea Party, Republican media ecosystems learned to monetize outrage; by the Trump era, outrage became both mobilizer and identity. Luntz is arguing that constant grievance is no longer persuasive to persuadables, and maybe not even sustainable for the base. Yet he sidesteps the uncomfortable truth: anger is often exactly what many voters do want to hear, because it validates their sense of status loss and provides a villain. His critique is less moral than strategic: tone down the suffering soundtrack, or you lose the room.