Politics & Power Quote by John Avlon

Avlon’s warning lands because it treats resentment not as a feeling but as a political technology: a fuel source that can be harvested, refined, and aimed. “Tap into” implies access and control, like drilling a well. Resentment is framed as something leaders don’t merely respond to; they activate it, channel it, and profit from its heat. The line’s blunt payoff - “it usually ends ugly” - resists the polite euphemisms of punditry. “Ugly” is deliberately unspecific: it covers everything from scorched civic trust and dehumanizing rhetoric to street-level intimidation and policy cruelty, without getting trapped in a single example.

The subtext is a critique of a recurring media-and-campaign cycle: stoke grievance, name enemies, promise restoration, and keep the audience in a constant state of agitated belonging. Resentment politics works because it offers moral clarity without demanding complexity. It turns status anxiety into a narrative of theft (“they took what’s yours”), and that story is easier to sell than a spreadsheet. It also flatters the audience by recasting frustration as righteousness.

Contextually, Avlon writes in the tradition of center-liberal alarm bells about demagogic impulses in American life, especially in an era where attention economies reward outrage. “Usually” is doing quiet, important work: it concedes the appeal can be real, the grievances sometimes legitimate, but insists the method is corrosive. The sentence is less a diagnosis of voters than an indictment of the entrepreneurs of anger who keep finding that resentment scales.