The politics of rage: Why refusal – not civility – moves history

From a Hall of Fame stage in New York to festival fields in Britain and clubs in Australia, artists are reviving a grammar of refusal. In an age of war, apartheid, and climate breakdown, civility is the alibi of the powerful. Rage can be an ethic.

We live in a time that praises “civility” while bombs fall on apartment blocks. The vocabulary of respectability – balance, nuance, the “responsible tone” – has become a force multiplier for the status quo. Against this, a counter-language is spreading through contemporary protest music: rage, not as nihilism, but as refusal.

When guitarist Tom Morello accepted Rage Against the Machine’s induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2023, he refused to treat the night as a museum exhibit. He turned the speech into a checklist for non-compliance: join a union; start an underground paper; follow conscience over orders; if you wanted to see Rage, form your own band and tell your truth. The rhetoric mattered less than its structure: imperative verbs, second-person address, a transfer of agency from the stage to the floor. This is rage as pedagogy.

Across the Anglophone world, artists are operationalising that pedagogy. In London, Bob Vylan’s punk-rap answers Britain’s colonial amnesia with a blunt refrain – “We live here” – and desecrates imperial icons on principle. Hyphen, a British South Asian rapper who performs with hardcore energy, refuses the scapegoating of refugees with a chant made for the square: “Hate yachts, not dinghies”. In Australia, Mudrat turned a viral denunciation of Gaza’s destruction into a career of insurgent rap-metal, shouting down wealth worship and state violence with the zeal of a street preacher.

Predictably, institutions respond by pathologising anger. Outrage at a military’s conduct is labeled ‘hate’. Calls for boycott become ‘extremism’. The artist who names the atrocity is made the problem. This is not new. The powerful have always sought to turn conscience inward – to make us police our own indignation before it can become action. What is new is the sheer speed with which this disciplining circulates on platforms that monetise civility as ‘brand safety’.

Refusal interrupts that loop. It says: we will not perform politeness while people are buried under rubble; we will not feign balance between oppressor and oppressed; we will not accept that the only permissible emotions are sadness without blame and hope without teeth. Refusal is not the enemy of complexity. It is the condition under which complexity can be told without euphemism.

There is a global through-line here. In the United States, ‘order’ is invoked to justify violent policing. In Europe, ‘integration’ becomes a demand to disappear. In Palestine, ‘self-defense’ is stretched to cover collective punishment. In the Global South, ‘stability’ licenses austerity and extraction. The vocabulary changes; the function is the same: produce good subjects who will not say no.

Rage, in the hands of these artists, restores that no to public life. Not as random venting, but as an ethic. It is an insistence that feelings are evidence: anger is a judgment that something is wrong. It is a method for building a we – the chant that turns strangers into a crowd; the crowd that becomes a constituency. Reviews of recent shows say the same thing in different words: the room felt like therapy because the truth was finally allowed to be loud.

There are, of course, risks. Institutions will punish those who refuse. Visas are revoked. Tours are cancelled. Careers are threatened. But the counter-risk, the one we speak about less, is spiritual: the risk of becoming the well-behaved audience to our own dispossession. The risk of swapping a politics of liberation for a performance of reasonableness that moves nothing and saves no one.

The point is not that everyone should scream. The point is that civility has been weaponised to neutralise moral clarity. Rage can correct for that. It can focus a lens fattened by euphemism. It can keep the names of the dead from being swept into the passive voice. It can refuse the script in which the victims must first prove they are flawless before they are allowed to be mourned.

What follows from this is practical. If you have a boss, join a union. If you are a student, publish what your administration prefers to keep quiet. If you wear a uniform, follow conscience – not unlawful orders. If you are ‘just’ a person, refuse to be just a person: organise with others, divest where you can, boycott where you must, and defend the vulnerable even when the cameras move on.

Rage is not a politics by itself. It is a way of keeping the political nerve alive when euphemism and fear numb it. It is the sound of a crowd remembering that history doesn’t simply happen – it is made. In Gaza, in Ferguson, in Marseille, in Johannesburg, that lesson is paid for dearly. The least we can do is refuse to be polite about it.

Ali Ridha Khan is MA student in Political Studies at UWC, and held a Masters Fellowship at the CHR.