Peter Wood sounds like he's written quite an interesting book, titled, A Bee in the Mouth: Anger in America Now. In his review, Stanley Kurtz writes:

Wood brings the detached eye of a professional anthropologist to our freshest political controversies — which only insures that everyone-and-his-brother is going to want to venture a second opinion on this hot-off-the-presses history of the present. As Wood tells it, the formative political moment for New Anger on the Left was the 1968 Democratic National Convention. It took till the Clinton years for New Anger to bleed over to the Right. Yet Wood argues that the Left is far and away angrier than the Right nowadays, the turning point being Jonathan Chait’s 2003 “I hate Bush” essay in The New Republic. (Wood’s analysis of Chait’s piece is another don’t-miss moment of the book.) As noted, Wood says the Right is angry, too. Yet, as Wood puts it, political anger on the Right is often anger with a guilty conscience, “anger that would prefer to be old anger, but can’t quite recover the old restraint.” The Left’s New Anger turns out to be infectious, at times goading the Right into a New Anger-style counter-reaction. (For a textbook case of New Anger on the Left infecting the Right, see Wood’s account of that original angry secular leftist, Madalyn Murray O’Hair.)

There are many reasons why anger on the Left and the Right lacks symmetry. “To be deprived of that which we are possessed of is a greater evil than to be disappointed of what we have only the expectation.” So wrote Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, and Smith’s observation applies as well to cultural prestige as to property. The Left has seen its taken-for-granted cultural monopoly threatened, of late, while the right, after decades of cultural decline, has merely suffered the frustration of its hope for a broader traditionalist restoration. So, over and above any character differences between liberals and conservatives, the freshness of the threat to liberals’ self-perceived “right to rule” evokes proportionally more deafening howls of rage. Wood’s careful dissection of such Left/Right differences is one of the best parts of the book.