Are You Angry?
President Biden and the passions of the electorate
“If you are angry today, I’m here to tell you to be angry. I’m furious. I’m furious that yet more innocent lives were taken by gun violence.”
- Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, in the wake of the July 4 mass murder at a Highland Park Independence Day parade.
Anger is potent. It can be a tool for good and for evil. It can lead to progress, and it can pave a spiraling path to the breakdown of society.
How leaders deal with anger — their own and the population’s at large — has helped shape the course of human history. Anger can be stoked, and it can be quelled; it can be channeled, and it can burst forth uncontrollably. It can be marshaled to fix our problems, or it can be weaponized toward explosive violence and destruction.
We live in angry times. And this fervor is tearing at our national fabric. It cannot be ignored and explained away. It and its root causes must be confronted.
Much has been written about the anger Donald Trump tapped into and amplified in his rise to the presidency. The propaganda and lies that Fox News and other right-wing media outlets spew forth are meant to keep viewers engaged through anger. Much has been made of the grievances, real and imagined, of Trump voters who say they have been left behind. Of course, we should never overlook the long shadow race continues to play in deepening the societal fissures that have been ripe for exploitation.
But anger is not limited to one side of our political divide. And I don’t think the role it has played in the forces opposing Trump and the broader Republican movement has received enough attention, although that is starting to change.
In electing Joe Biden to the presidency, America chose in overwhelming numbers a man whose political identity is the antithesis of a hothead. Here is a man who has faced unspeakable personal tragedies and maintained, at least in his public persona, a seemingly unquenchable optimism.
For all the differences between our current president and the man with whom he served as vice president, both President Biden and President Obama have been seen as steadying figures whose natural instinct is to calm rather than enrage. And to calm is a critical role of a president — except when anger is required. It is a delicate balance, but one that is necessary for both the governance of the nation and a president’s personal political fate.
A large swath of the electorate hoped that after the chaotic presidency of Donald Trump, America could return to a more tranquil path. To be sure, a deep current of anger has remained on the political left at myriad social ills — from racial injustice to income inequality to the assault on our democracy. This is natural and important. But at the political process level, there was hope among many Democrats and their supporters that with congressional majorities — desperately slim as they may have been — and the presidency, progress could be possible.
We don’t need to rehash in detail all that has transpired since Election Day 2020. It’s enough to say that whatever anger existed on the political left a few years ago has only magnified, and in recent weeks it has exploded in intensity, driven by still more mass shootings, grim revelations about the insurrection, and the Supreme Court's multiple extremist rulings, including throwing out the constitutional protections for women to determine the fate of their own bodies.
Naturally, much of the fury has been directed at the justices and other Republican politicians who are the lead actors of regression. There has also been ongoing fury at Democratic Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema for refusing to get rid of the filibuster for voting rights, gun regulations, or abortion rights. But increasingly, that ire has also been directed at President Biden, members of his administration, and other senior Democratic leaders in the House and Senate.
The politically savvy understand that there is little President Biden can do legislatively with the current membership of the Senate. But there is a general sense that he is failing to grasp the urgency and desperation of the moment. In short, why isn’t he angrier? With so much at stake, with such intransigence on the part of the Republicans, with the justices taking away existing rights, with an anti-democratic movement swelling at the state level, why doesn’t President Biden sound like Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, whose quote began this post?
I suspect that for many Democrats, it feels as if the president isn’t hearing them. It’s not like the anger is hidden from view or wasn’t predictable.
We have written many times in this forum about the headwinds Democrats face in the midterm elections, but we have also said that a mobilized response to outrages such as the abortion ruling can shuffle the dynamics. In this formulation, anger is the motivating force that allows the party to potentially hold the House and gain seats in the Senate, as improbable as that outcome might seem at the moment.
Are President Biden and other Democratic leaders out of step with where a large part of the country is? Will this tone doom the party’s chances in November? Or, as many of their supporters suggest, is this Democratic infighting and criticism counterproductive?
Perhaps Biden will grow angrier in his statements, especially as the criticism intensifies and the midterms draw near. Perhaps he will stand back and let the candidates on the ballot run on anger, including, if necessary, anger at him for not doing enough.
In the end, the only long-term salve is for there to be results. Action can quench anger. That requires political power. And that will mean winning elections. At this point, it seems to many that harnessing Democratic anger is the party’s best chance at beating the odds.
Are you angry? Do you think that anger should direct the Democrats' election efforts? Do you wish the president and others were angrier? Or do you think that there is enough anger out there and so a calm demeanor is the best response to holding the nation together on a road to progress?
In the past two years...
Republicans have taken away a woman’s right to choose by appointing 3 extremely conservative justices to the Supreme Court (Roe vs. Wade).
Republicans have taken away the constitutional separation of church and state, thereby taking money away from public schools and giving it to religious schools
Republicans have taken away our Environmental Protection Agency's duty to protect our climate and our future by limiting its ability to control the production of coal-based energy
Republicans have created a government where the majority no longer wins elections, the minority now rules due to Gerrymandering and interfering with voting rights.
Republicans have made it possible to carry a concealed weapon virtually anywhere...schools, churches, public events...what could go wrong?
Republicans have supported a corrupt, and perhaps criminal president (Trump) who seriously threatened our election process by staging, on Jan. 6, 2021 an attempted overthrow of the United States Govt..
If these issues are important to you, please vote all Republicans who have supported them out of office.
I’m angry and I’m frightened. I’m angry at every republican currently in Congress—especially Mitch McConnell. Why? Because every one of them has made it crystal clear they’re not in Congress to govern in the best interests of the American people, they’re in Congress for the power, prestige and self-enrichment opportunities.
Every republican in Congress has had multiple opportunities to display compassion for their constituents and the American people, and at every such opportunity they failed. There’s no other way we can possibly come to a different conclusion when they’ve had many chances to do the right thing by voting to implement serious gun control laws and they failed miserably every time for all to see.
Frankly, the Second amendment is meaningless. I guarantee the men who wrote our Constitution never in their wildest dreams could have envisioned the mass murder of young children in schools, worshipers in in their sanctuary or families at a Fourth of July parade. Every other paragraph and amendment in our Constitution is constructed in a way that lends itself to wise and compassionate interpretation over time as our American culture evolved. Other than the 2nd amendment, our Constitution is a phenomenal
governing document.
I’m also angry at people who demand that President Biden do “something” as if he’s a king or a dictator. If they don’t care enough to figure out how our government works, they have no right to fault the administration…republican or democrat.
Aside from being angry, what’s frightening me are the 5 extremists on the Supreme Court. They’ve deliberately ignored over 200 years of American legal doctrine in their zeal to force tragedy, cruelty and hardship on American families by overturning Roe. There’s no excuse for it. What that means is this Court cannot be relied upon to issue decisions consistent with our founding document and and two hundred years of legal precedent. People in every modern society and culture on earth must be able to rely on the law, whether it’s case law or codified law. If we can’t do that, it inevitably results in tremendous instability as a nation.
In fact the Talmud states that no law should be passed that the majority of the people cannot endure. I believe the Supreme Court's overthrow of Roe v. Wade is something the majority of us cannot endure. Which leads me to my next point—much of the cruelty and intolerance we are witnessing is being driven by religious zealots. Those fanatics are exactly why the 1st amendment is about freedom of religion. From what I’ve been able to observe, the 1st amendment is in jeopardy for, I think, the first time in American history.
From all I’ve read and observed, our country is in very serious jeopardy and not just domestically. Trump was & is Putin’s pawn. Putin has made a concerted effort and spent a lot of money for the specific purpose of destabilizing America. If Trump had won the 2020 election he wouldn’t have rallied NATO to defend Ukraine like President Biden did. Furthermore, if Putin decided to occupy Poland after subduing Ukraine, Trump wouldn’t have interfered. In fact I recently read that Putin considers America a “back door” to Europe and Brexit was an extremist manipulation to weaken the UK.
It’s not too late to fix most of these issues. But the only way to do it is to vote more democrats into Congress, especially democratic senators.
If that doesn’t happen…