The Left’s strategy for covering Barack Obama’s failures, and sticking us with his disastrous Secretary of State as his successor, requires his friends to somehow smear public opposition as irrational “anger.”
So the Internet is now groaning beneath the weight of all the “angry Republican” articles. They’re usually pitched as denunciations of “Crazy Angry White Males,” although Juan Williams went in search of “Crazy Angry White Women” at The Hill on Monday:
The NBC News/Esquire magazine poll, conducted with Survey Monkey, found 54 percent of white Americans have been getting angrier over current events during the past year.
That is far higher than the 43 percent of Latinos and 33 percent of black Americans who say the last year of political, economic and cultural events have left them feeling angry. In fact, 73 percent of whites (compared to 66 percent of Hispanics and 56 percent of blacks) say they get angry “at least once per day.”
And the angriest white people are white women.
Fifty-eight percent of white women say they are angrier right now than a year ago. Only 51 percent of white men say the same thing, as do just 44 percent of non-white women and 32 percent of non-white men.
In political terms, the anger of white Republican women is at the heart of the finding that Republicans are far angrier about the nation’s direction than Democrats. Sixty-one percent of Republicans say they are in a political rage over current events as compared to 42 percent of Democrats.
Wow, that’s a lot of anger! I guess that explains why mobs of enraged white hausfraus have been conducting “mostly peaceful” demonstrations that shut down cities, invade private business operations, and often leave burned and looted stores in their wake. Oh, no, wait, that’s Democrat constituents—and their angry mobs are influential enough to explicitly control the behavior of both the Democrat “frontrunner” and the chumps pretending to run against her.
What is the Democrats’ latest gun control push but an expression of spittle-flecked anger against the growing concerns of of law-abiding gun owners? The point of Obama’s meaningless executive order political stunt was to throw out some bait, to goad defenders of gun rights and Constitutional order into responding—and then unleash his hate-mob supporters upon them. It was yet another performance of some of the angriest political theater ever written: You Gun Nuts Just Want Children to Die.
When Islamist terrorists pile up corpses on American soil, Democrats view it as an opportunity to vent their hatred of “Islamophobes” and to rail against the phantom bigots they imagine lurking behind every corner in heartland America.
As soon as news of the San Bernardino jihad attack broke, liberals tried to pin the crime on white guys, ideally pro-lifers. When the identity of the perpetrators became clear, they began broadcasting wall-to-wall denunciations of incipient “Islamophobia.” President Obama personally mocked everyone with reservations about bringing thousands of unvetted Syrian refugees into the country. Democrats are working to increase the Islamic vote so they worry less about the next terrorist attack than the vote-shrinking “backlash” that might follow. This is a pure expression of anger against middle America.
That whole “War on Women” act the Democrats ran in 2012 looked pretty angry, didn’t it? They orchestrated a coast-to-coast rage-out against the alleged misogynists who plotted to enslave women as baby factories and deny them “access” to contraceptives. Criticize the big-bucks abortion industry, even its most grotesque organ-harvesting subsidiaries, and the response will be not reasoned discourse, but blind fury.
A similar response awaits those who dissent from any liberal social policy, especially same-sex marriage. “Love wins!” cheering lasted a matter of hours, before it was quickly replaced by the politically useful orchestration of rage against anyone who dared to object or resist. Flash mobs instantly swarmed around business owners who didn’t toe the line. There was nothing but anger heard from the Left, for weeks on end.
Even left-wing economic policies are anger-based. (They sure as hell aren’t based on economic reality.) They constantly denounce all resistance to tax increases as selfish greed, and pitch their tax hikes as just desserts for those who have “exploited” the Little Guy, somehow to extract “unfair” profits.
Left-wing economic policy grabs the property of people who have committed no crime, so it is necessary to keep liberal voters whipped up into a constant rage against revenue targets lest their voters begin wondering exactly why politicians who create zero wealth should have the right to retroactively appropriate the earnings of people who did nothing wrong. Arguments for hiking the minimum wage are expressly based on the notion that private-sector exploiters will ruthlessly exploit the working man, unless benevolent government forces those fat-cats to pony up a “living wage.”
Liberals always want to portray their own anger as laudable “passion” that demonstrates how serious their grievances are, while the passions of their opponents are dismissed as irrational rage and hatred. In liberal mythology, people of pallor are too privileged to have any right to be angry. The Left thinks one of the primary purposes of government is punishing and looting the people who have benefited “unfairly” from vaguely-defined “privilege,” and transferring their wealth to the more deserving constituents of the Democrat Party. The people who get the fuzzy end of the lollipop in this arrangement are not allowed to be angry about their unfair treatment.
This highlights one of the most important differences between conservative and liberal anger: conservatives are angry at the government, while liberals are angry at the American people. Liberals think the government is the embodiment of virtue, the avatar of public will—“another name for the things we all do together,” as one of their insipid slogans puts it. The State is God, and left-wing politicians are the Clergy. It is sinful to be angry at God.
It’s also rather dangerous to be angry at the progressives’ God, because the state can hit back pretty hard.
But faceless and voiceless people, on the other hand, are easy to get angry at, especially if they’ve been intimidated out of political organization to make their voices heard, and because the mainstream media despises them.
That’s what this liberal denunciation of conservative and populist “anger” is really all about—threatening and stigmatizing the adversaries of collectivism to prevent pushback.
The fairy-tale model of collectivist government has the people coming together and deciding on wise courses of action. What really happens is that the power-hungry Left seizes what it desires, breaking Constitutional law as necessary, and then dares the people to push back. It’s not about persuading majorities to support good ideas; it’s about adding another 100,000 pages of bad ideas to the books and challenging dissenters to assemble the super-majorities needed to repeal them.
It takes a very high level of organization and sustained political energy to push back against the Leviathan State. Look at ObamaCare: a disastrous scheme shoved through Congress in a midnight vote, with much of the law unwritten and almost all of it unread, but even after years of expensive and embarrassing failure, it will take the greatest political battle of our generation to repeal it.
Only a passionate electorate can hope to win such a battle against the State, its economic dependents, its pet media, and its extremely wealthy “partners.”
But if taxpayers can be made to view their justified passion and disgust—their determination to assert their rights, defend their Constitution, and demand value for money from the massive dumpster fire burning along the Potomac—as illegitimate and sinful “anger,” they’ll be easy prey for the government-defending forces arrayed against them.
What rational person wouldn’t be angry at the billions wasted on disasters like ObamaCare, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and Obama’s “green energy” boondoggles, all of them perpetrated without a shred of accountability? Why shouldn’t we be angry at people like Hillary Clinton, selling political influence to amass titanic fortunes, while the rest of us languish in a low-growth economy whose rotten stink is hidden with cooked government reports?
Why wouldn’t Republican voters be angry at a GOP leadership that squanders historic congressional victories, passively agreeing with Obama’s argument that Congress is irrelevant when a Democrat holds the White House? How can well-meaning, law-abiding, productive people suffer years of slander and abuse from the Beltway-media complex without feeling a bit of resentment, especially when the power of the State is deployed to punish them, based on unfair caricatures cooked up by people who hate them?
Those good people have been effectively told they have no voice in politics, no legitimate way to express their values or address their issues. Coercive totalitarian politics tend to bottle up a lot of rage. Sooner or later, the cork pops.
If you’re not angry about getting robbed, you are doomed to be robbed forever. The great threat to Democrats, and their GOP Establishment enablers is that the anger surging against them from coast to coast in 2016 is entirely rational, perfectly justified, and obviously necessary.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.