What is the root of many contemporary Republicans’ anger?
Between Donald Trump’s brazen rage and Mitch McConnell’s chronic dyspepsia, Marjory Taylor Green, Jim Jordan, Matt Gaetz, Josh Hawley, Steve Bannon, Alex Jones, and Tucker Carlson pride themselves in mean, irrational, rightwing, rants. As the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. posited regarding Governor George Wallace, their “lips dripping with words of interposition and vilification.”
Anger is the child of fear, fear the child of ignorance, ergo, anger is the grandchild of ignorance. Ignorance not in the pejorative, demeaning sense, but by definition, “lack of knowledge, education, or awareness.” (Merriam-Webster)
Given broad and distinct reservations regarding the trustworthiness of our cohort, ignorance around folks who do not appear, speak, behave, or believe as we do, fear of strangers, is rational. Out of ignorance regarding any- and everyone who does not appear, speak, believe, or behave as they do, many Republicans today seem to assume all strangers necessarily harbor malevolent intentions and must be feared! Then anger!
Today’s Republicans’ anger is rooted in ignorance of the fact they cannot turn back the clock, they cannot roll back the calendar. I have written,
“In the Dangerous Case of Donald Trump a woman is succinct, ‘I want my country back!’ American history is a relentless parade. Which star-spangled float or marching band, which ‘country,’ would our fearful lady have ‘back’? Thirty, fifty, a hundred years, 1776, 1492? Did the folks who met Columbus want their country back?”
In penning “We the People,”the Founding Fathers seemed to include all inhabitants of America. On examination, they appear not to have had all the People in mind. They did not mean women, people of color, folks who were here before white men. For heavy lifting and cannon fodder, middle- and lower-class white males had to be included. But, power and privilege rested in early America’s White Male Gentry.
An hypothesis regarding the authors of the Constitution’s intent is implicit and arguable. Today’s Republicans’ position is explicit and beyond question! “The People” are native-born, white, Christians. Wokes, non-Christian whites, and the growing polyglot of mongrel races must subscribe to their band of Fascism, “Christian Nationalism!”
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