Trump’s America Unleashed: Exploring the Fury and Wrath

An unruly mob storms the U.S. Capitol, incited by the nation’s outgoing and now re-elected president. A lone gunman expresses his fury by killing health-insurance CEO Brian Thompson and receives applause on social media. These incidents are just a few examples of a surge in political violence.

U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren noted that Thompson’s assassination was a “gut reaction” to the “repugnant practices” within the nation’s health-care system, a reaction that should serve as a “caution” against pushing people too far. “Violence is never the solution,” she continued, “nor a justification for murder.” The immorality of murder had to be explicitly stated; it couldn’t be assumed.

Anger is rampant among us. Uncontrolled fury and violent outbursts characterize these troubled times and highlight the fractured state of our political community. This isn’t the first historical occurrence of political anger, making it crucial for us to understand the current madness for what it truly is.

What is this affliction?

Rage is a raw emotion—a toxic blend of frustration, fear, anger, and hatred that can lead to unrestrained violence. Anger overrides logic and focuses intensely on objects of hatred. It is more than just a personal anomaly; it’s a cultural phenomenon, a socio-political rupture of existing norms and limits, a tool of demagoguery, a catalyst for war propaganda, and a strategy for political movements that reject nonviolence. Once set free, rage seeks retribution through havoc and destruction.

Are we collectively heading towards a culture of hatred as we lean towards authoritarianism? Can we escape these grim times, this neurotic fixation on constructing a hate-driven scapegoat?

Samuel Wells, in his 2023 essay “The Emotion Blocking Peace,” vividly describes the lethal dynamics of rage. During the intoxicating moments of “righteous indignation,” when “a red fog descends,” we lose “all rational thought.” All sense of control is lost in “our rampant pursuit of destruction and revenge.” We convince ourselves that demolishing everything in our path will restore justice. Subtlety is missing from this narrative of justification; the crude story boils down to a “warlike shout”—a call to resolve every grievance by annihilating an enemy.

Rage carries a mythic weight of avenging injustice. The Erinyes were the avenging goddesses in ancient Greece, embodiments of righteous justice, also known as the Furies. Their lasting presence is a key expression of rage. “Among all the gods, monsters, and spirits,” Mike Greenburg points out, these goddesses of the underworld “with their particularly severe view of justice” were “among the most fearsome.” Their mission was to chase, punish, and torment wrongdoers until their deaths were agonizing, and then to continue their torment in the afterlife. Orestes, pursued for matricide, could only be saved from the Furies and acquitted by Athena’s command for a trial by a jury of twelve Athenian citizens. The Furies were mitigated by an early democratic act.

However, democracy itself falls victim to rage when anger, fueled by political leaders, becomes a pervasive political force. Political tolerance, a cornerstone of democratic society, gives way to a profound hostility between “us” and “them.” Rage undermines the citizens’ commitment to democratic principles and values (See Steven W. Webster, American Rage: How Anger Shapes Our Politics. Cambridge University Press, 2020; and also Michael A. Milburn and Sheree D. Conrad, Raised to Rage: The Politics of Anger and the Roots of Authoritarianism. MIT Press, 2016).

The mythic strength of righteous rage corrupts the quest for justice by resorting to means that distort stated goals. The rhetoric of revenge stirs up an authoritarian arrogance. Democratic values are degraded, and democratic practices are weakened. Discussion is stifled. Justice is tarnished. The greater good is sacrificed. The democratic state is lost. Violence prevails, barring divine intervention, deus ex machina.

What explains this malfunction?

The current demagogic climate reflects and intensifies deep tensions caused by economic displacement, demographic changes, and mass migration within a context of divisive new media that foster misinformation and create echo chambers. The country’s dwindling control over global order is mirrored domestically by the destabilization of its longstanding racial hierarchy. Trust in the system is pushed to its limits. For the disenfranchised public that this November re-elected an authoritarian demagogue to the White House, tearing down a failing establishment feels justified. Rage is the harmful product of systemic insecurity.

Anger now dominates American politics. This wasn’t always the case, nor did it emerge suddenly. The country has gradually shifted over decades, argues anthropologist Peter Wood (Wrath: America Enraged, Encounter Books, 2021), from a nation that valued self-restraint to one that depends on anger to exercise political power. However, to argue for a historical preference for self-control, Wood must ignore a history of national anger that includes, for instance, the anti-communist McCarthyism of the late 1940s and 1950s, the earlier Red Scare of 1917-1920, and multiple instances of Ku Klux Klan domestic terrorism in the 1860s, 1920s-30s, and 1950s-1960s against Black Americans and other minorities. Regrettably, Wood’s desire to celebrate American Greatness requires him to overlook these negative aspects of U.S. history.

Wood presents his narrative of civility’s current decline from the viewpoint of a scholar who sees the threat of righteous anger as emanating from the political left rather than the right. These are the barbarians, he believes, who use anger to seize power and corrupt American culture. Wood positions himself as a guardian of higher education because, he claims, the university is the source of nearly all detrimental ideas (such as critical race theory, white racism, climate alarmism, and gun control) that plague contemporary American culture. Anger is a dangerous tool of resistance, but in Wood’s view, it is justified to save the country and its civilization from the overt anger of progressive ideologues. They are the malignant force that provokes the justified wrath of ordinary Americans who feel silenced “in their own government” (p. vii). Echoing the interwar “conservative revolutionaries” who set the stage for fascism in 1930s Europe, Wood advocates for the defeat, and indeed the eradication, of progressivism in all its forms.

Here is wrath’s circular logic of rage upon rage, boldly laid out. Fury is acceptable in the service of the right cause, Wood insists, in response to the adversary’s perceived hostility. Those on the left, whom he accuses of taking sadistic pleasure in thwarting the popular will and harming the republic, deserve the wrath of the Furies. However, this harsh measure of justice is based on the problematic premise of an absolute distinction between good and evil, a judgment at odds with the ethos of contingency, fallibility, deliberation, and the tolerance of a broader, more nuanced perspective that is at the heart of any meaningful democracy.

Exploring the dimensions of social rage, sociologist Bonnie Berry notes that besides violence, it encompasses “selfishness, rudeness, short-sightedness, aggression, intolerance, and narrow-mindedness.” The expression of rage, “filled with absolutisms and oversimplifications,” is fraught with distortions and distractions that are irrelevant to addressing serious social issues. Demagoguery leads a disillusioned public to target scapegoats based on their nationality, race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion, and other markers of difference. This distraction from socially constructed enemies leaves the ultra-powerful in control and unaccountable. All of this makes social rage appear larger than it is, Berry argues. Its “vociferousness, exaggeration, loudness, and vivid imagery” are a form of “impression management” that makes it seem “pervasive and powerful”—and thus beyond resistance (Social Rage: Emotion and Cultural Conflict, Taylor and Francis, 1999, pp. x, 13-14).

Yet, questions persist: Are we about to collectively succumb to a culture of hatred as we incline toward authoritarianism? Can we find a way out of these dark times, out of this neurotic attachment to the hate-driven construction of a scapegoat enemy?

The country’s thin veneer of democracy has not withstood the surge of tyranny’s rage, a rage that has intensified.

These questions are better posed than answered by Willard Gaylin, who focuses on individual psychosis and paranoia but also highlights social conditions, economic factors, and religious and political institutions that more broadly cultivate and exploit rage. The real danger, Gaylin concludes, lies with those who “cynically manipulate and exploit” the suffering of individuals feeling “a sense of deprivation,” agitators who “organize and encourage hatred for their political ends” (Hatred: The Psychological Descent into Violence, Public Affairs, 2003, pp. 215-15, 239-40, 246-7).

Rage over a profound sense of loss can turn inward when people no longer recognize each other as such, when they cannot empathize across differences and divisions, do not identify with the Other, and choose to portray diversities in dehumanizing and demonizing terms to the point of losing sight of a shared humanity.

Domestic rage is similar to rage in international relations when the image of the enemy within mirrors the projected image of the foreign enemy as the savage, the barbarian, the source of trouble. The ancient Greeks protected their own city-states from civil war by dedicating temples and altars to the Furies, meaning that rage in difficult times was redirected toward foreign foes. Outsiders were depicted in a bestial manner that placed them beyond empathy. Yet, what may have preserved civility and contained rage in the ancient city-state does not hold in a disparate republic of over 300 million, where insiders are more easily marked as outsiders. As Rupert Brodersen suggests, resentment of the estranged Other produces rage without moral restraint or consideration—indeed, a sense of moral imperative in an aggressor’s pursuit of justice, which can “plunge entire communities into chaos” when the target of rage is viewed as “undeserving of moral consideration” (Emotional Motives in International Relations: Rage, Rancour and Revenge, Routledge, 2018, pp. 4-7, 37-40). A baseless internet rumor that Haitian immigrants “are eating the dogs … eating the cats … eating the pets” of Springfield, Ohio residents, repeated by Donald Trump in a presidential debate watched by 67 million viewers, was an unfounded lie, noted Politifact, that reinforced negative stereotypes and incited dozens of bomb threats, “stigmatizing the town and its residents in the name of campaign rage.”

Where does that leave us?

On one hand, the current rage promotes authoritarian oligarchy over democracy. On the other, it signals democracy’s failure. We are more accustomed to waging wars in the name of defending democracy than to enriching democratic culture. Rage is attuned to the culture of war, a culture that permeates and informs daily life in the U.S. and diminishes civic life. Trump’s first administration was a dire warning and a clear and present danger—a bleak reminder of what we have been before and should not become again—but a danger that mattered too little to too many people this past November. If there is a lesson to draw from the outcome of the 2024 general election, short of giving up on politics, it is the need to cultivate a thicker, stronger democratic character. The country’s thin veneer of democracy has not withstood the surge of tyranny’s rage, a rage that has intensified. Whether we can deepen the sources of authentic democratic citizenship in the face of four more years of a Trump presidency remains an open question.