On Freedom and MAGA Anger

In a note recently entered in these pages, I referred to former President Donald Trump’s defeat of former SC Gov. and U.S. U.N. Amb. Nikki Haley in Ms. Haley’s home state of South Carolina, and indicated that I was struck by two findings in CNN’s South Carolina exit polling, the first being that the vast majority of South Carolina Trump voters believe, despite all objective evidence to the contrary, that Mr. Trump won the 2020 presidential election.

The second finding seems of equal concern.  CNN found that 59% of Mr. Trump’s South Carolina voters characterized their mood as, “Angry.”  I’ve pondered:  What makes them so angry?  What gives them leave to be angry?

Are they moved by religious fervor – is it that they consider the liberal and progressive agenda (which advocates for abortion rights, transgender rights, same sex marriage, and the like) a cause for righteous anger, justifying a hellfire response?  Call me a cynic, but the majority of the MAGAs coming out of Trump rallies, bedecked in red MAGA hats with Mr. Trump’s picture on their chests and American flag pants covering their bottoms, don’t look like their next stop is a Christian prayer service.  And for those who are sincerely inflamed by religious zeal:  I would suggest, as a trying but frequently failing Christian  – and here, genuinely respectfully — that no human can truly discern what God wants – save, perhaps, that He (please excuse the use of the male pronoun to refer to a genderless being) doesn’t want His children judging each other in His name.  (“Do not judge, that you may not be judged.” Matthew 7:1.)  I would have the temerity to suggest that those of faith should readily recognize that He can take care of Himself.  He will render His Just Judgement on each of us in His own time, without our help.

Are they driven by cultural antipathy – that their mores, even if not religiously based, can’t abide the urban, multi-ethnic, multi-gender, untraditional, frankly alien and frequently humorless ways and attitudes (and the arrogance and condescension that frequently attends them) that form the center of gravity of the progressive movement and have unquestionably attained ascendance in mainstream American culture?  If so, I would venture here:  MAGAs need to move on.  Their vehemence bespeaks insecurity.  All who know me are aware that I am a curmudgeon, getting worse by the day.  I believe in honorifics.  I liked my phone on the desk or wall, not in my pocket.  I liked the days of limited TV stations (or cable, if one wanted to live extravagantly 😉 ).  I like books in my hand, newspapers delivered to my door.  While long retired, to this day I believe that business people should be wearing business attire every day.  I cringe every time an NFL player carries on after making a great play.  [I fondly recall the great Barry Sanders calmly giving the football to officials after he scored touchdowns.  (“Act like you’ve been there before, and that you’ll be there again.”)]  I find a number of progressive shibboleths irritating overreaction.  It doesn’t matter what I prefer.  Our culture moves on.  One adapts to the extent one must (I do carry a cell phone 🙂 ), while otherwise maintaining the manner of life with which one is most comfortable.  It is, as MAGAs love to proclaim, a free country; if they are secure in their ways, they should simply get on with their lives.

Or is the anger primarily economically based?  If it is, I would submit that such attitude is in diametrical contrast to the spirit of initiative, independence and accountability that has made America, America.  Although I have genuine reservations about whether race-based affirmative action programs, however well-intended, have in sum benefited the African American community over the last 50 years, I don’t think it can credibly be denied that if you’re born black and poor in this country, you have the right to be angry (for purposes of simplicity, I’m ignoring other barriers such as gender, physical handicap and age).  I am less sure that anyone born white and healthy anywhere in this country (save perhaps for the extremely impoverished) is nearly as entitled to be aggrieved.  Not all of us are going to be superstars – recalling a secret agent series from my youth, fictional CIA assassin Matt Helm once observed in Donald Hamilton’s The Betrayers, “[A]nybody who tries to tell me that some people aren’t brighter than others, or better shots, or faster drivers, is wasting his time” – but for the most part, a healthy white American has choices to go to (at least community) college or receive technical training, and to utilize the skills s/he has been given where the opportunities are. 

John Mellencamp has written and sung in “Small Town” that he “was born in a small town” and “can breathe in a small town,” but conceded, “my job is so small town; provides little opportunity.”  Many of Mr. Trump’s supporters who are angered at being economically left behind – the vast majority seemingly white and healthy – appear to be from and consider themselves better able to breathe in a small town like Mr. Mellencamp’s.  That said, between 1940 and 1970, the number of American farms declined by over two thirds (from six to two million); the majority of the profitable farms that remain aren’t family farms, but rather large corporate concerns.  The manufacturing plants affording wages upon which workers could comfortably raise a family that proliferated in our nation’s small towns from the 1940s into the 1970s declined sharply thereafter as American manufacturing businesses turned to outsourcing.  Today, most of our economic opportunity exists amid the congestion and denser air of our more populated areas.    

I suspect that any MAGAs who became acquainted with the biographies of all of our presidents over the last 150 years would find Theodore Roosevelt the most appealing.  A scion of a well-to-do New York City family, the tragic losses of his first wife and mother to illness on the same day caused TR to escape New York in 1884 and spend until 1887 as a cattle rancher in the Badlands, now part of North Dakota.  His account of his years as a rancher, Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail, was published in 1901.  All are aware that throughout his adulthood Mr. Roosevelt was an avid hunter, for scientific research and for sport, but during his years in the Badlands, his and his team’s hunting was more often about survival; he frequently refers to their need for “fresh meat.”  The superabundance of bison and other game in the northwest in the early 1800s had already been severely depleted by the time he reached the Badlands.  The game rarely came to them; although the opportunity to kill game was still there, they couldn’t stand in place and wait for it; to survive they had to seize opportunity, had to seek out the game where it was.      

Some Americans may prefer to pursue occupations for which the psychic awards can be great but the recompense can be small (farming being a prime example).  So be it; but there are countless occupations in our urban areas that would afford many of these Americans a larger and steadier source of remuneration.  Many of Mr. Trump’s supporters clearly prefer to live in small communities; fair enough, but these citizens are choosing not to do what Mr. Roosevelt and his contemporaries did – leave the areas in which they are comfortable and go to where the game is.  [There is obviously also a segment that – as is true of all people of every cultural, ethnic and economic stripe – fails to thrive economically because they choose pursuits for which they’re poorly suited.  (Toiling in the minor leagues, you may be mad that you’re not in The Show, but if you can’t hit the curve ball, it is what it is.)]

Probably every one of us has made choices, either knowingly or unwittingly, that in retrospect weren’t the wisest.  I would submit that the “freedom” that MAGAs loudly proclaim they seek – as recently as this past weekend, I saw a gentleman wearing a sweatshirt bearing an American flag on the sleeve with “FREEDOM” emblazoned on his chest — is not a birthright, but an opportunity, to be seized or squandered. 

From someone scolding those who judge, fairly judgmental?  (At least give me credit for being self-aware  😉 ).  Unduly harsh?  I’m not so sure.  Do I think that if I had been born on a farm in Iowa, or on the Northern Great Plains of Montana, I would have had the foresight and gumption to have seen that I might best make use of the talents that the Almighty gave me by moving to one of our urban centers?  Maybe; maybe not.  Would I, at my now-advanced age, recognize that any choices that I had made that I now rued were, indeed, my responsibility?  I hope I would.  (There’s a good chance I would, since we Irish Catholics revel in guilt. 🙂 )

I am confident that the Godfather of modern conservativism, the late U.S. AZ Sen. Barry Goldwater, would agree that the price of freedom is the commensurate duty to take responsibility for the consequences of your choices.  Blaming others for one’s misfortune is the least American of all attributes, a desecration of the memory of our forebears who came from all over the world, embracing the right to speak and to practice their religions as they chose, to seize the opportunity of America.