The End of Rage

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“Think you are today what yesterday you were;
Tomorrow you shall not be less.”—The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

Once we were a great nation. We devised and built the Internet and gave the world its plans for free. We put men on the Moon. We invented nuclear power and nuclear weapons, in secret, during the most terrible war in history, working from bare theories imported by foreigners. We were the first to develop electric lighting, motion pictures, controlled flight, supersonic flight, lasers, transistors, integrated circuits and many other modern marvels.

We beat Yellow Fever and made the Mississippi Valley safe for civilization by tracking down and controlling the disease’s vectors: mosquitoes. Later we helped to conquer smallpox and polio with vaccines worldwide and to suppress AIDS with life-saving drugs.

Once we were a practical people. We trusted science and technology, and each other. A nation of farmers, small businesses and tinkerers, we fixed our own buggies and farm equipment. Our Wright Brothers, who invented both wind tunnels and controlled flight, were bicycle makers. They also invented the science of aerodynamics without calling it that. Like the rest of us, they lived and worked close to the practical realities of life. They worked with their minds but also with their hands.

Today we seem to have lost all that. We are no longer tethered to the reality of physical objects that each of us can hold, touch, and understand—that many of us could repair, build and even devise. We no longer can see cause and effect in the work of our own hands. We no longer have barns to raise and fields to clear from wilderness, so that whole communities can work together. Almost every physical thing that makes our lives easy is built, grown, managed, repaired, and controlled—and was nearly always invented—by someone else, often far away.

We live in an unimaginably specialized society. On any scale of history, it’s also unimaginably rich. But the price is high. Nearly all of us have lost control over the things we rely on to live.

A generation ago, farmers and teenagers could fix their own cars. (I, too, once rebuilt a Chevy piston engine.) But now cars have computer chips built in billion-dollar factories, often in Asia. These chips require thousand-dollar machines to test and diagnose.

How many people not in the business can fix their own computers or mobile devices and program their own software? Virtually none. And as cars shift to electricity from internal combustion, the ratio of visible mechanical stuff to closed-box electronic parts, stamped out in those billion-dollar plants, will only decrease. Now many of those billion-dollar factories are in China or Taiwan.

As with the things that make our life rich, so with society. The overwhelming richness and variety of our physical possessions would be impossible without corporations. They promote specialization and free productive activity from the intrigue of politics.

Yet corporations, too, are blindingly various, remote and complex. In theory, shareholders control them. But only about half of us own shares. Of those who do, how many have the time and expertise to attend shareholder meetings, organize other shareholders, and have any impact on corporate decisions? There are only a handful such nationwide. We call them corporate “gadflies.” They make interesting reading on the business pages, only occasionally breaking into the general news.

So in practice a small cadre of physically and socially remote oligarchs runs our productive machinery, perhaps a thousand people in all. In a nation of 331 million and counting, the bosses that call the shots are numerically little more than rounding error.

Not surprisingly, they arrange for most of the monetary benefits of the productive activity they supervise to flow to them. And so we have the 1% and the 0.1%. And so “monetize” has become a verb and a way of life.

So what’s the upshot? What have we become? We are a nation whose ordinary citizens, quite rightly, feel control over life, job, family, future and even community slipping away. And few, apparently, feel any confidence about getting it back.

There’s a common human answer to loss of control: rage. That’s what we’ve been experiencing the last four years: an explosion of blind rage.

Rage is one of the least helpful of emotions. It steps in when reason fails but pain persists. And so we have millions willing to obey speed limits and wear seat belts but not masks. And so we have tens of millions blaming others who don’t look like them, speak like them or pray like them for their pain.

Rage is not constructive. But because it’s blind, it can be directed.

Donald J. Trump has been a master at that skill, as was Caesar. Someday, someone should tally his Tweets and count the proportion that lay blame. It will no doubt be considerable, just as the raw number is astronomical.

Trump’s Tweets worked well for their intended purpose: to lay blame and direct rage. So we have spent that last four years in the echo chamber of his cunning but diseased mind, learning and expressing our rage.

Yet somehow, some way, reason and common sense prevailed. Enough of us sensed that rage is not a constructive emotion and voted for change. (As historian Allan Lichtman taught us, change is what presidential elections are all about. His theory explains every presidential election since 1860, including the last two in advance.)

Rage is a powerful emotion. It takes time to subside. After you curse your spouse or kids, strike someone, or put your fist through the drywall, you need time to recover. Sometimes it’s minutes; sometimes it’s hours; sometimes it’s days or years. Yet eventually reason and calm return.

That’s where we are now as a nation. We have picked a leader who personifies our recovery from rage. He himself has overcome the loss of a wife and two kids and the self-rage of intractable stuttering.

Joe Biden relies on faith, basic decency and the ability to solve problems practically—once notable characteristics of our nation. He has the experience in pre-presidential elective or appointive Executive public office (47 years) that perseverance demands, and that only two of our postwar presidents had: LBJ (26 years) and GHW Bush (17), as distinguished from Ronald Reagan (8), George W. Bush (6) and Trump (0).

So maybe we can hope. Controlling rage, like directing it, is a learned skill. We have a leader who knows it well.

We also have a people exhausted by rage. We have media which, one can hope, have learned their lesson. They will relegate Trump, once out of office, to the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson: madmen on the fringe who feed on rage.

When all is said and done, our problems are hardly insurmountable. We must provide relief from pandemic-caused job loss, eviction and destitution. We must get people who willingly obey speed limits and wear seat belts to wear masks, distance themselves and avoid crowds, at least until vaccinated. We must take better care of the groups and people who have unfairly been consistent objects of rage and neglect. We must bring our critical supply lines and some of our factories back from China. And we must help preserve our planet by converting our energy infrastructure away from fossil fuels—an activity that will provide good, skilled jobs for decades. While doing that, we must also repair and upgrade the rest of our infrastructure.

Above all, we must devolve control over local matters, as much as we can, to the local level. Only in that way can we revive the sense of personal power that our people seem to have lost.

None of this is rocket science. It’s just good organization and common sense. It’s what we can do well once the rage subsides. It’s the kind of thing we did well for most of our history. Tomorrow we should not do less.

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