America’s attitude 2025/Craig Medred photo

No ‘peace on earth, goodwill to all’

Comes now that holiday season when so many will be walking on eggshells at family gatherings in an angry nation.

Credit, in part, a political establishment that feasts on breeding discontent among the masses, a mainstream media hyping such discontent, and a social media cesspool that can inflame almost anything.

There are arguably more factors than these driving our national crankiness, but we can start with those.

“Americans’ extreme satisfaction with their personal life has fallen to the lowest level in a quarter century,” Gallup, the national polling organization, noted in January. “Political discontent appears to have further depressed satisfaction, especially for Republicans.”

The country has changed a lot since then, however, with Republican satisfaction on the rise and Democrat personal and socio-political satisfaction nosediving. Eighty-one percent of Democrats and Democrat-leaning voters in October told the Pew Research Center that the Republican Party makes them angry.

Almost a third were found to be angry at their own party as well, and only 29 percent were proud to be Democrats versus the 50 percent proud to be Republicans. But, of course, the plurality of Americans aren’t Republicans or Democrats.

Gallup calculates that 43 percent are independents, with the other 56 percent split nearly equally among the nation’s two, main political parties. Overall, the pollsters estimate right-leaning Americans now hold a 1 percent advantage – 46 percent to 45 percent – over the left-leaners after more than two decades largely dominated by a tilt toward the latter.

Left-leaning dominance in the U.S. peaked in 2008 with an estimated 52 percent leaning that way, according to Gallup, with only 42 percent leaning right. The leaners on both sides have since shifted and considerably, but few of them appear happy.

“Three-quarters of U.S. adults say the Democratic Party makes them feel frustrated,” Pew reported, “while a smaller majority (64 percent) says the same of the Republican Party.”

Fifty percent were recorded as actually “angry” at Democrats, but the Republicans weren’t doing much better with 49 percent angry at them.

And yes, President Donald Trump can be given credit or blame for a fair part of this anger on both sides of the political spectrum. The example he sets for what one might call “acceptable conduct” can only be described as horrific. But he is not alone.

There is ranting aplenty from politicians in both parties. Consider a visibly enraged Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez attacking the “cowardice” of Senate Democrats who voted for legislation to end a 43-day government shutdown as if they’d fled from the battlefield in a war.

American politics is not war, or at least, it’s not supposed to be war. The system was set up to avoid war by providing a means to find workable compromises when people disagree. The founders understood that.

As Thomas Jefferson, one of the rebels who went to war against the British in order to form the United States of America, observed in 1800, “I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend.”

Many would do well to heed those words today in a country that has moved a long way from where it was in 1999 when George W. Bush declared he was running for the presidency because he wanted to be “a uniter, not a divider.” 

The country might be even farther removed from where it was in 2004 when then Sen. Barack Obama told the Democratic Convention that “there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America – there’s the United States of America.

“There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America. The pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States; Red States for Republicans, Blue States for Democrats. But I’ve got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don’t like federal agents poking around our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and have gay friends in the Red States. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and patriots who supported it. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.”

Maybe, Americans were one people then. It’s debatable as to whether they are now.

The big split

This is today a nation with a whole lot of folks pledging allegiance to starkly different Conservative and Progressive ideologies. As for the classic liberalism that shaped the nation, it appears dead, no matter how much some on the right might still toss that label around as a pejorative.

The Economist, an old liberal publication in the United Kingdom, in 2018 recognized this shift and called for a return to the philosophy that “made the modern world, but (that) the modern world is turning against it. Europe and America are in the throes of a popular rebellion against liberal elites, who are seen as self-serving and unable, or unwilling, to solve the problems of ordinary people. Elsewhere, a 25-year shift towards freedom and open markets has gone into reverse, even as China, soon to be the world’s largest economy, shows that dictatorships can thrive.

“For The Economist this is profoundly worrying. We were created 175 years ago to campaign for liberalism  –  not the leftish “progressivism” of American university campuses or the rightish “ultraliberalism” conjured up by the French commentariat, but a universal commitment to individual dignity, open markets, limited government and a faith in human progress brought about by debate and reform.

“Liberalism’s respect for diverse opinions and ways of life has whittled away much prejudice: against religious and ethnic minorities, against the proposition that girls and boys should have an equal opportunity to attend school, against same-sex sex, against single parents.”

“Individual dignity” has since been sacrificed on the throne of American name-calling.

“Limited government” is vilified as a threat to all the good deeds of the nanny state.

“Faith in human progress brought about by debate and reform?”  Well, as former President Bill Clinton might observe here: “It depends on what the meaning of progress is.”

And “respect for diverse opinions”  drowned in a poll of anger, partisan bickering.

Thankfully, prejudices against minorities have diminished, and boys and girls, straight and gay, are still going to school together. But on the religious front, the prejudice against Jews seems to have undergone a resurgence, while what prejudice against same-sex relationships remains has deteriorated into an impossible-to-resolve debate as to how one defines “gender.”

Worst of all, many Americans seem to have lost focus on the many things they can agree upon and become fixated on those things about which they disagree. Give some credit, or the opposite, to former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin for kick-starting the political chaos of these days.

The “Don’t retreat; instead, RELOAD” political philosophy she embraced in the wake of a vice-presidential electoral defeat in 2008 echoes loudly today. Trump embraced that aggressive, attack-dog strategy to win the election in 2016 and again in 2024, as did others.

Trump had barely been in office 100 days before Hilary Clinton, his opponent in the 2016 election, was accusing the Russians of fixing the vote and announcing she was joining the “resistance,” as if the Nazis had just occupied France. 

Gone from the political playbook by then was the old strategy of moving toward the middle to bond with the country’s “silent majority,” as the late President Nixon defined the American voting bloc in 1969. In its place was a new strategy focused on building coalitions of the angry on both right and left.

Perhaps this was to be expected in a country where fewer than 60 percent of the voting-age population goes to the polls to vote for a president, and where the voter turnout to elect members of Congress has been as low as 22 percent, according to data collected by the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics. 

It reported that in the mid-term elections for Congress in 2022, only 92,390 of the more than 413,00 voters in New York House District 15 turned out to vote Ritchie Torres into office. The turnout for Ocasio-Cortez, now one of the most visible of Democrats on the national stage, wasn’t much better.

Fewer than 117,000 voters turned out to send her back to Washington as their representative from New York District 14, which is, according to New York state records, home to almost 413,500 voters.

“Ocasio-Cortez, arguably the (Congress’s) most outspoken Progressive, represents a New York City district that had the sixth-lowest number of House votes cast in 2022,” the non-partisan Center for Politics reported. Elsewhere in the city, new Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries won reelection in a district with the nation’s 23rd-lowest turnout. Across the country, new House Democratic Caucus Chairman Pete Aguilar took a Southern California district with the 17th-lowest number of total congressional ballots cast last fall.”

All of them clearly understood that in the new dynamic of these times, the idea of trying to reach that silent majority of Nixon’s day is a waste of time. Better to inspire those prone to mob frenzy and then ensure they get to the polls to express their anger.

Rest of the story

But realistically, the nasty politics of these times are only part of the story here. The country is now home to plenty of unhappy and angry people who don’t vote and who don’t much care about politics one way or the other.

Their angst is harder to pin down than that of the politically engaged, but there are clear links to technologies that promised to make life in the U.S. ever faster, easier and more convenient while at the same time tripping all over itself.

Politics can’t be blamed for the American Automobile Association (AAA) in September reporting a “Study Finds Almost All Drivers Experience Road Rage.”

How much this pent-up rage spills over into their non-driving lives is hard to say, but it would be foolish to pretend that it doesn’t. Anger has a way of lingering, and the angrier people are, the longer it lingers.

Consider the conclusions the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety drew from the study:

“….Aggressive driving has become a near-universal experience, and it’s not just frustrating; it appears to be contagious. 

‘The study found that the more drivers are exposed to aggressive behavior on the road, the more likely they are to drive aggressively themselves. This self-fulfilling cycle of aggressive driving and road rage is fueling a culture where impatience and hostility are becoming the norm behind the wheel.”

The potential spillover effect from this is hard to ignore. Common courtesy, manners, polite behavior, holding one’s tongue and other such niceties have become relics of the past, and whatever part of this stems from an urban society constantly amped up because of the nature of traffic on American roads is only magnified by social media.

As a personal observation, I have seen too many times supposedly rational, caring liberal reporters respond to criticism of their work, sometimes valid criticism, with a FU. And these are supposed to be folks educated in dealing with others, trained to learn that FU responses don’t further discussion but instead do the opposite.

Sixty-seven years ago, Wlliam Lederer and Eugene Burdick penned a novel titled “The Ugly American” that pilloried the American foreign policy establishment as arrogant and out out-of-touch in Southest Asia. The book became a movie in 1963, and in the years that followed “ugly American” became “a stereotype depicting American citizens as exhibiting loud, arrogant, self-absorbed, demeaning, thoughtless, ignorant, and ethnocentric behavior mainly abroad, but also at home” as Wikipedia fairly records.

Unfortunately, “The Ugly American” appears to be transitioning into the “The Ordinary American” with about the only change being a shift from that “ethnocentric behavior,” the use of one’s own culture or ethnicity as the standard for judging others, to a more personal all-about-meism that now has such a chokehold on the population that some Americans can’t even act friendly toward their neighbors let alone engage them in convsersation.

And yes, there are those in this country with legitimate complaints about the imperfections in American politics and society. The rich in this country, and their offspring, still do better than the poor, and their offspring. Those with a lot of money can still buy influence unavailable to those with little money.

Educational systems and businesses are still sometimes unfair to people of color, but then again, they are regularly unfair to all sorts of people: short people, tall people, white people, handicapped people, fat people, skinny people, gay people, straight people, and especially ugly people.

There is a deeply embedded prejudice against those who are unattractive. Psychologists have even coined a term for this prejudice: “Lookism.”

“…Unattractive people are perceived as less warm, less kind, less intelligent, and less competent than attractive people,” Christoph Klebl, an Australian psychologist involved in Lookism research, observed in a commentary for Psychology Today. 

But the unfairness of society today is nothing compared to the past. Look, I can speak from personal experience here having lost my last newspaper job for refusing a cowardly editor’s directive to stop investigating a sleazy member of the Alaska Board of Fisheries and instead catching him committing felonies.

There was a time when reporters got a pat on the back for doing that sort of thing. But that was before publishers bought newspapers mainly to try to bolster their political influence and editors (even the female ones) had balls.

As a reporter from another generation, I find the loss of editors with principles more depressing than the growth of wealthy publishers, both online and off, more interested in political influence than journalism. It’s unfair what the two have done to a once noble craft.

It’s not right. But it’s kind of a tiny thing compared to how much better life is in general for me and for most everyone else.

As The Economist observed in looking back at its own history, “our founders would be astonished at how life today compares with the poverty and the misery of the 1840s. Global life expectancy in the past 175 years has risen from a little under 30 years to over 70. The share of people living below the threshold of extreme poverty has fallen from about 80 percent to 8 percent and the absolute number has halved, even as the total living above it has increased from about 100 million to over 6.5 billion. And literacy rates are up more than fivefold, to over 80 percent. Civil rights and the rule of law are incomparably more robust than they were only a few decades ago. In many countries, individuals are now free to choose how to live  – and with whom.”

And yet, despite this, Americans are unhappier and angrier than ever because everyone’s politics don’t agree with theirs, or because they can’t drive everywhere as fast and as easily as they want, or because their internet connection is slow today or, God forbid, their server is down or the internet has crashed.

Or because someone expresses an opinion on social media that they simply don’t like for who knows what reason. In short, it would almost seem Americans are angry because they work at being angry, which is rather nonsensical.

But that’s where we are.