Tennessee WordSmith: A Liberl Dose, September 23, 2025 "Why Are They All So Angry?"

Welcome to my first blog in my post-newspaper career. As many of you know, my regular column -and the whole opinion page -was ended recently by my hometown paper, over legitimate concern for my well-being due to several anonymous death threats they received about me in the days after Charlie Kirk's killing (even though I had not said a word about it). So now I am back to the days when my opinion pieces only appear on my own blog. It is incredible how violent things have gotten, and how quickly, and the degree of absolute rage on the right.

I am reminded of a clip from The Joy Reid Show six days ago. She summed it up perfectly, but I disagree with her final assessment. I am going to paste a lengthy quote from her statements below, plus a link to the actual segment.

"Why are y'all so angry? You have the White House. You have both houses of Congress. You have a Supreme Court that is completely obedient to your president. They're willing to give him unlimited power. They're willing to say that he can take Seal Team 6 and kill anybody he wants.... they're willing to say that ICE can racially profile anyone they want. You guys have everything you want -you have legal racial profiling, you've ended DEI, you've ended affirmative action, you have everything. Why are y'all so angry? You've banned all of our books. You've banned Black History. You've banned the 1619 project. You don't have to compete with women for jobs, you've chased them out of the military... you've gotten rid of all the Black History in the museums, museums are terrified... they're afraid to tell the real history. People who work for the federal government are afraid to say the word black. You've canceled black scholarships, I guess you're damn near ready to get rid of HBCUs... What more do you want? What are you so angry about? ...You've almost got the pilgrims again -you can come and cough on the Natives and wipe them all out... yet you're still so angry. I genuinely don't understand it."

I'm with her so far. The MAGA right has literally everything they wanted, yet they are still frothing at the mouth in fury, demanding liberals be fired or shot or both. What is the source of that anger?

Reid has a theory. "What y'all are angry about is that while you've gotten everything you wanted on the right, we on the left won't give you love for it, we won't respect you for it, we won't hail you for it. You want us to fete you, you want us to embrace you... you don't just want to run us and tell us what to do and tell us what to think and what to read and tell us what history we can have... what you really want is to sit at our table... you're mad at us because we do not want to be with you."

While there may be some truth to that, it does not explain the depth of MAGA rage. They don't really care if we like them or not. They don't want to be in our club, or have us in theirs. There is something deeper at work.

"Making America Great Again", for many people, means returning to the social structure and mores of the early 1950s, before the Civil Rights Movement. A period of white male dominance. True, all of those people are not white (though a good 95-99% of them are) and not all are male, but they are all invested in that patriarchal racial hierarchy of yesteryear, and either want to be white-adjacent if they are minorities, or seen as good obedient submissive women. Either way, it is an appeal to the protections they perceive to get from a racial patriarchy.

They are invested in the structure that, essentially, this country was built on, and feel threatened by efforts to move away from that structure. Even, and in some ways especially, by us folks that Reid called "the spicy white people".

They are angry because they've even HAD to take over the government and use the force of law to return us all to yesteryear. Their position should have never been threated or questioned to begin with. They're not mad because they want us to love them, they're made because THEY WANT US TO KNOW OUR PLACE AND KEEP IT. And they expect us to be obsequiously grateful for even being allowed to be in that place at all. They are not sad little schoolchildren crying because the other kids are excluding them for their rudeness -they are Eric Cartman, screaming at the top of his lungs, "Respect my authoritay!"

Any hint of resistance to that authority on our part -or even questioning the rightness of it -must be crushed immediately as harshly as possible. "Those people" need to learn their place.

This was the impetus of the wave of violent racial progroms after WWI that started with the Red Summer of 1919 and culminated in Rosewood and Tulsa later. In almost every single case, the riot started when a group of racist white folks were enraged at the sight of a black veteran in uniform, comporting himself with dignity like he was equal -being "uppity".

As the Compromise of 1820, establishing a dividing line in the country between slave and free states, was being debated, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams had some thoughts. Those who mouthed platitudes about loving freedom, and even of admitting slavery was wrong, were still taking action to preserve it. About such people, Adams said "They have betrayed the secret of their souls." That secret being- they liked being "superior." And they began agitating for a war to preserve that superiority.

Some of my conservative friends are going to read this and say I am full of crap. To them, I say look deep into your soul and ask yourself why YOU are so angry, even though you're getting everything you said you wanted. And share your reasons with us.

--Troy D. Smith is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech and serves on the executive committee of the Tennessee Democratic Party. His words do not necessarily represent TTU., nor are they connected in any way with his job- they are his own opinions on matters of public concern, and an expression of his First Amendment freedom of speech.

Buy the book A Liberal Dose: Communiques from the Holler by Troy D. Smith HERE