The angry voter is good for politicians but bad for democracy.

The angry voter is too stupid to understand the issues and must fall back on blind rage to make a decision.

The angry voter is coming from a place of hate, not calm consideration, and is therefore, by definition, wrong.

The angry voter is a red-faced, red-state, red-blooded retrograde redneck, and therefore incapable of making a rational decision.

The angry voter is a child throwing a temper tantrum, disqualifying him from the right to participate in his own governance.  The famous 1994 tirade of Canadian ninth-grade drop-out Peter Jennings can be heard here.

Those are the bigoted, dismissive, degrading tropes and memes and clichés tossed about by the collaborationist cabal of Big Media, Big Government, and the Deep State whenever it appears an election might not quite go their way.  It is part of an effort to explain any result that doesn't reinforce their power — we're good, but they're too consumed with irrational primordial hate to see that.  Thirty seconds on the internet will confirm that:

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/11/swing-voters-are-angry-alienated-and-very-powerful.html

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/midterm-elections-2022/bill-clinton-midterms-gop-strategy-b2216939.html

https://www.penncapital-star.com/campaigns-elections/voters-are-angry-thats-good-for-turnout-but-bad-for-democracy-opinion/

If you vote angry when it comes to the Dobbs decision, you are a determined fighter doing the right thing.  If you vote angry for any other reason, it is the equivalent of screaming at your four-year-old in the supermarket for not being able to solve differential equations.  In other words, it is an anger that is at best misplaced if not entirely unhinged.

Well, to be blunt: to hell with that.

Particularly in this election cycle, though valid most years, an angry voter is a voter who is actually paying attention.  It is impossible, except for those willingly wearing blinders, not to be angry about:

• Inflation: for the most part specifically caused by the government
• Incompetence, and possibly incontinence: the perilous state of the president, a state that was known but actively ignored
• The pandemic — from the meaningless devastation caused by the "experts" to the most recent plea for amnesty, no one can possibly argue that COVID was properly handled
• Crime: ballooning criminal activity tied in part to purposefully lax district attorneys, the defund the police movement, and local law enforcement agencies being put in an impossible bind by politicians telling them to stand down
• Drugs and the border: Chinese fentanyl (and criminals and gangs and human-traffickers and terrorists) coming over the open border with Mexico is flooding the streets, fueling a massive spike in overdose deaths and homelessness
• Homelessness: allowing people to literally die in the streets and/or letting people destroy neighborhoods and kill random people because the homeless-industrial complex does not want to solve the problem — they just want to keep getting paid
• The Deep State: it definitely exists and is now coming for concerned parents
• Woke culture: the knowledge that if you happen to say what — that day — happens to be the wrong thing, your entire life could be upended by an internet mob
• Corruption: from Baltimore to Chicago to Los Angeles, one-party-rule cities and states are awash in payoffs, sweetheart deals, political back-scratching, and the targeted oppression of those who demand change
• Voting systems: using "making it easier to vote" as a cover, election offices around the country have become cesspools of conflicting interests, ballot-harvesting, dark-money "donations," and brazen manipulation
• The lying: there's fudging, there's spin, and there's what is coming out of the Biden White House — lies so brazen that all one has to do is turn one's head five degrees to see the truth
• Schools: public schools have become a toxic breeding ground for previously unimaginable concepts, local school boards call the police on (and report to the FBI) parents who have the courage to stand up and say that detailed sexual how-to manuals may not be appropriate for fourth-graders, on-campus crimes are viewed through the lens of intersectionality, and, unsurprisingly, the education offered is still awful
• Gas prices: inflation-related, but more accurately the result of the administration's decision to scale back production and transport options, ending the nation's energy independence achieved under Trump

All of these — or even just one of these — are issues that justify righteous and proper and considered anger.

But, as with a cheating spouse who simply stares at you and says, "So what?  What's the big deal?," the justifiable anger afoot in the land is dismissed with a contemptuous "get over it — we know best" wave of the hand.

Well, no.

The results from this coming Tuesday will be portrayed as being like the scene from Network in which people opened their windows and randomly yelled, "I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!" — an unfocused general idiocy that in the end is meaningless, a mere escape valve for tension — a temper tantrum, if you will — that does not mean the governance of the nation is fundamentally flawed.

But it won't be that at all — voting is a specific intentional act intended to change the body politic.  It is the direct expression of the will of the citizenry.  It is a core ability of the people to shape a better future for themselves and their families.

Anger is not inherently bad.  Anger can be a warning of danger, a reaction to a particular threat.  Harnessed anger can be a positive thing for a society and should not be rejected out of hand or denigrated as a meaningless sign of Neanderthal thinking.

Anger can be a force for good, especially when it is targeted appropriately at people and institutions that are causing such bedrock damage to the country.

And never forget: the elite pretend to dismiss angry voting because they cannot control it and, more importantly, because they know that the anger is directed squarely at them and are terrified something might actually change.

So proudly vote for change, proudly vote for accountability, proudly vote for transparency, proudly vote for a better future.

Proudly vote angry.

Thomas Buckley is the former mayor of Lake Elsinore, Calif. and a former newspaper reporter.  He is currently the operator of a small communications and planning consultancy and can be reached directly at planbuckley@gmail.com.  You can read more of his work at  https://thomas699.substack.com.

Image via Pixabay.