Brian Dickerson

Detroit Free Press Columnist

Anger is the heroin of this political season: Addictive, abundant and cheap, it has overflowed our TV screens and Twitter feeds to flood our neighborhoods, our workplaces and even our bedrooms.

It is also the conventional explanation for the rise of Donald Trump, whose severest critics acknowledge his genius for articulating the inchoate rage of many white, male workers.

Not since a 19th-Century populist named William Jennings Bryan led Democrats into the political wilderness has a major party's presidential nominee so relentlessly cultivated a neglected constituency's resentment.

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But anger, like heroin, is not always what it appears to be.

Sometimes anger camouflages other emotions — hurt, shame and fear, especially — that people who wish to appear powerful are loathe to confess.

And sometimes it travels incognito, bubbling stealthily beneath the words and deeds of commentators who appear calm, philosophical and even sympathetic to their more aroused countrymen.

Fear undercover

Donald Trump says he’s angry about a lot of things: immigrants, lousy trade deals and women who accuse him of sexual assault, to name just a few. But should we believe him?

Angry people tend to engage. Confronted with the binary choice of fight or flight, their reflex is to attack, not retreat. The terms of engagement depend on the tools at the angry person’s disposal. Toddlers scream. Teenagers throw punches. The wealthy file lawsuits. Sovereign nations deploy armies or launch missiles.

Trump has done, or threatened to do, all these things, and so it is tempting to accept his professed anger at face value. Yet if those who have followed him for decades have learned anything, it’s that Trump is the most unreliable of narrators, a fabulist who uses words more often to conjure a mood than to convey factual information.

His talk is tough, but his actual policy proposals betray fear, not righteous indignation: Build the wall. Block Muslims from entering the country. Suspend trade with countries who make things more cheaply than we do.

These are prophylactic measures, meant to keep the objects of Americans’ anxiety at a safe distance, not to confront or vanquish them. Trump’s real genius is not for channeling his supporters’ anger, but for recognizing, and conspiring to camouflage, the anxiety that undergirds it.

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I know how scared you are, he whispers, but I won’t unmask your fear; I’ll swear it’s anger, not apprehension, that fuels your love for me. And I’ll carry a big stick, the biggest stick, a stick so big that no one will notice how much all our hands trembling.

But avenging angels don’t build walls or erect punitive tariffs. They hurl thunderbolts, not groundless allegations that the contest has been rigged against them.

Maybe Donald Trump is as angry as he says. Or maybe his anger is as counterfeit as his business acumen, his philanthropy and his respect for women.

Anger undercover

At the other end of the spectrum you have those who pretend to empathize with Trump’s dispossessed constituents but are secretly contemptuous of them. They project aloofness, but beneath their analytical detachment lies the fury of a stuck bull.

I am talking, of course, about people like me.

I’ve been hearing from Trump’s legions for the better part of a year now, and I’ve had it up to here with them.

You want to talk to an angry white man? Talk to me.

My contempt for Trump’s apologists is born of familiarity, not unrecognition. Demographically speaking, we are from the same tribe: white, male, suspected of technological obsolescence and prime targets for employers dangling early retirement incentives. Sully Sullenberger is our patron saint, and we feel his prideful pain; our employers can’t wait to get us off the payroll, either.

I’m more comfortable and better educated than many of Trump’s white male constituents, but not all of them. Our similarities outweigh our differences. And part of what we have in common is our anger with one another.

Now hear this

I don’t advertise my anger very much in print because I don’t think it’s very productive. My indignation has no probative value; its intensity doesn’t strengthen my arguments against a Trump presidency.

But like the steam in a nuclear reactor, anger has to be purged from time to time. Perpetual containment is not a sustainable long-term strategy.

And so, in the absence of any bloviating avatar to amplify my own, proprietary brand of rage, I’d like to speak directly to my white male counterparts on the other side of the political divide — the ones who have phoned, e-mailed and otherwise provoked me for much of the last year by advocating for the lunatic charlatan at the top of the Republican ticket.

So listen up, deplorables: It’s my turn to hold the anger stick. And look at me when I’m talking to you.

A catalogue of disgust

My grievances, like yours, are legion. But we're all busy people, so I’ll mention just three:

First, I’m furious with your inability — or is it simply your stubborn refusal? — to navigate the richest trove of information that has ever been available to any group of voters.

We don’t let people drive in our state until they prove they can read a yield sign and decode a traffic signal. And if it were within my power, I would confiscate all your digital devices until you demonstrated the capacity to find out whether the stuff you read on them is true.

Newsflash, my fellow baby boomers: The Internet is not a verified information source. It’s only a conduit, one that ferries every variety of useful data and discredited propaganda to any boob with a smartphone.

The good news is that it has never been easier for someone perusing his Facebook feed to distinguish reliable information from the patently spurious. Any digitally literate 15-year-old can do it. You, apparently, cannot.

I recognize that no candidate or party has a monopoly on the truth. We can have honest arguments about the merits of free trade, religious tests for visa applicants or what makes a good Supreme Court justice.

But you can't make a credible argument with made-up facts. And when you send me links to fake news sites revealing that Hillary was fired from the staff of the subcommittee that investigated Watergate (she wasn’t), or that the Pope has just endorsed Trump (he hasn’t), or that Muslim Americans turned a blind eye to the preparations of the San Bernardino terrorists (they didn’t), you’re not expressing an opinion; you’re demonstrating your unfitness to move about safely in the Information Age.

Furthermore . . .

I’m furious, too, at your willingness to overlook in your presidential candidate the sort of behavioral and character deficits you would never tolerate in your own children or your own friends.

I know you, and I know this man doesn’t represent your values. If your sons bragged about their sexual prowess or intellectual superiority the way Trump does, you’d tell them to put a sock in it. If any man spoke about your wives or daughters the way Trump speaks about my female colleagues in the press, you’d punch his lights out.

So when you excuse this behavior in Trump, you’re not making allowances for male boorishness; you’re slandering your own families, and mocking your own decency.

And finally ...

But you know what really frosts my shorts? Because I’ve saved this, my most serious grievance, for last:

It’s your conviction that the United States of America can no longer contain us both, that we — you and I — would be better off if we never had to encounter each other after this election is over. It's your candidate's reflexive response to anyone who dissents from his paranoiac vision of America: Get on board, or get out.

If I really think Hillary Clinton would be an acceptable president, you’ve told me, I should move to some other country. If she’s elected, you may jump ship (or take armed refuge in the hills) yourself.

Really? You’re ready to throw my fellowship away for Trump's?

As Kwame Kilpatrick’s chief of staff Christine Beatty once asked, albeit in a somewhat different context: Do you know who the $%@# I am?

Hanging together, or separately

I’m your neighbor, you pathetic, myopic ignoramus. You know: the guy whose taxes help pay for your roads, your schools and your police protection. The one who cheers for your son’s pathetic football team and applauds when your daughter wins a scholarship.

I'm the neighbor who’d walk your dog if you were hospitalized, shovel your walk if you were stranded in Florida or give you a lift to the polling place if your car gave out on Election Day (even if I knew you were voting for Trump).

You really think your presidential nominee would do any of those things for you?

Don’t be ridiculous. And rest assured that I, an angry white man in the tank for Hillary, know that I depend on you and other Trump supporters as much as you depend on me.

I’m as angry as I can be with you, but I’m not an idiot. I know Hillary won’t lend me her generator if the power goes out, that our neighborhood would be as diminished by your desertion as it would be by mine.

OK, I’m done. And I have to admit I feel better, although I doubt I’ll sleep any more peacefully than you will until this election is over.

I won’t presume to guess how it’s going to turn out. But as I noted at the beginning of this column, anger is as abundant, and as short-acting, as heroin. By this time next week, it’ll be even cheaper than it is today — and not much consolation to any of us.

Contact Brian Dickerson: bdickerson@freepress.com.