How much anger about wokeism should GOP candidates display?

And how should they display it?

Yesterday, in his insightful post about whether Ron DeSantis should run angry or happy, Bill quoted from this article by Richard Hanania. I found Hanania’s article well worth reading, but disagree with what I understand to be his thesis — namely, that voters prefer “higher status” candidates to “lower status” ones and that angry candidates signal low status, thereby injuring their prospects for electoral success.

I want to consider this thesis in light of the four candidates the GOP has nominated for president in the six elections held this century. But first, let me say a few words about Ronald Reagan.

Reagan is remembered today as an optimist, and rightly so. His optimism distinguished him from Barry Goldwater, who shared some of Whitaker Chambers’ pessimism about the outcome of the Cold War. (Listen to Goldwater’s 1964 speech accepting the Republican nomination to see what I mean.)

Reagan was optimistic about the Cold War and about the future of America. But as a candidate for governor and for president, he was angry about the state of affairs in his state and his country. It seemed to me that, other than George Wallace, Reagan was angrier than any major presidential candidate in the post-Nixon years.

And he could be rather nasty about it. Recall, for example, this crack: “The signs of the Vietnam War protestors said ‘Make Love not War!’ It didn’t seem to me that they were capable of either.”

Sure, it’s a funny line. Reagan had a good sense of humor. But there’s humor in plenty of Trump’s zingers, too.

As for status, Reagan was widely derided as a former actor and anti-intellectual. In 1980, he would have been considered low status.

Reagan’s anger and lack of status didn’t hurt his electoral prospects.

What about the four GOP presidential candidates from this century? They’re a pretty diverse lot on the anger/status scale — much more so, I think, than their Democrat counterparts.

We’ve had an angry, nasty billionaire populist; a rich blue blood who ran as a compassionate good-old-boy; a rich blue blood who ran on his managerial acumen; and a maverick with a temper who prided himself on working with Democrats.

Broadly speaking, the results of the six elections were pretty similar. Five of the six were close and in five of the six, the Republican failed to reach 50 percent of the popular vote.

The outliers are (1) 2004 when George Bush, running as the incumbent on a strong economy and early success in the war on terrorism, cleared 50 percent but just barely and (2) 2008 when John McCain, saddled with voter dissatisfaction over Bush’s second term, was defeated handily by Barack Obama.

Of these four candidates, only Trump ran as particularly nasty and angry. His outcomes were typical, broadly speaking, of the ones Republicans have experienced this century.

Bush, the most successful of the four candidates, didn’t run angry or nasty. He left the hardball for others, mostly Dick Cheney. His outcomes were better than Trump’s, but not by enough to justify any conclusions about anger and nastiness as possible impairments to a presidential candidacy.

What about status? Romney, with his Harvard education and good manners, may have had the strongest claim to high status in the sense Hanania uses the term. Trump, with his crudeness, had the weakness.

Trump’s outcomes were better than Romney’s, but not by enough to justify any conclusions about the benefit of low status.

To me, McCain was the highest status candidate of the four — a war hero (though not by Trump’s reckoning) with a long Senate career and a fair amount of bipartisan and media goodwill. As noted, McCain fared the worst of the four candidates. But he was running against major headwinds. And, as importantly, he was running against Obama, whose status should have been medium-to-low, but was pumped up by his race and the hype surrounding him.

This leads to what I think is an important point about status — the Democratic candidate always has an edge here because of media bias and its influence on public perception.

Bush should not have been considered a lower-status candidate than Al Gore and John Kerry. He was as well educated as they were and seems to have done as well, if not better, than they did in college. And as a candidate, Bush did not display low status in Hanania’s sense — he did not run particularly angry or nasty campaigns.

But the media portrayed Bush as a dolt, and he seemed willing to play along. It paid off, particularly against Kerry, who came off as ridiculously elitist. Bush made his allegedly low status work to his advantage.

McCain and Romney should not have been considered lower-status candidates than Obama. Neither ran nasty or angry campaigns. Both, in different ways, had accomplished more than Obama. But Obama received points for his race and because, quite simply, the media desperately wanted him to win.

The lesson, I think, is that Republican presidential candidates shouldn’t worry about whether they are perceived as high-status or low-status. The experiences of McCain and Romney show they have limited control over this perception. The experiences of Bush and Trump in 2016 show that lower status can be a plus.

What should Republican presidential candidates worry about? I think Bill nailed it. They should focus on “understanding, even if only in an intuitive way, what the country really wants, and supplying a plausible way to get there.”

As for anger, they should be angry about the same things that bother a broad array of the electorate, and to roughly the same degree.

Here, I agree with Hanania about this much: Relatively few voters are interested in re-litigating the 2020 election and most of those who harbor suspicions about it aren’t nearly as angry as Trump.

The electorate is angry about many manifestations of wokeness. Accordingly, anger should play a significant role in the GOP candidates’ presidential campaigns, including once we get to the general election. But it should not overshadow anger about the economy (though we don’t know how much anger about the economy there will be in the last months of the 2024 campaign).

Hanania contends that the winning way to oppose wokeness “is to be angry at the phenomenon because it gets in the way of a more positive vision.” What vision? He mentions “the Enlightenment project, national greatness, or getting to Mars.”

What wokeness really gets in the way of is national pride and self-respect, public safety, and common sense. The woke narrative of America as racist and oppressive undermines our pride and self-respect.

It’s naval gazing of the most counter-productive and dangerous kind. And it’s deeply pessimistic, which creates a big opportunity for a Republican candidate to be angry and optimistic at the same time, like Reagan was.

The woke anti-police, criminal-as-victim narrative is incompatible with robust public safety. Hanania complains that “low-status” anti-wokeness turns people off because it treats adherents as victims. But the woke treat criminals as victims, which surely is more off-putting. Focusing on the public as the victims of soft-on-crime policies should be a political winner, absent a sharp downturn in violent crime rates.

Woke foolishness about gender is at war with common sense. Republican candidates should not shy away from ridiculing it and citing its harmful effects, unless and until their Democrat opponents repudiate major components of the woke line.

The victims of woke irrationality and anti-Americanism are, as Bill says, America’s children — and therefore America’s future. In his words:

Wokeism has millions of actual victims in every part of the country — namely, our children, whose education is being traded in for elitist subversion and not-very-well-hidden anti-American propaganda. When Glenn Youngkin told the Virginia electorate that parents and not the Educational Establishment should decide what their children will be taught, he won the governor’s chair in an increasingly Democratic state. When Ron DeSantis took on the Woke shading of the biggest children’s attraction in the country, Disneyland, he turned a swing state into a Republican landslide.

Attacking wokeism and its implications for education, public safety, and national spirit and unity isn’t a silver bullet for the GOP. But it should be an important component of its case for control of the White House and Congress.

The case should be made rationally and optimistically, but without shying away from anger and without worrying about status.