Hello and welcome to the Americano podcast. My name is Freddie Gray. I'm the deputy editor of the

spectator and the editor of its US edition. We thought that 2020 was going to be all about the

presidential election, but now it will forever be the year of the pandemic.

So instead, Americano is going to look at how COVID-19 is transforming the United States and its politics.

There's a lot to talk about, perhaps even more so than before. So please keep tuning in.

I'm joined by Peter Wood, who is president of the National Association of Scholars,

and we're going to be asking, why is America so angry?

Now, Peter, back in 2007, you wrote a book called A Bee in the Mouth, Anger in America Now,

and it was about how anger has become a very powerful and ugly force in American life.

And I wondered, looking at the riots that we're seeing at the moment, the burning of American cities,

whether you think that your thesis was right then, but even more true now.

Yes, I do.

I think that Americans have since the 1960s

valued anger as a form of authentic self-expression, more important than self-control,

and more effective in causing other people to behave in manners that you're seeking

than almost any other form of persuasion. Anger was not always that. It has been traditionally

viewed in the West as a rather dangerous thing and something that mature adults attempted to

instill in their children a sense of danger to it. That's not that we can ever be without anger,

but to treat anger as though it is a rewarding experience and one that should be sought after is a

relatively new thing given the longer arcs of cultural and societal history. It's not so new that

we're experiencing it as though for the first time here.

The riots that have descended on so many American cities have a quality of gleefulness to them.

...