Are Republicans angrier than Democrats? Such a broad question cannot be answered at this time, but when it comes to Twitter the angriest Republicans are angrier than the angriest Democrats, according to a new study.
Preply, an online tool for learning languages, studied the Twitter accounts of the 85 political figures with the most followers to determine who is the angriest tweeter. And the “winner” is ... Republican National Committee Chairman Ronna McDaniel.
More than half (52.3 percent) of McDaniel’s September tweets were deemed to be angry by Preply’s machine learning model.
\u201cEven amid a violent crime wave, extremist Democrats like John Fetterman in PA and Mandela Barnes in WI want to empty our prisons and release violent criminals back into our communities.\u201d— Ronna McDaniel (@Ronna McDaniel) 1663539000
Of the 25 politicians who issue angriest tweets the most often, 19 are Republicans (including the top 15) and five are Democrats. The remaining person is former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, who ran for the Democratic nomination for president in 2020 but recently became an independent. Rounding out the top five are four other Republican allies of former President Donald Trump: Rep. Louie Gohmert of Texas, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green of Georgia, Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida and Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas.
The highest ranked Democrat is Rep. Eric Swalwell of California, a vocal opponent of Trump. He placed 16th in September, with 44.3 percent of his tweets tagged as angry.
In addition to measuring who tweeted angry messages the most often, Preply also measured the intensity of that anger. The same five Republicans landed in the top five on that list as well. While McDaniel again had the highest score, the order of the five was shuffled.
\u201cKevin McCarthy would make a great Speaker of the House. In Iran. \n\nBut in America, women have long enjoyed freedom of their bodies. We won\u2019t go back.\u201d— Rep. Eric Swalwell (@Rep. Eric Swalwell) 1663901376
All of this anger comes as the threat of violence against politicians is on the rise. Just days ago, Paul Pelosi, the husband of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, was attacked in their San Francisco home by a man searching for the speaker. That man, Paul DePape, has been linked to far-right conspiracy theories, including unfounded claims about the 2020 election.
The same day as that attack, federal security agencies issued a warning about potential threats against political candidates.
“Angry tweets only make the difficult work of engaging the real differences in our country more challenging. Neither side can wish the other away,” said Keith Allred, executive director of the National Institute for Civil Discourse. “The only option is to address our differences constructively and on the merits.”
The Preply study also examined the difference in tone between politicians' official Twitter accounts and their personal handles. Many were noticeably angrier in their personal accounts.
While Rep. Steve Scalise, the second-ranking Republican in the House of Representatives had the biggest difference between his official and personal “anger” scores, he was followed immediately by three of the most outspoken House Democrats: Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
A deep look at how "All in the Family" remains a striking mirror of American politics, class tensions, and cultural manipulation—proving its relevance decades later.
All in This American Family
There are a few shows that have aged as eerily well as All in the Family.
It’s not just that it’s still funny and has the feel not of a sit-com, but of unpretentious, working-class theatre. It’s that, decades later, it remains one of the clearest windows into the American psyche. Archie Bunker’s living room has been, as it were, a small stage on which the country has been working through the same contradictions, anxieties, and unresolved traumas that still shape our politics today. The manipulation of the working class, the pitting of neighbor against neighbor, the scapegoating of the vulnerable, the quiet cruelties baked into everyday life—all of it is still here with us. We like to reassure ourselves that we’ve progressed since the early 1970s, but watching the show now forces an unsettling recognition: The structural forces that shaped Archie’s world have barely budged. The same tactics of distraction and division deployed by elites back then are still deployed now, except more efficiently, more sleekly.
Archie himself is the perfect vessel for this continuity. He is bigoted, blustery, reactive, but he is also wounded, anxious, and constantly misled by forces above and beyond him. Norman Lear created Archie not as a monster to be hated (Lear’s genius was to make Archie lovable despite his loathsome stands), but as a man trapped by the political economy of his era: A union worker who feels his country slipping away, yet cannot see the hands that are actually moving it. His anger leaks sideways, onto immigrants, women, “hippies,” and anyone with less power than he has. The real villains—the wealthy, the connected, the manufacturers of grievance—remain safely and comfortably offscreen. That’s part of the show’s key insight: It reveals how elites thrive by making sure working people turn their frustrations against each other rather than upward.
Edith, often dismissed as naive or scatterbrained, functions as the show’s quiet moral center. Her compassion exposes the emotional void in Archie’s worldview and, in doing so, highlights the costs of the divisions that powerful interests cultivate. Meanwhile, Mike the “Meathead” represents a generation trying to break free from those divisions but often trapped in its own loud self-righteousness. Their clashes are not just family arguments but collisions between competing visions of America’s future. And those visions, tellingly, have yet to resolve themselves.
The political context of the show only sharpens its relevance. Premiering in 1971, All in the Family emerged during the Nixon years, when the “Silent Majority” strategy was weaponizing racial resentment, cultural panic, and working-class anxiety to cement power. Archie was a fictional embodiment of the very demographic Nixon sought to mobilize and manipulate. The show exposed, often bluntly, how economic insecurity was being rerouted into cultural hostility. Watching the show today, it’s impossible to miss how closely that logic mirrors the present, from right-wing media ecosystems to politicians who openly rely on stoking grievances rather than addressing root causes.
What makes the show unsettling today is that its satire feels less like a relic and more like a mirror. The demagogic impulses it spotlighted have simply found new platforms. The working-class anger it dramatized has been harvested by political operatives who, like their 1970s predecessors, depend on division to maintain power. The very cultural debates that fueled Archie’s tirades — about immigration, gender roles, race, and national identity—are still being used as tools to distract from wealth concentration and political manipulation.
If anything, the divisions are sharper now because the mechanisms of manipulation are more sophisticated, for much has been learned by The Machine. The same emotional raw material Lear mined for comedy is now algorithmically optimized for outrage. The same social fractures that played out around Archie’s kitchen table now play out on a scale he couldn’t have imagined. But the underlying dynamics haven’t changed at all.
That is why All in the Family feels so contemporary. The country Lear dissected never healed or meaningfully evolved: It simply changed wardrobe. The tensions, prejudices, and insecurities remain, not because individuals failed to grow but because the economic and political forces that thrive on division have only become more entrenched. Until we confront the political economy that kept Archie and Michael locked in an endless loop of circular bickering, the show will remain painfully relevant for another fifty years.
Ahmed Bouzid is the co-founder of The True Representation Movement.