The Politics of Hate

Anthony Harrigan

Anthony Harrigan is the author, co-author or editor of twenty books. He has lectured at Yale University, Vanderbilt University, the University of Colorado and the National War College.

Presidential elections generate a variety of reactions. Not once in the past has hatred been one of those reactions. Disappointment, yes, also incomprehension, elation and other moods. But the United States has been spared the feeling of hatred that has characterized politics in other countries with all consuming ideological divisions until now. Unfortunately, in 2004, the country experienced an ugly passion, hatred, on the part of a small but noisy element that evidenced a almost previously unknown degree of hostility towards one of the presidential candidates, President Bush, that derived from a passionate hostility towards the United States. This kind of hostility is the stuff of politics in countries that have come to reject traditional values and established institutions of republican (small “r”) political systems.

Even in the most difficult moments of American political history, hatred has not often manifested itself. The election of Abraham Lincoln and the dispatch of federal troops to Fort Sumter resulted in secession which had been generating for decades because of economic and sectional differences but this act was not accompanied by pervasive hatred on either the Union or Confederate side.

Despite the bloodiest struggle in our history, the troops on the battlefield respected one another. Their commanders were the product of the same institution, West Point, and were respectful to one another, culminating in the civilized discussion between the military victor, Gen. U. S. Grant, and the defeated commander, Gen. Robert E. Lee, at Appomattox.

It is true, of course, that the anarchist movement at the turn of the century sought to spread hate. And an anarchist did assassinate President McKinley, but the anarchists failed to spread hatred on the scale they hoped for. And, again, in later decades, Communist Party members and their fellow travelers were consumed by hatred of capitalist America, its history, and institutions. But they, too, were unable to expand their base beyond the lower depths of New York City, populated in the main by immigrants from Russia and their children. Indeed it would be interesting to determine how many people in the current anti-American agitation have family roots traceable to the original Communist cadres on New York’s lower East side. But it would not be advisable to hold one's breath in anticipation of a scientific study of this historical question.

This is the political context and culture from which the atomic spies of the 1940s emerged. This world found its voice in the Stalinist Nation magazine that, today, is deeply involved with the hate Bush campaign. To be sure, hostility to America was spawned in other social contexts. Witness Alger Hiss who came from a very different background.

The radical rich in Hollywood have been major players in the campaign of hatred, figures such as Michael Moore, Barbara Streisand, Whoopi Goldberg, Alec Baldwin, and a host of others. The networks have lavished attention on them and their hate-filled commentaries. Clearly, however, they have no weight with the majority of the American people. The big media have been repudiated. They continue to endeavor to portray conservative Christians as the equivalent of the Taliban, which only further isolate them from the American people who don’t live on the Left Coast. Interestingly, as Newsweek revealed in a post-election map, California’s interior counties went for President Bush. It was the homosexual capital San Francisco that supported Mr. Bush’s opponent by 83 percent.

The hate campaign lives on the absurd calls for secession of the so-called blue states. Some of these calls come from media people who ought to know better, no matter what their emotions impel them to say.

A case in point is that of Lawrence O’Donnell, television commentator on the McLaughlin show and former staffer for Sen. Patrick Moynihan. According to his fellow panelist, Tony Blankley, editorial page editor of The Washington Times, Mr. O’Donnell asserted that the 2004 election will give rise to a serious consideration of secession by the blue states. One wonders: has he never heard of the Civil War and its outcome after hundreds of thousands of casualties.

Mr. Blankley rightly says that absurd talk of secession is the product of secular bigotry on the part of liberal-left elements who are furious at the majority of American voters who didn’t buy into the hate campaign waged by the anti-Christian Left. They must be bonkers, to use an English term, if they imagine that the Left Coast can wage a war against Florida, Ohio, and the other red states.

There is abundant evidence of the new current of hatred in the world of the liberal-left intelligentsia and the entertainment industry. This hatred is now directed at the democratic process. Prime examples of this are the columns written by Maureen Dowd, editorial page columnist for the New York Times in the days after the presidential election.

Ms. Dowd accused President Bush of “dividing the country along fault lines of fear, intolerance, ignorance, and religious rule.” Her second post-election column, published November 7, says,

W’s presidency rushes backward, stifling possibilities, stirring intolerance, confusing church with state, blowing off the world, replacing science with religion, and facts with faith. We’re entering another dark age.

Sharp political differences are to be expected in a democracy. We have had them since the earliest days of the republic. Consider the chasm in philosophy that separated the federalists from the Jeffersonians. But political paranoia is something we have not had and it is something we cannot afford. Hebert Rumerstein, head of the Office of Counter Soviet Disinformation in the Reagan administration, writing in The Washington Times after the November election, pointed out that

. . . the majority of American people voted against the “Politics of Hate,” and repudiated Michael Moore and his clones.

 

He described the hate campaign in terms of the Ku Klux Klan and the Nazis and Communists of the 1920s and 1930s, adding “I thought we had learned from history.”

Unfortunately, the shapers of the hate campaign have not learned anything. They are unlikely to change their tactics by 2008. They almost certainly will damage the Democratic Party, though Democrats generally may be opposed to use of hate.

There is the most pressing need for civic and moral education to rescue our politics. The haters surely will be driven on by the big media whose behavior since the election indicates they will encourage the worst in our society. Good Americans, irrespective of party, must do everything possible to restore the sense of civility that characterized American politics in the past.      *

 “Republics are created by the virtue, public spirit, and intelligence of the citizens. They fall, when the wise are banished from the public councils, because they dare to be honest, and the profligate are rewarded, because they flatter the people, in order to betray them.” --Joseph Story