Politics and Hate

"Politics is eminently a realm of hatred," says Anthony Esolen in this article at American Greatness.

Has that always been true? It certainly seems truer now than ever before. Perhaps this is why most of the truly saintly people I know are the least politically minded. Politics brings out the worst in us.

I had a vague knowledge of who David Koch was (although until very recently I mispronounced his last name). My mispronunciation was corrected when I ran into someone who hated them, bringing them up in sarcastic comments at every opportunity. [Who are these Coke brothers he keeps talking about, I.] I was surprised at the level of hatred for someone he didn't know at all and in fact someone whose life never impinged on his own in the least. And when David Koch recently passed away, this hatred was on display again in Leftist memes on social media. But why?

And by the way, it is just as evident on the right as on the left. I tend not to bother much about young politicians from districts far from my own. So a Dem Representative from a district in Minnesota said something stupid. If she were my congresswoman, I might be working hard to defeat her in the next election, but she's not. So why lose sleep over her. And yet many on the Right are on a continual tirade against The Squad, and if you don't share it, if in other words you are insufficiently hateful toward them, your conservative credibility will be called into question. Our politics now is defined by who we hate, and how intensely we hate them.

I could cite many examples (and Esolen cites many from his own experience inacademia). This need to hate is very strong in us. Fairness goes out the window. Probity and moderation have long fled. Thoughtfulness and generosity of spirit need not apply. As in the case, say, of Antifa zealots, hatred becomes an organizing principle for community, the glue that holds the group together.

There's an interesting piece at Quillette called The Great Scattering: How Identity Panic Took Root in the Voic Once Occupied by Family Life. The author, Mary Eberstadt, says,

The diminution and rupture of the family and the rise of identity politics cannot be understood apart from one another.

I think that's right. In any case, the author provides plenty of food for thought. Connecting the ideas of both Esolen and Eberstadt, I think that hatred and Identity Politics go hand in hand. I am comparing no one in particular to Hitler, but his political philosophy was nothing if not "Idetnity Politics."

Anyway, it's a sad and disturbing development. Sometimes a grim thought wiggles its way into my brain: things are reminding me of the French Revolution. Oh, that's extreme, I tell myself. You really can't go that far! But I do wonder if someday it will not seem to far-fetched.

Donald Trump and Identity Politics

So when I was kid growing up in and around Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania in the 60s and early 70s, I was exposed to a lot of racial and ethnic stereotyping, antisemitism, and strange conspiracy theories about the nefarious Roman Catholic Church trying to take over the country.

The John Birch Society was a thing, and I vaguely recall flyers from them. We kids were told that the Catholics were stockpiling weapons in the basements of their churches, waiting for the right moment to being the takeover. So all those summertime church bazaars with fried dough and candy apples, etc., staffed by kindly blue-haired grannies, were all just a precursor to some gigantic RC Anschluss. I well remember peering into the basement window of the St. Ignatius Church, trying to spy out the guns.

This calumny, that the Catholics were bent on taking over the country, was repeated for "the Jews." Every disgusting antisemitic trope you can think of was taken as a given in my household as well as those of most of my neighbors. Both the Catholics and the Jews, you see, had a dual loyalty problem. You shouldn't vote for Kennedy, because he was ultimately beholden to the Pope. And the Jews, their highest allegiance was to Israel, not America.

So when I first heard about President Trump's endearing tweet suggesting that all Jews who disagreed with him politically were "disloyal," it sounded like a familiar trope to me. I assumed he meant disloyal to America, but Trump later explained that he meant disloyal to Israel. So here we have a twist on the old trope. In the president's mind, Jew's need to have a dual-loyalty. The president was condemning all Jews who vote Democratic as insufficiently loyal to a foreign nation!

This seemed strange to me, and stupid, with the odor of antisemitism (making generalizations about how all Jews ought to think, condemning them if they don't think that way) wafting through the Twittersphere.But then I remembered that Trump is an eager participant in the Identity Politics sweepstakes that now seems to dominate our electoral universe. This puts religious/ethnic/racial identity above all else, and encourages voters to think that way. These "identities" are essentially upstream from politics, they are a "first thing," and therefore should shape our responses to everything else. That seems to be the idea, anyway.

On the left, Blacks are encouraged to think this way and only this way, and I'm sure that many leftist politicians would think, if not say, that any Black voter who didn't think and vote accordingly was being, well, insufficiently loyal to his race. A similar way of thinking about Whites, which should logically follow, is however deemed racist. And to think that way about Jews, well it's clearly antisemitic.

What I am saying is, it's all a crock. You can't practice this particular brand of demagoguery for some and not expect your opponents to pick up the proverbial gauntlet themselves. Because, electorally speaking, it works. Or at least seems to for now.

I would posit that saying all Jews ought to think a certain way or be branded disloyal is, yes, antisemitic. It's generalizing about a large and diverse population, and insisting on conformity to your political view. But worse, it's insisting that, and expecting that, all Jews identify first as loyal to Israel and vote accordingly.

Identity Politics is not really a moral or ethical position, but simply a political tactic, useful to those seeking power. Trump knows he's not going to change the minds of the 79% of Jews who voted against him in the last election, but he also knows, or thinks he knows, that this kind of language will rally the White Evangelicals, many of whom support Israel. Apparently, he already has their vote, but he'd really like to legitimize through repetition the underlying presumptions of Identity Politics.

I call that a dangerous trend.