The Rise of Political Hatred
An article in the Wall Street Journal last November by Peter Berkowitz, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, had a disturbing observation. After he had carefully explained to a group of politically liberal academics whom he was hosting for dinner that he was dismayed by the vitriolic hatred expressed in attacks upon President Bush, he was harangued by several of the guests. According to Berkowitz, one guest responded in a loud, seething, in-your-face voice, “What’s irrational about hating George W. Bush?”
Intellectuals in all civilizations have often been the most forceful exponents of political hatreds. Russia’s nineteenth-century revolutionaries of Narodnaya Volya (“People’s Will”) translated their venom into assassination attacks upon the Tsar—and Alexander II, “the great Emancipator” who freed Russia’s serfs in 1861 was assassinated by a revolutionary in 1862. Lenin was a quintessential intellectual who brought hatred to a new pitch of practical expression: terror as an instrument of revolutionary coercion. And the world is familiar today with the fact that the vast majority of the hate-filled practitioners of Islamist terror are college-educated intellectuals and professionals, from Ayman al-Zawahiri on down.
It is, however, profoundly disturbing that the emotion of hatred should have found a place of respectability in a constitutional republic like the United States, whose founders surely hoped that reason, persuasion by sound logic, and calm, would have more weight in the affairs of the nation than extreme emotion. It is even sadder that its place of honor is in the academy, where young minds are supposedly being shaped to face the complex challenges of the coming era.
In fairness, the hatred on the left today has been matched in the past—perhaps not usually in academe, but elsewhere—by hatred on the right. Americans now in their golden years can recall the venom directed against FDR for his “socialism” and the crude anti-Semitism of America’s arch-capitalist Henry Ford (1863–1947). In Germany, many of the earliest and most enthusiastic supporters of Hitler were also academics. But even during President Clinton’s eight years in office, when he was the daily target of dismay and criticism among conservatives, the “hatred” level was relatively low.
Arthur C. Brooks, in another Wall Street Journal article drew the attention of readers to a 2004 University of Michigan American National Election Studies survey of some 1,200 Americans. The survey tested the “temperature” of affection or hostility towards liberals of people who called themselves “very conservative,” and similarly the attitude towards conservatives of those who considered themselves “very liberal.” “Very conservative” people gave the left a thermometer score of 27, whereas the left gave the right a score of 23. Yet 60 percent of the far-left group gave President Bush a temperature score of 0. To put this in context, among ordinary Americans even Saddam Hussein, when alive, scored eight. At the present time, and despite claims by liberal film-maker Michael Moore that America’s “right wing” are “just a small minority of people who hate. They hate. They exist in the politics of hate . . . They are hate-triots,” it seems to be the left that has won the hatred stakes in America in the political arena.
Whether from the left or the right, however, hatred cannot possibly be an emotion that benefits the inhabitants of this nation or any nation in the world. When it reaches its full expression in any society, hatred usually ends up in one of three places: prison, the lunatic asylum, or the grave.
Dr. Aikman, a Senior Fellow of the Trinity Forum, was for many years senior correspondent for Time.
2 Responses (comments are closed) • Columns, David Aikman, Character and Ethics, Good and Evil, Society, Mon 04 Feb 2008
on 2008 02 15
Three problems with your article.
First, FDR’s policies were strongly socialist, so remove the quotes.
Secondly, Henry Ford was more left than right.
Third, Hitler was a far left socialist. He preached social justice, utopia, and nationalization of industry under a beneficent government. He was anti-semitic, but so was Lenin. Declaring fascism, a form of government that believes in government control of industry, the creation of welfare states, utopias and social justice right-wing is simply incorrect, even though it is conventional wisdom. You’ll find more in common between Hitler and Lenin than you will Hitler and John Adams or John Stuart Mill in philosophy and economics.