For The Love Of Hate

History reminds us that haters gonna hate.

We love to talk about how good we Americans are. We’re good citizens, we’re generous people, we’ve led the world in innovation for over a century. And while there is great truth to our generosity and to the many other accolades that recommend us as exceptional, there is a darker side that is rarely discussed openly. It is the strain of violence and hate that has been with us since the beginning.

Hate movements in our history range from the early settlers through the 19th Century killing and displacement of native Americans; through pogroms against Irish, Chinese, Italian, Japanese and Jewish immigrants; to the not once or twice, but three times resurgent Ku Klux Klan and the battle against equal rights for the formerly enslaved Black populace and their descendants; to the isolationist, racist antisemites of the John Birch Society, the Three Percenters, the Proud Boys, and the entire roster of haters and dividers.

The difference, historically, has been that those hateful impulses have been beaten back by our better angels, as Lincoln and Obama might say. Today, the question is whether our better angels can prevail again. The great uncertainty of our time is whether those for whom love powers life, or those whose lives are powered by hate, will prevail.

Today, if you hate women, gays, people of color, and liberals, here are the guys for you: Yes, they’re all White, they’re all guys, and, not coincidentally, they are the men the Former Guy lauded in a recent stump speech in Iowa. They need no introduction: they are Russia’s Putin, Hungary’s Orban, North Korea’s Un, and wildly, perhaps unintentionally, (although I doubt that), Adolph Hitler. They are only too happy to undermine democracy at home and abroad in the name of the Motherland, the Fatherland, Christianity, and whatever other forms of nationalism they champion.

The themes they have in common are that immigration poisons the blood of a nation (Hitler, Trump, Orban—Not Un, because nobody anywhere ever has wanted to emigrate to North Korea), that anything other than heterosexuality is unnatural and against God; they all—again except Un, although, who really knows what goes on there—want to “preserve the natural order” which is of course the order they control. They all disdain a free media. Here, you can add to the list Iran, India, Saudi Arabia, Myanmar, China, and all the other authoritarian countries where dictators dare not let people express themselves freely. 

After Trump’s Iowa stump speech, the White House issued this statement: “Echoing the grotesque rhetoric of fascists and violent white supremacists and threatening to oppress those who disagree with the government are dangerous attacks on the dignity and rights of all Americans, on our democracy, and on public safety…. It’s the opposite of everything we stand for as Americans.”

What that it were true that these things are un-American. Sadly, they are all very American. Thankfully, they have never—including now—been the majority view.

In the past, the enslavers and the bigots like Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, George Wallace, and David Duke, were drowned out by the good-hearted Americans in churches, synagogues, mosques, the mainstream media, judges, juries, and elected officials, who all believed in the Originalist idea that all men are created equal.

The fear among those paying attention and not assaulting the Capitol to stop the peaceful transfer of power for the first time in our history, is that today is different. There is no historical analogue to media outlets that support and spread hate and conspiracy theories. Sure, you had the Dearborn Independent, Henry Ford’s antisemitic newspaper that peaked at over a million subscribers in 1927, and the first mass media demagogue, Father Charles Coughlin, flung vitriol against the Jews every Sunday night on the radio for the better part of the 1930’s.

Those were dangerous, hate-spewing men (always men, by the way) who sank their teeth into us, and had big platforms for a time, but media was limited. The barriers to entry were immense amounts of money like Ford had, or government regulators who policed the airwaves, a collective asset belonging to all Americans. Neither Coughlin or Ford had the impact of today’s multiplicity of hateful outlets, which when aggregated and amplified by social media, have unprecedented reach.

In the 1930’s, Congress chartered The Federal Communications Commission to ensure that no entity had too great a “share-of-voice.” The Fairness Doctrine forced stations to air all sides of contentious issues. Ronald Reagan did away with the Fairness Doctrine in the 1980’s, and the Modern Age of Demagoguery began with Rush Limbaugh, whose act saved the dying AM radio band, and inspired an entire bramble bush full of hateful wannabes.

We say that this is not who we are, but this is exactly who we’ve always been.

May our better angels continue to prevail.

2023 Jon Sinton