The disease of political hatred

As the vitriol, invective, and dishonest attacks against Sarah Palin continue to come from the Left, demonstrating that their determination to destroy her remains high—and as she continues to refuse to fight hatred with hatred and vitriol with vitriol, which is one of the reasons I support her as strongly as I do—I can’t help thinking yet again of what a disease hatred has become in our politics in this country. It’s hard to believe, from a rational perspective, that this is really what our politics has come to, that some people in this country hate others because they don’t like their views on tax policy, or immigration, or foreign policy, or gay marriage; but sadly, it has.

I can remember, more times than I can count, hearing people denounce George W. Bush as a thief, a liar, and an abuser of presidential authority, but most of the folks who made those accusations didn’t dislike him for those reasons. Sure, there were probably some who did, but for most, it was the other way around. That’s why is why people who wrote off President Clinton’s perjury then waxed furious against President Bush for lying to the American people—which if true put him in the company of FDR and Lincoln, among others—while others who wanted President Clinton impeached turned around to defend President Bush; it’s also why many who spent 2001-08 screaming bloody murder about “the imperial Presidency” and declaiming that the president should be impeached for “destroying the Constitution” are now perfectly happy as Barack Obama continues to expand executive power. If you want defenders of congressional prerogatives (outside Congress itself, anyway), you’ll have to look on the Right. The hypocrisy here—which is not confined to one side, by any means—is enough to make you gag.

The key thing about all these charges and denunciations is that people’s views of them tend to be defined by their politics, not the other way around. That’s why criticizing Clinton’s character never worked for the Republicans, and it’s why accusing Bush of lying didn’t work for the Democrats (it was the specter of losing in Iraq, combined with the Katrina fiasco, that killed his administration): in our current political climate, for far too many people, only the politics matter.

Those on our side (whichever one that is) are the white hats who can do no wrong, and we love them; those on the other side are the black hats who do everything from evil motives, and we hate them. If the other side lies, cheats, and steals, we proclaim it from the housetops. If our side does, well, the other side reporting it just proves what rotten people they are. Not everybody takes this approach, of course—to give conservatives credit, the reaction to the Ensign and Sanford scandals has been encouragingly different in many quarters—but more often than not, this is American politics in the early 21st century.

Of course, this is nothing new; much the same could have been said about American politics across much of the 19th century, which gave us our first presidential assassination and most of the dirtiest presidential elections in our history. For that matter, it was nothing new then, either; so it has been, I expect, in pretty much every society or group that has politics, at least some of the time. I’m not accusing contemporary America of any sort of new or different sin. But that doesn’t mean we don’t need to do something about it—hatred is a sickness that could eat our country hollow from the inside, if we let it.

We need to start to fight this—and by we I don’t mean somebody out there, I mean us, the common folks, the ordinary barbarians of this country. This isn’t going to be solved by politicians, or the media, or any of the rest of our country’s elite—from their perspective, that would be counterproductive; after all, as long as they can exploit the hatred so many people have been taught to feel for their own ends, they’re going to carry right on doing so (and exacerbating it in the process). The only way to begin to break down this culture of animosity is to do it at the grassroots level, following the example of (of all people) David Mamet:

Prior to the midterm elections, my rabbi was taking a lot of flack. The congregation is exclusively liberal, he is a self-described independent (read “conservative”), and he was driving the flock wild. Why? Because a) he never discussed politics; and b) he taught that the quality of political discourse must be addressed first—that Jewish law teaches that it is incumbent upon each person to hear the other fellow out.

And so I, like many of the liberal congregation, began, teeth grinding, to attempt to do so. . . .

The right is mooing about faith, the left is mooing about change, and many are incensed about the fools on the other side—but, at the end of the day, they are the same folks we meet at the water cooler.

We need to do the same with those who disagree with us—not to change our minds, but to build relationships with our political opponents and listen to them respectfully, such that they know that we take their concerns seriously and with real care for what they think and feel and believe; that’s the only way we’re ever going to convince those across the political divide to do the same for us. We need to set aside the goal of changing people’s opinions—that might happen, but it shouldn’t be the purpose of conversation—and seek instead to change the way people hold their opinions, by building a spirit of disagreement in mutual understanding and respect.

The more we can do that, the worse it will be for our politicians—but the better it will be for us.