The Dishonesty of Hate

​Something interesting about hate is how much it relies on dishonesty, both internally and externally.  I think we naturally recoil at it – we have to learn to overcome our revulsion to its wrongness, to its irrationality and illogic, to the obvious pain it causes.  We face a choice and must either fight or embrace it, or ignore it (which is maybe another way of embracing it).

Today we see so clearly the many paths it travels, the murky ways it winds around the minds of our fellows and warps their thinking.  We see the phantasms is creates for them and which they try – often seemingly earnestly – to pass off upon others.  When I was young, I remember hearing a conservative critique about Black Entertainment Television (BET).  Why is it OK for there to be a BET but not a WET, a White Entertainment Television channel? 

Now, this was 30 years ago, and even then, as a teenager I knew enough of black history and the civil rights movement to know the obvious answer (which I won’t bother with here because it’s not even worth it).  This was not coming from an explicit white nationalist.  This was standard, basically mainstream – if a tad provocative – conservative thought.  You can still find this critique, and many worse examples on the mainstream right today.   The theme is always the same: to diminish, to deny, to denigrate the black experience of racism in America. 

The corkscrew turns of excuse-making and misdirection, of blame-shifting and all manner of fallacy spill out in a toxic mess of something called conservative ideology.  But it’s really just hate at its core.  Economics, psychology, criminal justice, genetics, evolution, education, religion and any other popular political subject gets bent into service.   

There is no science or research to back up any of it.  No lived experience.  No data.  Nothing expressed in art or poetry.  It is hate that is too ugly to be named outright.  And so it must be dressed up.  It must be hidden behind euphemism and implication, pseudoscientific hand-waving and misapplied academic imprimatur.   Over the years many tactics have been tried, and many have succeeded in subtly shifting the discourse. 

Something obvious to black Americans and minorities who experienced racism first hand didn’t need to learn to see it.  Those on the radical left who studied racism and bigotries could learn to see the connections.  But the assault was so broad and cacophonous, so subtle and hard to pin down.  Did they really mean that?  How could you know what is in a man’s heart?  It was hard to prove. 
 
Liberal tradition encourages pluralism and open-minded thought.  Bad ideas ought to be discussed.  Hold them in the light of truth so as to expose their flaws!  But there is a weakness to this tolerance.  Once an idea is shown to be clearly wrong, it is time to move on.  What hate is, what causes it and what perpetuates it has been clear enough for quite some time.  It is a hierarchy in which an arbitrary marker of some group is determined to be superior to another and thus deserving of more rights.  This has been, and remains one of humanity’s great evils.  We have codified it in law with the concept of Protected Classes: groups historical discriminated against on the basis of race, gender, sexuality, or other characteristics. 

And although, sadly, too many of us are denying even this truth, most still agree that this is wrong, that this is hate.  But hate isn’t honest.  Hate wears masks.  Hate deceives the wearer into believing the unthinkable: that they don’t hate.  “I am not a racist”, are words not uncommonly found coming from people who are indeed quite comfortable with racism.

So, as we see the modern conservative movement awash in open displays of brutal hatreds towards all manner of protected classes – President Trump seems to have a go at each one on an almost daily basis.  (As he has himself stated “I am the least racist person in the world”.)

It is my contention that the right wing has always given safe harbor to hate.  Even in its most charitable description, an ideology of free markets and limited government, it is essentially an ideology of protecting a system in which property owners can consolidate their wealth free from government interference.  History is clear that this leads directly to more and more accumulation of capital in the hands of fewer and fewer hands.  Capital, no more so than in the absence of government regulation, equates to power.  And given our country’s peculiar history of slavery and settler colonialism, Christianity and Jim Crow, we are literally talking about the consolidation of White Christian Power. 

There are stories you can tell about competition and free will and trickle-down theory and any number of other fantasies about “opportunity” and the “land of dreams”, and I’ll grant you that while some of it is debatable, much of it is complete bunk from a scientific perspective.  Conservatism has always been about telling a story to justify why those on top should feel OK being on top because those on the bottom deserve being there.
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But we’re all seeing more clearly than ever how much this was just a part of the lie.  The only difference now is that the movement felt the need to come out and say it out loud.  They want their White Entertainment Television and they don’t want to be ashamed about it.
Oh, and don’t complain.  They might just send you away.