Maybe you’re aware that lots of complete strangers virtually hate you now.
This is the case if you are a Democrat or a Republican, a conservative or a liberal. In the inflamed-opinion era, other political, religious and social identities also attract high levels of hatred, which now includes comedy that’s usually more vicious than funny. But the Democratic left and Republican right have become the main objects of hatred — also the subjects.
This phenomenon is especially easy to recognize if you return the hatred. (Come on, now, commune with your choler!)
And don’t think you can take the bullseye of hate-worthiness off your back by being some type of moderate. Many Republican pundits hate nobody as much as a squishy Republican who doesn’t eat enough ideological red meat or support every tax cut. Many Democrats now seethe at their dwindling brethren who still see socialism as having certain Venezuela-esque drawbacks, believing those old-school non-progressive fools deserve even more rage than Republicans do.
(Cut Democrats a break. They assumed the presidency was Hillary’s entitlement. They’re still clinically depressed.)
Is there an easy way to tone down all this ideological hatred? Probably not. It’s well supported.
The ideological crusading of three cable news channels is conquering the news industry, much as Amazon is conquering retail stores. The fuel for this crusade is provided by marketing and money. If by chance you’ve been unwise enough to spend your career in marketing / advertising and haven’t made a lot of money at it, you might ruefully recognize how powerful marketing and money are. What’s worse, you’re like me.
Here’s a small suggestion for tempering general political hatred. It’s just a matter of names, but it might help.
Let’s start by dismissing the names Republican and Democrat. They’ve both become anachronisms.
The old Republican Party was the party of Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and only 44 years ago some brave senators responsible for getting core civil rights legislation passed over the absolute opposition of Dixiecrats, including Al Gore’s father, who threw a filibustering fit. Republicans’ current devotion to civic justice is manifested by their fondness for cheap labor (which is why some of them remain quietly conflicted on enforcement of immigration law) and the defense of big money in various encampments.
The Democratic Party of well-intended idealism — the party of Harry Truman, Jack Kennedy, Sam Ervin, and Eugene McCarthy — has morphed into something that would shout down those four or any other principled traditional liberal whose reincarnation wandered into one of their fury fests. The party’s primary remaining fight for justice demands the cushy early retirement of the over-populated armies of government paycheck cashers and the continuing mass importation of indentured voters. Although this assimilation of voters takes time, the urgency for the party to maintain a stream of new voters is great, since so many citizens who are outside the public sector or have an identity not favored by Democrats no longer trust them.
Hey, at least Chamber of Commerce-type Republicans and almost all Democrats have something in common now: taking advantage of desperate immigrants.
That leaves us with conservatives and liberals. (To paraphrase a wisecrack in a Salinger novel: No quotation marks. I’ll spare you that.)
Let’s dump those terms too. Contemporary conservatives have too often pushed policies that do not conserve assets — economically, diplomatically, or in realistic military commitment. Liberals keep getting more dogmatically illiberal, bullying especially on campuses to silence the occasional heretic and now even going Lester Maddox in restaurants. Furious calls for political mob violence don’t seem entirely harmonious with traditional liberalism.
Since both parties have degenerated into nasty bands of K Street conduits and special pleading, let’s stop focusing on Republicans and Democrats. Let’s also move away from the terms conservative and liberal. How about new terms — new teams, if you need a team?
Jeffersonians and Hamiltonians.
This might provide several civic benefits:
- Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton are often identified by historians and political theorists as polar representatives of American democracy: Jefferson, decentralized government; Hamilton, strong federal authority. Though there is truth to this identification, the policies and philosophies of these great men are considerably more complicated than that. But even those complications have value.
- The primary complication, of course, was slavery. Jefferson recognized the moral evil of slavery but was himself a slaveholder and almost certainly the father of a child of one of his slaves. Hamilton was ideologically an abolitionist but his own family’s economy and his political positions on slavery were not quite as uplifting and ovation-worthy as a hit Broadway show. Sounds like a cautionary precursor of our latter conflicts on race and social order, doesn’t it?
- You know people who are absolutely certain of the rightness of their political beliefs — of being a Republican or a Democrat, a conservative or liberal. How many of them know the nuanced philosophies and politics of Jefferson and Hamilton? Wouldn’t most benefit from a bit of historical education and reflection?
- Yes, the monster hit musical Hamilton, cross-marketing 18th century populism and 21st century hip-hop, is selling out $600 tickets. But couldn’t these well-heeled “progressive” thinkers be encouraged to actually study the history of Hamilton, as opposed to acquiring their understanding of American history and politics from show business and cable TV? Re-identifying political preferences as “Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian” might encourage partisans to read and think, rather than just stare at Fox or MSNBC and wave signs.
- How many admirers of Jefferson understand what his great biographer Christopher Hitchens grasped: After noting that Jefferson effectively designed America, or “authored” it, Hitchens added: “Jefferson did not embody contradiction. Jefferson was a contradiction . . . .”
- So, before reflexively cheering for one’s home team or expressing hatred for the other team, those in the Jeffersonian-vs.-Hamiltonian debate might be encouraged to read, think, decide for themselves, re-examine their own assumptions and beliefs. Wouldn’t that be interesting? Maybe even less hateful?