Why the Left Is Consumed With Hate
Lacking worthy menaces to fight, it is driven to find a replacement for racism. Failing this, what is left?
Even before President Trump’s election, hatred had begun to
emerge on the American left—counterintuitively, as an assertion of
guilelessness and moral superiority. At the Women’s March in Washington
the weekend after Mr. Trump’s inauguration, the pop star Madonna said,
“I have thought an awful lot of blowing up the White House.” Here hatred
was a vanity, a braggadocio meant to signal her innocence of the sort
of evil that, in her mind, the White House represented. (She later said
the comment was “taken wildly out of context.”) For many on the left a hateful
anti-Americanism has become a self-congratulatory lifestyle. “America
was never that great,” New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo recently said. For
radical groups like Black Lives Matter, hatred of America is a theme of
identity, a display of racial pride.For other leftists, hate is a license. Conservative speakers
can be shouted down, even assaulted, on university campuses. Republican
officials can be harassed in restaurants, in the street, in front of
their homes. Certain leaders of the left—Rep. Maxine Waters comes to
mind—are self-appointed practitioners of hate, urging their followers to
think of hatred as power itself.How did the American left—conceived to bring more compassion
and justice to the world—become so given to hate? It began in the 1960s,
when America finally accepted that slavery and segregation were
profound moral failings. That acceptance changed America forever. It
imposed a new moral imperative: America would have to show itself
redeemed of these immoralities in order to stand as a legitimate
democracy.The genius of the left in the ’60s was simply to perceive the
new moral imperative, and then to identify itself with it. Thus the
labor of redeeming the nation from its immoral past would fall on the
left. This is how the left put itself in charge of America’s moral
legitimacy. The left, not the right—not conservatism—would set the terms
of this legitimacy and deliver America from shame to decency.This bestowed enormous political and cultural power on the
American left, and led to the greatest array of government-sponsored
social programs in history—at an expense, by some estimates, of more
than $22 trillion. But for the left to wield this power, there had to be
a great menace to fight against—a tenacious menace that kept America
uncertain of its legitimacy, afraid for its good name.This amounted to a formula for power: The greater the menace to
the nation’s moral legitimacy, the more power redounded to the left.
And the ’60s handed the left a laundry list of menaces to be defeated.
If racism was necessarily at the top of the list, it was quickly
followed by a litany of bigotries ending in “ism” and “phobia.”The left had important achievements. It did rescue America from
an unsustainable moral illegitimacy. It also established the great
menace of racism as America’s most intolerable disgrace. But the left’s
success has plunged it into its greatest crisis since the ’60s. The
Achilles’ heel of the left has been its dependence on menace for power.
Think of all the things it can ask for in the name of fighting menaces
like “systemic racism” and “structural inequality.” But what happens
when the evils that menace us begin to fade, and then keep fading?It is undeniable that America has achieved since the ’60s one
of the greatest moral evolutions ever. That is a profound problem for
the left, whose existence is threatened by the diminishment of racial
oppression. The left’s unspoken terror is that racism is no longer
menacing enough to support its own power. The great crisis for the left
today—the source of its angst and hatefulness—is its own encroaching
obsolescence. Today the left looks to be slowly dying from lack of
racial menace.A single white-on-black shooting in Ferguson, Mo., four years
ago resulted in a prolonged media blitz and the involvement of the
president of the United States. In that same four-year period, thousands
of black-on-black shootings took place in Chicago, hometown of the
then-president, yet they inspired very little media coverage and no
serious presidential commentary.White-on-black shootings evoke America’s history of racism and
so carry an iconic payload of menace. Black-on-black shootings carry no
such payload, although they are truly menacing to the black community.
They evoke only despair. And the left gets power from fighting white
evil, not black despair.Today’s left lacks worthy menaces to fight. It is driven to
find a replacement for racism, some sweeping historical wrongdoing that
morally empowers those who oppose it. (Climate change?) Failing this,
only hatred is left. Hatred is a transformative power. It can make the innocuous
into the menacing. So it has become a weapon of choice. The left has
used hate to transform President Trump into a symbol of the new racism,
not a flawed president but a systemic evil. And he must be opposed as
one opposes racism, with a scorched-earth absolutism. For Martin Luther King Jr., hatred was not necessary as a means
to power. The actual details of oppression were enough. Power came to
him because he rejected hate as a method of resisting menace. He called
on blacks not to be defined by what menaced them. Today, because menace
provides moral empowerment, blacks and their ostensible allies indulge
in it. The menace of black victimization becomes the unarguable truth of
the black identity. And here we are again, forever victims. Yet the left is still stalked by obsolescence. There is simply
not enough menace to service its demands for power. The voices that
speak for the left have never been less convincing. It is hard for
people to see the menace that drives millionaire football players to
kneel before the flag. And then there is the failure of virtually every
program the left has ever espoused—welfare, public housing, school
busing, affirmative action, diversity programs, and so on.
