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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.
For the American left today, the indulgence in hate is a death rattle.
Mr. Steele, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, is author of “Shame: How America’s Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country” (Basic Books, 2015).
An insightful essay.
The point is clearly true: the left needs to find witches to burn even when none exist, in order to justify their own dictatorial power to defeat witches.
Without witches, they have no power.
America is and was founded on the values of equality and even so, the vast and increasing inequality of America today injures us all, meaning inequality narrows our horizons, shortens our lives, steals our freedoms, etc.
There is nothing on the right except relentless pursuit of cheaper labor, return on investments, shareholder value, all you need to crucify our country with. These false gods have captured our representation and turned it against us all. We must all correct this travesty before we lose ownership of the government. (and that time seems to be coming fast)
jazz_music sayspursuit of cheaper labor, return on investments, shareholder valuSounds like a plan.
Straight out of the Democrat playbook Rules for Radicals.
the left needs to find witches to burn even when none exist
https://outline.com/TXW6L8
So... do you REALLY think "the left" is making up issues out of whole cloth,Yes, whatever works, doesn't matter. It's Saul--patron saint of losers--Alinsky in action.
... because the working people of this country matter and they shall not be relegated to poverty and death.
The love of money
It disables both eyes and ears, and makes men worse to deal with than a wild beast, allowing a man to consider neither conscience nor friendship nor fellowship nor salvation.
This love of money is the curse of an American, and for the sake of it men will sell honor and honesty, till we don't know whom to trust.
Go ahead, laugh. Hahaha
Patrick saysthe left needs to find witches to burn even when none exist
"sandalistas"=people who went to El Salvador to help the revolution by picking coffee or something.Before that it was trips to Cuba to help harvest the sugar cane. Diana Oughton, Billy Ayers' GF made one of those trips before she blew herself and two other bomb makers up in the New York townhouse as they fashioned a bomb to set off at a Naval Reserve dance that night. I'm sure they wanted to free Tibet as well.
Also why the left loves Obama who in the same situation says things like "the average person is too small minded to govern themselves. In order to have globalism we must all give up sovereign rights."
Funny how Trump said “hire Americans “ and the left screamed “omg our diversity is under attack!!!
income inequalityWhen have we not had income inequality?
high military spendingThe main purpose of government.
climate changeEnvironmentalism/Global Warming, call it what you like, it's the bandwagon on which the orphaned Marxists from the collapsed Soviet Union have been clambering for the past 25 years. We defeated communism on the national level, but we didn't eliminate the impulses of envy and resentment that animated it for 70 plus years. Those impulses live on in individuals who still believe the state is the highest source of human good and they intend to make it prevail one way or another.
After all, it was "the moral majority" and fundamentalist Christians with their virtue signaling that succeeded in taking government power away from the democrats, decades ago.
You really need to lay off the dishonest propaganda. It's basically the opposite of what Obama said. Do you have no pride whatsoever in telling the truth ?
Ok go ahead and show us your pride in truth telling w the exact quote
Dumbass.
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