“Living in a Time of Political Hatred” Sydney Williams
http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com
“Let no man pull you so low as to hate him.” Sermon: “A Knock at Midnight,” 1958 Martin Luther King
“I hate you!” Who has not screamed that invective, or had it directed at them? It is generally short-lived, an intense, emotional response to an accusation, characterized by anger, contempt and/or disgust.
Such words are usually directed toward specific individuals, things, or ideas. In most cases those feelings are ephemeral. But I write about what I call ‘institutional’ (for lack of a better term) hatred, where an individual or group deliberately foments hatred toward a person, race, ethnicity, or nation. Time is a healer, even of ‘institutional’ hatred. Bill Clinton was despised by Republicans during the 1990s, and as Matthew Hennessey wrote in last Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal: “Hate is too mild a word for how Democrats felt about George W. Bush while he was in the Oval Office.” Today, in both cases, hatred has vanished.
But such hatred is not always transient. Blacks were hated by many in this Country for decades, culminating in the white-robed Ku Klux Klan, whose remnants still exist. The consequences were the killings – many by lynchings – of tens of thousands of black Americans. For more than ten years, from the mid 1930s through May 1945, Nazis maintained a nation-wide hatred toward Jews and others they classified as undesirable. The consequence was that between fifteen and twenty million civilians were imprisoned, tortured, mutilated and/or murdered, in a network of over 44,000 Concentration Camps scattered across occupied Europe.
Hatred clouds reason. Hatred of Jews is what the Nazis employed to get ordinary citizens to go along with their despicable extermination policies. Reason, on the other hand, is what permitted the Allies to ultimately defeat Nazism. Hatred has returned today, in much of the West, in the anti-Semitism that has infiltrated college campuses, in political speech, and in the language of Podcasters. “Open Jew hatred,” wrote Alvin Rosenfeld in last Monday’s Wall Street Journal, “is also politically mainstream, with ‘free Palestine’ and ‘globalize the intifada’ now a key part of the left’s political agenda.” The call by French President Emmanuel Macron, British Prime minister Keir Starmer, and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney to have their countries recognize a Palestine state before there is one reflects hatred toward Israel. The meaning of ‘globalize the intifada’ is clear: Kill the Jews. While Israel has been winning militarily, Hamas is winning the public relations war.
Here in the U.S., hatred’s most common target today is President Trump, an easy person to demagogue, as his language and actions are often goofy and/or intemperate. This hatred is manifested in opposition to anything he supports or does. In the August 2, 2025 issue of American Greatness, Stephen Soukup wrote: “The left’s hatred [of President Trump] is more powerful than any instinct it might have to do the right thing.” That hatred is displayed by those rallying against the deportation of criminal illegal migrants, and by those opposed to Israel’s war against Hamas. It motivates those who blame man for all climate change and stirs up those who support gender-affirming surgeries. Will Weissert of the Associated Press recently quoted a fifteen-year-old girl from Scotland who was protesting President Trump’s visit to Scotland: “We don’t negotiate with fascists…So many people here loathe him…We’re not divided…We’re just here because we hate him.” One hopes she is instructed on the history of fascism, what its aims, goals and means were. Nevertheless, hatred for Mr. Trump is not new. It began ten years ago when he descended the escalator at Trump Tower in New York City to announce his run for President. It was revealed in the fake accusations by the Clinton campaign about Russian “collusion.” It led to the refusal of the media to acknowledge that Hunter Biden’s lap-top was real. I have friends who, to this today, cannot speak the name Trump without a grimace. He is not my favorite politician, but I do not hate him, and I believe he loves his Country. I experienced hatred nine years ago when I refused to join the cortège of those who wished to bury his nascent political career. But hatred is not the exclusive domain of the Left. MAGA extremists are equally vituperative. We hear it in the voices of many conservative commentators, and in the expressions of those who rail against all immigrants. But it is most powerful on the left.
Mainstream media, threatened with irrelevance, exploits and encourages this scourge of hatred, falsely seeing it as a means to stay relevant. They know their business models are in trouble. Fifty years ago the daily news viewership of the three main networks – CBS, NBC and ABC – was approximately 70 million people, or roughly 30% of the population. Today combined network and cable news programs capture about 30 million viewers, or less than 10% of the population. Newspapers have suffered similarly. In 1975, approximately 62 million newspapers were printed daily. Today that number is less than 25 million. Now, most get their news from social media accounts, like X, Facebook, Instagram and from Podcasts. People listen to what augments their prejudices and not to what challenges their predilections, so these platforms become breeding grounds for polarization and hatred. It is why Alex Jones on the right and Rachel Maddow on the left remain popular, but only with those who share their views. Ironically, greater choice in news has increased our division.
In her novel White Oleander, `Janet Fitch wrote: “Isn’t it funny. I’m enjoying my hatred so much more than I ever enjoyed love. Love is temperamental. Tiring. It makes demands. Love uses you, changes its mind. But hatred, now, that’s something you can use…It’s hard, or soft, however you need it. Love humiliates you, but Hatred cradles you.” I think she is wrong, but her words reflect today’s culture. C.S. Lewis warned in Mere Christianity that there is a tendency among people to cling to bad stories of people they detest, to “wish that black was a little blacker, [then] we shall see grey as black…Finally we shall insist on seeing everything – God and our friends and ourselves included – as bad.” I suspect he is right; it is something to guard against.
Can we return to a time when respect and tolerance were common? Thirty-six years after he had been freed from slavery, Booker T. Washington wrote in his autobiographical story, Up from Slavery, a remarkable sentiment we should all feel – and one that anticipated by fifty years Martin Luther King’s words in the epigraph that heads this essay: “I will permit no man to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him.” While the Bible advises us to abhor what is evil, it warns against harboring hatred in one’s heart. It tells us to hold fast to what is good. Two and a half years ago I wrote an essay titled, “Hatred and the Curse of Identity Politics: “Man is perhaps the only species that kills and destroys its own kind out of pure hatred.” Man is also the only creature capable of reason and love, so perhaps there is hope.
The goal of ‘institutional’ hatred is power, to be rid of those who stand in their way. The consequences are alienation, division, distrust and polarization. As humans, we have been endowed with emotions and with the ability to reason. In our polarized environment, we run the risk that the emotional response of ‘institutional’ hatred supersedes our willingness to listen, to debate – to reason. We must not let that happen.
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