I don’t find hate interesting, in terms of understanding modern politics and society.
Yes, hatred of your enemy is bad. Everyone seems to know that. That’s why every ideological writer quotes and links to every hateful diatribe by randos on the other side they can find. “Look at all the hate spewed by that arab / trumpkin / black teenager / Republican toady!” And there are links to statements and actions that do seem very hateful.
But nowadays everyone knows this sort of gratuitous hatred is wrong, which is why we leap on it so quickly. Even the allies of the hate-spewer try to ignore it, or defend it as an “understandable” reaction to states of stress or frustration. Maybe it’s a tolerable indulgence, but that’s as respectable as we treat hatred. At least in modern liberal discourse, hatred by your side is an embarrassment and it’s hard to use it as justification for change in policy or convincing others. You can’t use it to convince or bully someone who doesn’t want to agree with you, not consistently.
If we want an emotion that can be used to dehumanize your enemy, ignore all logic and evidence, and demand everything you want without tradeoffs - well the effective emotion to use there is fear.
Fear is mainstream acceptable. If you show your fear of the Muslim terrorists or Republican racists or of not being able to walk on the streets at night, you’ll get sympathy. People may disagree with your fear, but they won’t delegitimize your emotions like they do with hate. They want to comfort you and calm you down. No one wants to get in an argument about facts or civil liberties with someone who is fearing for their safety!
(You’ll note the “not being able to walk on the streets at night” is a fear used by social justice liberals talking about men, or conservatives talking about black men.)
And there’s a fascinating amount of parallelism in the way people talk about fear. You all remember the clock-boy fiasco some years who, when a Muslim boy came into school with a clock he made, and was arrested for having a bomb. Did you see the letter the school used to explain its very dumb reaction?
We always ask our students and staff to immediately report if they observe any suspicious items and/or suspicious behavior. If something is out of the ordinary, the information should be reported immediately to a school administrator and/or the police so it can be addressed right away. We will always take necessary precautions to protect our students and keep our school community as safe as possible.”
There’s no justification based on evidence, or even an apology. There’s only the logic that “we felt unsafe. So that explains anything we did to protect our students.” The logic of exclusion no longer counts the accused boy within “our students” who are to be protected of course.
This is not to hate on conservatives. Look at the way some liberals are reacting to the 2016 election.
This is completely detached from reality, or from treating the object of your fear like a goddamn human being. In effect, it is just as bad as hatred. In our society, it’s even worse because people are much less likely to challenge it. Just imagine what this guy would justify doing to this phantom Trump voter now - segregation, humiliation, punishment, you name it.
Sure your political enemies will laugh and laugh at your pants-wetting, but your allies and moderates will take it seriously. They are full of compassion and won’t stop to check evidence or follow due process when such palpable, painful fear is in play.
So you’re not going to find on this blog me making fun of other tumblrs that spew hate - that’s fish in a barrel and they are just minority outliers. I am much more interested in the logic of fear, and posts that try to argue based on that emotion. There is where ideology finds its power now.
And on a personal level, don’t pat yourself on the back so much for never being hateful (like your enemies.) Work on reducing how much you feel fear of them, and how often you use that fear as justification for attacks on them.
(This is not to say that all avoidance of dangerous things is bad. There’s just a big difference between “I have weighed the risks and I decide I don’t want to do this” and “Look I don’t care what the numbers say, I just feel unsafe around people like X, and I want you to keep them away from me.” See @ozymandias271 on Risk Management.)
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