Ending the rampant hate running through America
By Tom Krattenmaker
USA Today, November 12, 2020
In this dangerous post-election election moment, hate is hanging in the air. It’s so thick you can cut it with a knife and eat it with a fork. I’m afraid many of us are finding it a little too tasty.
We must spit it out before it’s too late. Because once swallowed, hate can only nourish our capacity for more hate — and the violence to which unleashed hatred can easily lead.
There might seem to be plenty of reason to hate right now. We see the other side of the political battle trying to steal the election, crush our side and the values we hold dear, ruin the country and our cherished institutions — destroy our way of life. It seems very clear that “they” hate us. How can we not hate “them”?
As a candidate and president, Donald Trump has given people more of a license to hate, never more so than with his foul, lie-spewing conduct since his election defeat. Not that the country was hate-free before Trump. But he has raised the fever to alarming new heights, forever using labels like “evil” and “enemy” for the people and institutions he is constantly battling. The hate manifests in menacing spectacles liked armed protesters stalking polling places and election officials — even Republicans — receiving death threats during the drawn-out vote-counting.
There’s a t-shirt for sale on the web that succinctly describes the force that animates these ugly scenes: “I hate liberals.”
Of course, if you ask conservatives, they’ll tell you the liberals are the real haters. The left, Hoover Institution fellow Shelby Steele argues, is fueled by hate, forever scrounging for dubious moral outrages it can latch onto and leverage to demonize conservatives and gain power.
Steele is wrong — injustice is real and needs to be confronted — but it’s not hard to find examples of liberals dispensing rather than receiving the hate.
There’s a Facebook group goes by the name “I hate Trump supporters.” The rapper Iggy Azalea says, “If you like (Trump) then I hate you.” The Reddit user Wonder_Hippie writes, “I can’t shake the impression that Trump supporters are worthless at best and actively malignant at worst. I really can’t bring myself to feel anything but hatred for them.”
I can’t tell you how to feel, Wonder_Hippie, but this much I’ll say: Voicing hatred of Trumpies plays right into their hands. And even if your hatred feels well-earned, it does no good.
The Christians who make up the country’s religious majority ought to know better than to hate. As Yale Divinity School theologian Willie James Jennings points out, anger is entirely appropriate, even righteous, in the face of injustice. The problem is hatred — the hatred of other people, specifically. Jennings says, “It is simply Jesus. For the Christian, Jesus stands between anger and hatred, prohibiting the reach, blocking the touch and saying to us, ‘Don’t go there. There is nothing there but death.'”
The world’s other major religions and wisdom traditions teach against hate. And all who profess humane values, religious or not, should be guided by humanism’s vision of a world of mutual care and concern where differences are resolved cooperatively, without violence. There is no role for hate in a world like that.
However justified it might be — however galvanizing it might feel in the moment — hate warps and destroys, sender and recipient alike. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was right when he famously wrote: “He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster.”
To reject hate does not mean we must compromise our core principles. For liberals, it does not require us to tolerate racism, attacks on democracy, or other forms of injustice and wrongdoing for the sake of “getting along.” It does not mean foregoing the prosecution of those who break laws if the evidence warrants, even if they currently occupy the highest position in the land.
Rejecting hate does not require us to accept the dangerous, deceitful game that Trump and his cronies are playing in the aftermath of the election with their reckless no-evidence claims of large-scale voter fraud, or their refusal to cooperate with the presidential transition. They must accept the people’s verdict and do their duty, now.
What a no-hate commitment does compel us to do is simply remember the humanity of the everyday people with whom we compete in the political arena and to speak of them, and interact with them, in a way that lets them know they are not dirt to us. As President-elect Biden called for in his acceptance speech Saturday night, we need to “see each other again, to listen to each other again.”
We need to abide by the teaching Biden absorbed from his mother: I am no better than anybody else. And I am no worse.
We must reserve our hate for hateful ideas, hateful rhetoric, and hateful actions. Not for people, who, when we strap our generosity, we can see as products of their environment, of their fears and traumas, of misinformation and bad understandings force-fed to them by “leaders” who only lead them astray.
Political fighting often brings out the worst in people. So, you must remember there is more to someone than the fact they’re a Biden or Trump supporter, liberal or conservative. They are also someone’s valued co-worker, friend, neighbor, aunt, uncle, cousin, grandparent, sibling, spouse, kid, or parent. Maybe yours.
Hate the hate but never the “hater.” Because hating other people won’t get us anywhere we want to go.
A member of USA Today’s Board of Contributors, Tom Krattenmaker writes on religion and values in public life. His most recent book is Confessions of a Secular Jesus Follower. Follow him on Twitter: @TKrattenmaker