American-on-American Hatred

[babylonsister]

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/jedediah_purdy/2007/10/one_of_the_standard_complaints.html

Can't talk the talk

The more US politicians speak about community and responsibility, the more Americans are coming to hate each other.
Jedediah Purdy


One of the standard complaints about Hillary Clinton's candidacy is that she reminds everyone of 15 years of partisan anger. Like Pavlov's bells, the story goes, she starts Americans salivating over mental maps of red and blue. There's something to that. Many Bush supporters loathed both Clintons, and liberals have amply returned the sentiment since 2000.

But bitter partisan division isn't a genetic disorder of the country's two dynastic houses, the hemophilia of 21st-century American politics. Something else links the Clintons and Bushes, and it's a basic problem for anyone who wants to be the next president: they share an exhausted political language, with no way of talking about the dignity of citizenship or the common good. The hatred is partly a substitute for lack of more important things to fight over.

snip//

Before all that, presidential language was political language. "Service" and "responsibility" referred to the duties of the office. "Community" was not a moral term. "Virtue," that old word which recent presidents mean although they don't say it, meant civic virtue, not personal goodness.

That doesn't mean that American politics has spent much time in a golden era. Lots of political visions have been shoddy, like Grover Cleveland's defence of laissez-faire capitalism as the heart of liberty, or disastrous, like Teddy Roosevelt's praise of a bloody American nation-building project conducted in the teeth of a tribal and Muslim insurgency. (No, that was the Philippines.) It does mean, though, that our political language is a new kind of cop-out. Bush's one major effort, his wish to be a "war president," says nothing about the lives of most citizens except that, when political questions arise, they should defer to their leaders and not ask hard questions.

Political language tells people what, if anything, government has to do with the things that palpably matter in their lives: safety, opportunity, personal freedom, duty. It connects citizenship with dignity. It ties personal existence to a national story and suggests how each can contribute to the other. Major reforms, important projects, re-aligning partisan divides are all that much harder without a language that can make these connections.

When political vision is basically personal, it's no surprise that people love and hate presidents - and other partisans - in personalized ways. That's what marked the politics of the 1990s and the Bush years except for the war: triviality veined with hatred, futility inflated by platitudes. Yes, Hillary will remind us of this. So will any candidate who can't do better. It is, unfortunately, what we are now in together.

[Dhalgren]

1. We didn't start the hating. No Liberal said that right-wingers should

be hunted with dogs and killed - that was the right against the left. They began to hate us because we were better than them. We made them look like fools and charlatans; we made them feel like cads, creeps and slime-balls: and they began to hate us. They didn't realize that we didn't make them feel that way...they WERE that way. We just made them know it...

[babylonsister]

3. I think you're wrong in thinking it's only a rethug thing. It's now a

societal thing, regardless of who is or was at fault. We need to get back to basics.

[Dhalgren]

13. I never said "rethug" - I said "left and right".

We will never get back to basics - ever. You can't make up with some one who hates you for who you are. The left often hates the right for what the right does, the right hates the left for who they are. I can't see this ever getting back to just Republicans and Democrats, disagreeing as friends. We have become separate nations...

[Igel]

4. Dunno 'bout that.

The dislike of Reagan was pretty intense and thorough-going. I know a lot of people that revelled in calling him a "hater", mean-spirited and, well, evil. No "let's sic dogs on him" talk, but pretty bad. I remember my ma--a dem from birth--having only hate for the mean, puppy-killing murderer-wannabe who wanted to subjugate women and take away all their stuff just because that's how he gets his jollies, all the while saying, of course, that she could *never* hate anybody, she's the sweetest and most caring thing. (At that point my father, who was a "hater", had a bad temper, and yet never mentioned politics ... self-preservation would kick in about then ... would simply leave the room. My mother would yell after him, "And you're just like him and can't bear to hear the truth." Ah, family life.)

And let's not forget the vitriol heaped on old "rabbit-fighting" Carter. Conservatives had no use for him. More disgust and loathing than hate, so not quite as bad as what liberals threw at Reagan.

Then there was the utter contempt that many dems had for Nixon.

Drawing the line between "hate" and the "he's an evil hating SOB and I can't stand the sight of him" is a really tough call. I know when I was a kid and saw a demonstration on the Mall in DC, I had no doubt that was *hate* being expressed for Nixon. (This would have been in '71, I think.)

[Jade Fox]

10. The difference is....

We dislike Republican presidents for stuff they've actually done. Sure it gets mighty personal, but if they weren't doing horrible things to our country (that can be proved), they wouldn't be hated.

Clinton hatred, on the other hand, is justified by mostly minor or non-existent things he supposedly did (it helped that there were people doing almost nothing but looking for stuff they could pin him with). Clinton hatred had to be drummed into a willing audience by a steady stream of Right-wing pundits telling their listeners how to feel about stuff that was either exaggerated or made up whole cloth.

[Dhalgren]

14. It isn't "Democrat and Republican". It is left and right. Liberal and Conservative.

Progressive and Regressive. The left and right have been at war in the world since the 1700s. It is either people first or wealth first, and everyone chooses sides...

[alarimer]

17. Not it isn't

Almost all the hate comes from the right-wing. Those fundamentalist right-wingers who HATE gays, who hate women, who hate minorities. All of that began when Rush Limbaugh was first allowed to spew his hatred on national radio and it became acceptable for the all the little dittoheads to follow along.

You can put all the blame on the right for this. I am not talking about regular Republicans but their on-air mouthpieces. Limbaugh and his ilk can say whatever they want. "Chelsea Clinton is the White House dog"- that and worse comes from those people. All the cross-burners and lynchers are right-wingers. All of them.

[kickysnana]

7. But they made others think we made them feel that way by manipulating the media.

(and of course churches) War on Christmas is the best example. They made it up, said we did and made a whole lot of people dislike "liberals" because they could not see that they were being manipulated because of media manipulation of perceptions.

I wish I knew what to do to counter it and I would say it to my Dad. He is/was a smart guy and I had admired him until he blindly followed this group over the edge despite my Mom's trying to talk to him about it. Now he won't talk or listen to any of us about it. He says he is "too old to change."He always did HATE to be wrong but what does one do when he is wrong about being wrong?

[whatwasthequestion]

2. Agreed

but, isn't there any way to go back back to plain old arguing of the facts and ideas as in a debate, a search for the truth? Won't anyone call a truce or timeout? I am so sick of this sort of thing from EVERYBODY!!!

[lvx35]

5. Wow, really insightful.

And really, really significant with Hillary.

Hillary is a phenomenon...We quietly accept the first president in American History whose campaign signs feature only her first name, as if she's somebody we personally know. (Imagine if John Edwards was just refered to as "John" while everybody else went by last names) Her husband sends her contributors a birthday card to sign, like she is a friend and its a big suprise. We feel like we cried with her, went through this big thing with her when the media forced us into the Lewinsky scandal, forcing our eyelids open Clockwork orange style until we saw ourselves reflected in the drama.

What I can't tell you is how this is going to play out in the context of what the author talks about, the personalization of politics in the GWB style, which has the effect of marginalizing us. Will we live vicariously through Hillary and continue to be marginalized, or could it be that we will feel more connected by her doing the personalized thing in a different way? What I do know is that the change the author discusses is real, and it has a very high probability of weakening us on the whole. ("I don't need to DO anything, my friend Hillary does things...") Although she has a historical opportunity to reverse that trend. Whether or not she will remains to be seen.

[babylonsister]

6. Not to me so much; I still wonder about her.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x3653225

[immoderate]

8. What about "Ike?"

There might be others.:shrug:

--IMM

[Jade Fox]

9. The first name thing with Hillary....

is, I think, mostly because when you say Clinton, people think of her husband.

[lvx35]

12. That's true, but you can't ignore the effect nevertheless.

Of us being on a "first name basis" with one candidate but not the others...

[Lydia Leftcoast]

15. Actually, during Eisenhower's campaign, he was commonly referred to as

"Ike." A popular campaign button was "I like Ike."

[lvx35]

16. It was a nick name, and I don't imagine that his campaign played it up quite as much.

No doubt he used it to seem a bit more of a "common man" with his own little nickname, but Hillary is really trying to get cozy and familial with her base, its a huge part of her strategy. The second they heard people using her first name to differentiate her from Bill Clinton, they latched on to it and used it to define their campaign...and I think it will work.

[Demeter]

11. The Difference In Hate Can Be Measured In Convictions

The Left hates the Right because they are crooks. Just count the large number of convictions in each GOP regime--convictions for serious crimes!

THe Right hates the Left because they don't like spending time and money trying to get out of jail, or trying to avoid any punishment whatsoever. They want to rape, ravage and pillage unimpeded and unobserved.