The Wrath of the Right and the Left.

A few days ago, Victor Davis Hanson posted an essay titled 'When Hate Becomes an Agenda' in where he deconstructs how the FBI, the impeachment process, and the Democrat Party have been turned into weapons of wrath against Trump and he predicts that impeachment will become a common practice of both parties to merely smear presidents in their first term. I think he is right about everything except his underlying assumption and perhaps his conclusion. If this impeachment continues to blow up in democrats' face and clearly seen as a boomerang, it will become a tactic that is less likely to be used.

Furthermore, much of the driving force in politics has always been hatred. As the far-seeing longshoreman Eric Hoffer once wrote: Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all the unifying agents. Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a god, but never without a belief in a devil. Our Founders had bitter rivalries and even deep hatreds of each other. What is different today is the openness with which it is being spewed and the complete collapse of civil debate. Animus formerly was only legitimate if accompanied by a reasonable-sounding argument. That's not to say that all arguments were well-reasoned, logical or sound, but rather they at least tried to seem so.

Now, since an alarmingly large portion of the populace don't understand the difference between genuinely critical thought and the nihilistic tactics of Critical Theory, and couldn't recognise a logical fallacy if their lives depended on it, we have regressed to a place of political barbarism. People today measure truth and fact based on strength of emotion, but don't realise how much the emotion of hate, resentment, envy, and jealousy corrupt their reason and their capability to think straight.

In a society of universal suffrage, one person's easy ignorance counts for as much as another's hard-won wisdom. Nowadays it no longer matters whether people actually know what they are talking about. What matters today is only that a person have opinions and hold them fiercely. Indeed, it is most important that they join the ranks of others who share those opinions and impose them on dissenters forcefully. The days of earnest liberalism--the belief that a pluralism of opinion can be maintained with respectful harmony--are dead, and the days of enforced group-think thrive.

In the future there will be an even greater gnashing of teeth, and politicians will increasingly pander to this tendency. Indeed, nobody more than Trump has fed this appetite for apoplexy. He is a Black Swan presidency which has caused three main changes; on one hand, with Trump the gloves are now off. He has legitimised and normalised the low blow and the tactics of nastiness in the political ring. There have always been bitter and nasty partisans, but the top leaders of the movements have always maintained a modicum of decorum in the public forum. Presidents behaved in a way that could be called 'presidential' even as they infuriated their opponents. Not anymore.

Secondly, Trump has legitimised and proliferated apoplexy as a tool and even a weapon of the Right. Obliterating group-think is a common dynamic of collective politics. It has been typically a characteristic of the Left. Within political movements of the left, whether socialist, communist, fascist, labor movements, gay movements, or racial identity politics, the tyrannical demand for complete adherence to the rigid ideology has been a mainstay. Heretics are upbraided into compliance or marked out as traitors and ostracised.

Furthermore, hatred was primarily a tactic of the Left. From the hippies in the sixties who postured for Peace & Love but who heaped scorn upon soldiers and political opponents, to the winnowing attacks on Reagan from the No-Nukes crowd, to the Code Pink screaming Mimis and others who scolded Bush regularly, the open display of wrath was a mark of the Left, not the right. The affable and peaceful Tea Party rose in resistance to Obama's attempts to "fundamentally change America" into a far more collectivist country, and looking back upon it, the Tea Party now seems fanglessly friendly in comparison to the rhetoric ravenous Trumpsters now espouse. Yuval Levin once remarked that :

"Conservatives tend to begin from gratitude for what is good and what works in our society and then strive to build on it, while liberals tend to begin from outrage at what is bad and broken and seek to uproot it."

Conservatives are pushed to the backbench by the populist Trump movement, and outrage, not gratitude, now drives the Right as it always has the Left.

Thirdly, he has poured gas on the fires that are already raging in the hearts of the Left. The flames of ferocity and violent invective have risen to levels of wrath we've never witnessed before. Physical assaults upon person and property are on the rise among the Left. Antifa is an organisation of organised violence which wears masks to conceal their identities and cover up their criminality. Identity groups are protesting in ways that are riotous. Rancorous rhetoric is on the rise amongst leading politicians and media mouthpieces on the Left. Many say Trump's triggering of the Left is a good thing because they are now demonstrating how they have lost their damn minds and are exhibiting their tyrannically totalitarian tendencies. So far all the political violence has been perpetrated by the Left, but the angry rhetoric of the Right is on the rise. Some can hardly wait for the first shots in a civil war.

The Left has always traded in outrage and hatred. It's what they do. -And they grind their opposition under their feet as they march under the banners of 'Tolerance' and 'Love Trumps Hate'. Some on the Right say said that the swing vote in the centre will be repulsed by the Left's wrathful reaction and will run to the Right. While I think that is true, I believe it is more likely to happen if the Right doesn't also look as hateful and vindictive as the Left. It seems to me that the Right ought to aspire to be the escape from the disasters of the policies of the Left, a sanctuary of sanity in a sea of seething madness, and a respite from the wrath of progressives.

I fear that the temperature of political rhetoric in America has become so hot that swing-voters have only a choice between the fire and the frying pan. Our message ought not be "our hate is better than their hate." We ought to give the undecided swing voter something great to love.