The Efficacy of Hate
The post-mortems on Donald Trump’s victory and the Democrats’ defeat are coming from all directions. Most focus on Kamala Harris’s shortcomings, and many are contradictory.
Did Harris lose because she was a weak candidate, despite the initial optimism surrounding her campaign? Did she move too far to the right, alienating a critical mass of potential progressive voters by palling around with neo-cons like Liz Cheney? Did she veer too sharply to the left, alienating moderate old-guard Republicans and independents who saw her as too woke? Did Harris’s stance on Gaza cost her the “Blue Wall” states, or was it inflation or the crisis at the border? Was she a victim of intractable sexism and racism? Or was it Biden’s refusal to step down until late July that sealed her fate?
Each of these perspectives has some merit—especially the argument, concisely made by Bernie Sanders in a post on X, that the Democratic Party has abandoned the working class and that, as a result, the working class has abandoned the party. These voters instead backed a candidate whose actual policies undermine the interests of working people.
What these arguments all miss, however, is an essential element of Trump’s triumph—the simple and sad truth that hate sells. Ever since he descended the golden escalator at Trump Tower in midtown Manhattan in July 2015 to declare his candidacy for President, Trump has preached an unrelenting gospel of hate, scapegoating immigrants, the LGBTQ+ community, minorities, political opponents, journalists, academics, and scientific experts as the cause of our alleged national decline. He has flagged them as “the enemy from within” as a target that must be removed or neutralized.
It’s still tempting to think of Trump and the movement he leads as an aberration that will run its course over the next four years. But nothing could be further from the truth. Despots and dictators all over the world use hate as a psychological tool. Trump is simply the newest member of the club.
In 1931, as Europe yielded to fascism, the League of Nations’ International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation invited Albert Einstein to start a dialogue with a scholar of his choosing as part of the committee’s mission to generate cross-disciplinary contacts between scientists, researchers, teachers, writers, and artists.
Although Einstein had met Freud face-to-face only once, in 1926, he invited the famed psychoanalyst in an April 1931 letter to reflect on the “evils of war.” Receiving no reply, Einstein asked in a subsequent letter, written in July 1932, if there was “any way of delivering mankind from the menace of war” once and for all, and if hate could ever be erased from society.
In September 1932, Freud penned his response, offering a distillation of his renowned theory of the instincts:
You are amazed that it is so easy to infect men with the war fever, and you surmise that man has in him an active instinct for hatred and destruction, amenable to such stimulations. I entirely agree with you. I believe in the existence of this instinct and have been recently at pains to study its manifestations.
“The upshot of these observations,” Freud added, “is that there is no likelihood of our being able to suppress humanity’s aggressive tendencies . . . . It is all too clear that the nationalistic ideas, paramount today in every country, operate in quite a contrary direction.”
As an antidote to hate, Freud offered the instinct of love, or “Eros” (as Plato used the term in his Symposium), writing: “If the propensity for war be due to the destructive instinct, we have always its counter-agent, Eros, to our hand. All that produces ties of sentiment between man and man must serve us as war’s antidote.”
Tragically, the antidote failed. Both Einstein and Freud were forced into exile as the Holocaust ensued. Hate proved supreme.
It doesn’t take an Einstein or Freud to draw parallels between the 1930s and the political climate today in the United States. While Trump may not be “America’s Hitler,” as J.D. Vance once described him, he is an aspiring autocrat who has mastered the craft of hate-mongering.
In the face of Trump’s rants about immigrants “poisoning the blood of our country,” Harris’s “campaign of joy” proved unavailing. The bromide she invoked at the Democratic convention and throughout her campaign that “we have so much more in common than what separates us” was no match for Trump’s calls for retribution and revenge.
What, then, can be done? While Democrats and progressives cannot—and should not—attempt to mirror the right’s use of hate and bigotry, the left not only needs a positive program for social change, but a clearly defined enemy to mobilize against.
That enemy exists, and is staring us in the face. It is oligarchy—the extreme concentration of wealth and outsized political influence that has gutted the middle and working classes and corrupted our politics.
Fortunately, we have a template for fighting back against oligarchy, in the way that Franklin Delano Roosevelt decried monopolies while promoting the programs of the New Deal. Here’s how Roosevelt framed the issue in his April 29, 1938, address to Congress:
Unhappy events abroad have retaught us two simple truths about the liberty of a democratic people. The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism—ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.
The second truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if its business system does not provide employment and produce and distribute goods in such a way as to sustain an acceptable standard of living.
Roosevelt’s admonitions could easily be applied to the enormous power wielded by our current crop of oligarchs led by Trump’s “first buddy” Elon Musk. Going forward, we need to revive the spirit of FDR and dig even deeper into what really ails this country.