Therapeutic Hatred

Great news from Tomorrowland and the wonderful world of Science! Are you worried that you might be suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome? Do you suspect that the balance of your mind may be disturbed by the white hot hatred glowing in your heart towards a certain norm-shattering ex-president? Well, fear not! According to Michael Caruso, chief executive officer of The New Republic, the most up-to-date scientific opinion says that “hating Trump can actually be healthy for you.” In a fund-raising letter, he writes to subscribers and would-be donors that,

With bestselling self-help books with titles like Never Get Angry Again, the steady growth of meditation apps like Calm, and the rise of fads like anger management classes — part of the $2 billion stress management industry — people are spending a lot of time and money trying to keep from having a meltdown. But scientific studies show that our ability to get angry is actually part of a healthy, natural process. “Anger comes up as a warning,” a mental health counselor explained to CNN recently. “It helps us set boundaries. It helps self-preservation. It helps us be assertive and advocate for ourselves.” “Anger is a protective emotion,” agrees Jamie Mahler, a trauma specialist who literally wrote the book on Toxic Relationship Recovery. “If we need to overcome some sort of obstacle, anger can provide us with motivation to do that.”

But, added Mr Caruso, for Trump-hating to be good for you, your anger must be constructively directed. And it just so happened that “The New Republic was launching the first Stop Trump Summit” — towards the surprisingly modest $20,000 cost of which the lucky recipients of this September e-mail were being invited to direct their anger by contributing.

In a way, I suppose it is some kind of progress for the rabidly anti-Trump New Republic to admit that its opinion, and that of the all-star cast of Trump-haters invited to its “Summit” — who included Robert DeNiro, Don Lemon, Al Sharpton, Jamie Raskin, special guest star Mary Trump “and many more” — is emotionally rather than rationally based, or at least that they make no appeal to reason but only to the hatred they already share, presumably, with subscribers and contributors to the magazine. You would have to be pretty far gone in Trump Derangement yourself, I think, to find such an appeal appealing, even with the promise that those “who give $100 or more will receive a super-cool TNR tote bag.”

“A super-cool TNR tote bag” sounds like an oxymoron to me, but what do I know? Only that this kind of politicking on pure emotion, or moral indignation whipped up into a frenzy by self-righteousness, is not limited to the Trump-haters, though it is primarily a natural outgrowth of the neo-Marxist left’s reduction of politics to a pure power-struggle between irreconcilable classes of oppressors and oppressed. More alert to this development than most of his Republican rivals, Mr Trump has never been afraid to make himself the favorite target of the left by hating them back. But the result, as Michael Cuenco writes a propos of the conviction of Peter Navarro on a charge of contempt of Congress, is “what happens when politics is severed from its policy content or, indeed, from any larger moral objective — and becomes simply about the prosecution of feuds based on pure friend-enemy distinctions.”

Of course there is a radical asymmetry between the two sides in this struggle, as only one has all the immense propaganda power of the media at its disposal for the belaboring of its putative enemy. The multiple prosecutions of Mr Trump and even the least riotous of his followers at the Capitol — or, as in the case of Enrique Tarrio, nowhere near it — on January 6th, 2021 cannot but have made it clear to all but the wilfully blind that ours is now the politics of vendetta. The only real political question today is that of Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty: “Which is to be master — that’s all.” And the media and their Democratic allies, who have long had ready-to-hand in the power of scandal-promotion the means of criminalizing political differences, are currently the master.

It would be surprising, under the circumstances, if the Republicans did not try some scandal-promotion of their own against their habitual persecutors, as they are now doing with the impeachment investigation of President Biden, launched with the blessing of Kevin McCarthy, then Speaker of the House in September, despite his side’s being so much at a disadvantage in terms of media firepower. To me, the case for impeaching Mr Biden on a charge of bribery seems all but open and shut, but neither I nor Speaker McCarthy can deny that the effort must also be seen as a tit-for-tat response to the Trump indictments, and, before these, the Trump impeachments and the Russia-gate hoax.

By the way, the larger strategic purpose of this battle of the scandals seems to me to be the same on both sides. Each is invoking scandal against its rival at least partly in order to induce it to rally around and so prop up an otherwise presumptively weak or dubious presidential candidate in next year’s elections — the opposing candidate, that is, whom each side believes it will be the easiest to defeat. This strategy has worked spectacularly well for the Democrats with Mr Trump, who is so far ahead of his Republican rivals in the polls that the latter have become irrelevant. It also shows signs of working in Mr Biden’s case, since intrapary and intra-media doubts about his age and cognitive decline appear to have been silenced since the announcement of the impeachment inquiry.

Meanwhile, the scandal culture which took on a new lease of life with the Trump presidency continues on its merry way. I’d like to think that ordinary, unbiased people are able to see that every time the Justice Department or the media discovers a new Enemy of the People, it turns out to be someone having second thoughts about the left-wing orthodoxies that the media and the Justice Department alike are now dedicated to enforcing. Most recently this has happened with the DoJ’s opening of an investigation into Elon Musk, supposedly over his management of his businesses. Maybe there are legitimate concerns here, but does anybody believe that this would be happening if Mr Musk were still a paid-up member of the left-media establishment in good standing?

Even Democrats can hardly credit the testimony before the House Judiciary Committee of Attorney General Merrick Garland that “Our job is to uphold the rule of law. That means we apply the same laws to everyone. There is not one set of laws for the powerful and another for the powerless, one for the rich and another for the poor, one for Democrats and another for Republicans.” That’s just about as believable as the “science” behind the claim that hate is good for you, and it reminds me of Chief Justice John Roberts’s claim back in 2016 that, “We [in the judiciary] don’t work as Democrats or as Republicans” — something which few can have believed back in 2016 and nobody can believe now, though it may be true of Chief Justice Roberts himself and one or two other Republican appointees.

Nor is the politicization of the law limited to this country. Everywhere, political life and culture seems to be sinking to the Merrick Garland level — that of a naked pursuit of power and partisan advantage under the thinnest and most platitudinous rhetorical cover. In the UK Russell Brand, formerly a darling of the left, has lately shown signs of harboring heterodox opinions. Few will therefore regard as coincidental the charges recently surfacing in the media (though not yet in the legal system at this writing) of sexual assault from the years during which he bragged of having slept with hundreds (or possibly thousands) of women.

Mr Brand has always seemed a loathsome character to me, if only on account of his propensity for kissing and telling, and it wouldn’t surprise me or, I imagine, anyone else if one or two of the claims against him turned out to be true. But it is also undeniable that his treatment of women never bothered anybody in media or government until he became a vaccine skeptic, appeared with Tucker Carlson and started saying things that people in media or government just don’t say these days, not if they don’t want to be branded as criminals — whether in Britain or the U.S.

Is it any wonder then that, as noticed in this space recently (see “No Surrender” in The New Criterion of September, 2023), Americans are losing faith in our system of justice to an unprecedented degree? Of course, on the well-established left-wing principle of “the worse the better,” this is no bad thing for those whose politics are dedicated to destroying our system of justice in order to replace it with a revolutionary alternative. Hate — a word which, like “racism”, “authoritarianism” or “democracy,” can now apply only to one side of the political divide — feeds on itself, and those who resist being drawn into its vortex are likely to feel so emotionally bullied by both sides that they give up any hope of a peaceful or orderly political solution to the country’s problems.

There is some reason to believe that this is actually happening. A new poll from Pew Research shows that,

a little more than a year before the presidential election, nearly two-thirds of Americans (65%) say they always or often feel exhausted when thinking about politics, while 55% feel angry. By contrast, just 10% say they always or often feel hopeful about politics, and even fewer (4%) are excited. The survey also provides people several opportunities to describe in their own words their feelings about the political system and elected officials. When asked to sum up their feelings about politics in a word or phrase, very few (2%) use positive terms; 79% use negative or critical words, with “divisive” and “corrupt” coming up most frequently.

Similar feelings of disgust with the political process seem to be showing up in Britain, at least if these recent headlines from the British press are anything to go by:

• “The political elite has given up on Britain”;

• “The Tories have given up. Britain has a government in name only”;

• “Britain is in a state of distress more profound than our leaders are capable of addressing”;

• “Britain’s high streets are becoming a no-go zone – and our incompetent elite are to blame”;

At any rate, even if the impression of a widespread feeling of political hopelessness and futility is mistaken, the media in both countries appear to be doing all they can to create one, since this may be supposed to serve the interests of the revolutionary left to which the media have ever more closely allied themselves. At UnHerd the South African Wessie Du Toit recently noticed that “Britain is turning into South Africa”:

South Africans have come to regard their chaotic and inept state with a weary resignation that borders on ridicule. It is a burden to be negotiated when necessary, and fended off where possible. For some time now, Britain’s attitude to its own governing class has been moving in the same direction. New Labour alienated large parts of the traditional Left, and now Tory incompetence has led to similar cynicism among conservatives. With each perceived betrayal, more people enter the reservoir of citizens who have given up believing that Westminster can do anything remotely useful.

Insofar as this is true, it must be because both countries have either explicitly or implicitly adopted — as has the US since the advent of the Biden administration — the Marxist-Leninist view of political power, which is primarily if not solely concerned with who has it and who hasn’t. Once in power, the dominant party inevitably becomes obsessed with consolidating that power and making it permanent — invariably, these days, in the name of “democracy” — which renders it more or less useless at performing the ordinary political business of providing for the country’s defense, maintaining law and order and a sound currency, creating the conditions for economic growth and opportunity and educating children.

In fact, since all these things are said by the left only to serve the white power structure — still mysteriously supposed to be running things though the Democrats and their media and bureaucratic allies are ostensibly in power — they must be revolutionized along with everything else. If the response of the electorate, and even large numbers of the opposition party, to this revolutionary movement, which is now scarcely even bothering to disguise itself, is mere ennui and disgust with politics in general, surely part of the explanation is that Republicans have been suckered in, again and again, to playing the game of competitive scandals — a game at which they are always going to be the Washington Generals to the media’s Harlem Globetrotters.

It would be nice to think that the GOP could trade dropping all proceedings against the Biden family for the Democrats’ dropping all proceedings against Mr Trump, thus putting an end to the battle of the scandals and perhaps even to the scandal culture itself. Then we could go back to the happy days of Tammany Hall or Chicago machine politics under Mayor Daley when politicians were only corrupted by money and personal power and not by totalitarian ideology. But something tells me that the Democrats are not exactly shivering in fear about the likely fate of either impeachment or criminal proceedings against their guy. They don’t have to trade for either Joe or Hunter or any of the rest of the family to be left to enjoy their ill-gotten gains in peace.

But is there no other way to put the brakes on the scandal juggernaut? As one looks at the panel of would-be GOP presidential candidates, meeting to “debate” and, with their prepared one-line “zingers,” to abuse or undermine each other while distancing themselves from the endlessly “scandal-plagued” standard bearer whom the rest of the party appears overwhelmingly to prefer, one wonders whether they mightn’t do better to let scandal unite rather than divide them.

Mightn’t they, in other words, go to where the party in the country seems to be and unanimously decline the honor of its nomination, which none of them is likely to receive anyway, until such time as the corrupt Democrat-run justice system releases its beleaguered hostage and allows him, like themselves, to make his case to the American people on its own merits. Perhaps even a few principled Democrats, if there are any left, would join in the effort to de-criminalize politics and so tone down the partisan hatred. That might not only snap the public out of its lethargy but also encourage Mr Trump himself to forsake the politics of hate to concentrate on his more hopeful and positive message. It would also be what we used to call democracy, wouldn’t it?