Say Anything Blog

J.R. Dunn

Eight Years of Liberal Hatred
In politics as in personal life, hatred is a dangerous tool. It’s like one of the early medieval cannons, just as capable of blowing up in your face as it is of lobbing a ball at the enemy. Of course, the medieval metal casters realized they had a problem and worked to correct it. Haters never seem to get that far.

For the latest evidence of this, we can thank Peter Berkowitz. Berkowitz is that rarity, a sincere liberal with as critical an eye for his own side as he has for the opposition. In a recent piece in the Wall Street Journal, “The Insanity of Bush Hatred”, Berkowitz attempts to take the measure of the haters, a phenomenon generally unmentioned by the legacy media, which prefers to act as an unknowing conduit for these people (watch how quickly this changes if Madame Hillary manages to squeak in).

Berkowitz gives us several fine examples of individuals on the very edge of permanent cognitive damage from Bush Derangement Syndrome. People who can’t so much as hear the name without their faces going red and their features distorted. (My favorite is the “political moderate” who answers a civil question with: “I . . . hate . . . the . . . way . . . Bush . . . talks”, an excellent illustration of the psychological factor called “displacement”.)

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All the same, the two Bush terms have been on unending carnival of hatred. Just to hit the high points, there’s the novel blueprinting his assassination, a film on the same topic, and probably more. We’ve had several impeachment attempts, all hopeless on their face, the latest proposed by the noted statesman Dennis Kucinich. And all this before we get to one single word of media coverage on Karl Rove, waterboarding, surveillance, Virginia Plame, or Scott McClellan.

It’s a waste of time looking for a rational explanation amid all this. None could conceivably cover every last convolution of paranoia, delusion, and obsession. “Bush hatred,” as Berkowitz writes, “is different.” It’s different because it has its roots in ideology.

Ideological Devils

We often overlook the fact that liberalism is an ideology, and has been since the days of the New Deal. It is not a doctrine or a school of thought, and does not operate by the rational rules required in those cases. It’s an ideology in the sense of a synthetic, politically-based replacement for religious belief, and it operates by the rules of an ideology—irrational, compulsive, and totally divorced from anything outside of the ideological system itself.

Hatred, along with fear, hysteria, and conformity, is a basic element of ideological thinking. I know of no exceptions. For the Nazis, the hate-figures were, of course, the Jews. For the Soviet communists, they were a shifting cast of kulaks, socialists, capitalists, Trotskyites and “wreckers” (saboteurs out to destroy communist achievements on the orders of any of the above). For the New Dealers, it was businessmen (as it is today for some Greens).

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While it was forgotten amid all the adulation following his funeral, Reagan was loathed nearly as much as Bush during his presidential terms. (A critical moment in my political education occurred when I stepped out of my office moments after Reagan was shot in 1981 and saw Americans dancing in the street over the news.) Reagan, of course, was the halfwit who needed to be led around by his “handlers” lest he stumble in front of a bus or hit the wrong button on the nuclear football. Almost everything he said or did was reported to fit that image, for example, the widely-covered incident in which he referred to Thailand as “Siam”. What the reporters failed to realize was that for the first third of Reagan’s long life, the name of the place actually was Siam. (Late in the 80s, a small number of liberals began to wise up. Prominent among them was the cartoonist Jules Feiffer, who published a cartoon showing one of his trademark wimpy liberals saying, “Reagan said the Berlin Wall would come down, and I said Reagan was a fool.” Each panel featured yet another statement by Reagan answered with the same refrain, until we reach the last: “Because if Reagan was right all along… ... then what kind of fool am I?”)

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Any Republican elected to high office will be treated the same for the foreseeable future. So the media may as well knock off all the marveling on how hated Republican office holders are. At this point, it’s simply part of the job description. Liberalism has become the party of hate—the first major party to fit that description since the heyday of the Know-Nothings. You can check the record and see how long they lasted.

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So we can look forward to more viciousness and more nastiness, more foully and more often expressed. It will only break when liberalism does.

Speed the day.

We might as well get used to it, recognize the truth of the hatred of the lefties, and get to work countering their hate-filled propaganda.
There is no other way.
They would have us lose to the terrorists in their hatred.