The hate, the hate
At the dawn of the eighteenth century, a class of sailing vessels carried valuable freight at great speed. These clippers raced each other over the heaving seas, the value of their cargoes determined as much by the outcome of the race as by intrinsic worth. Each captain followed a course that attempted to optimize winds and currents, sometimes wandering far from the most direct route and the other ships in the race.
Consider political parties as clippers. The sea is the electorate with its prevailing current of opinion that carries all parties with it willy-nilly. The wind is a composite of opinions that blow in many directions at once. The sails are a party’s values: swelling to some opinions, cobwebs to the rest. In a winner-take-all race only the winner gets to land its cargo, its ideology.
What if there were a course that that nurtured the winds and currents in favor of that course? What changes in ideology would be required to engender that course?
A judicious study of discernible reality is not the way the world really works anymore… We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do. [The Greatest Story Ever Sold by Ron Suskind]
Hatred nurtures itself. A political party whose values allow its sails to swell to hatred will find hatred blows ever harder in its favor once it sets its course to it. Naturally, the party’s ideology must mutate to align with the hatred it employs; though it will pretend otherwise, cloaking itself in the sanctimony of nationalism, or patriotism, or whatever comes to hand. The hatred mounts to the point it mounts us, the electorate. We start voting against a party rather than for a party, and our politics stagnate as they circle the essentially parochial issues that divide us.
Can we make headway against the hate? What course should we follow, what sails should we set. Can we raise the winds we need the way hate does?
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First, we must learn to know the winds of hate, because the more we know about them the less they fill our sails and drive us from our course. Hate has legion guises — the ravings of demagogues, the disingenuous rulings of blinkered judges, the soulless separation of children from their parents, the cynical exploitation of some of our rights against all our rights.
Then, we must raise the winds of aspiration that we need to follow a new course. We have long called out the hatred with humor, but we are only beginning to discover how to express the aspirations we share. Ordinarily we would find each other in politics, because that is what politics are supposed to be for, but these are strange times. The Overton window is wide open but, with few notable exceptions, our politicians cower from it. In lieu of leadership we are rallying behind symbols.
Our course will be determined by the winds, but the first leg seems clear: we must fight the hatred with civil action. Our police, our judges, and our politicians have drifted far from us. They need to be reminded they are there to serve us, not the hate.
As we follow our course the winds of hate will die, and so too the outrage. In time all that will remain will be the winds of aspiration. Our politicians will bicker about the course, and our unity will falter and fade, but that is okay. In fact it is right! A society that embraces its differences is far healthier than one that suppresses them.
As long as it doesn’t nurture them.
But right now we must unite against the hate or it will run its full nihilistic course. And the survivors will wander a wasteland seeking each other the way we should have when it wasn’t one.
Find us, we seek you.
