Paul Scott Editorial In The Star Tribune

09/26/2005

Conservatives adept at playing the ‘hate’ card A liberal writer wonders how the outrage industry can possibly turn up the heat any higher.

Paul Scott
September 26, 2005

There are days when one can feel as if the mounting and faceless stressors in American life—technological change, acceleration of life, materialism, economic uncertainty, fear—have turned inward on us, dividing us like Sunni and Shia. How else can you explain the way Americans now talk about each other?

I am talking about the way in which conservatives speak about liberals. Consider the creepy trade in “books” a person must pass on the way to the coffee bar at Barnes & Noble. In powerless bouts of protest I have turned upside down more anti-liberal manifestos than I can remember. Just look at some of these titles: “The 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America,"Surrounded by Idiots,"Useful Idiots,"Intellectual Morons,"Liberalism is a Mental Disorder,"How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must),"Persecution,"Slander,"Treason,"The Enemy Within” and my personal favorite, “Deliver Us From Evil.” And this is from the movement that complains about the coarsening of America culture.

Then there is the sight of Fox News, which tends to talk about just two things: liberals and child abductors.

Liberals, it seems, are deranged morons, cunning and powerful misanthropes to be patronized at worst, institutionalized or outfitted in orange jumpsuits at best. On good days, you wonder how this outrage industry, as it has been called, can possibly turn up the heat any higher. Should we prepare for a book titled “Impale Them All. Now”? On bad days, you order your latte and wonder if this is how they started in on the Tutsis.

The left is not above demonizing the other side, but we don’t do it nearly as well. Perhaps we don’t have the stomach for it. The left has never managed to demonize the word “conservative,” for instance, while the word “liberal” now rolls off tongues in quarters across the land as a nasty pejorative. Liberal books tend to target Bush, not Everyone Not Like Me. At the most, one can find an occasional title like “Why the Right is Wrong for America.”

“Wrong.” How quaint. I get sent e-mails that make Photoshop fun of the president, but reading them feels like chuckling at the teacher from the back of the classroom—while the other side is busy erecting billboards clamoring for your public defenestration.

Then there is the issue of access: You need to go to the back of the Nation to order a roll of George W. Bush toilet paper. But you need only look up from your treadmill to hear Bill O’Reilly. Forget Bin Laden; to American conservatives, it’s liberals who have become the Other.

And we all know what happens to those we cast as the Other, of course. We turn them into a big white sheet to aim our projectors at—after we load them with film of every quality we like least about ourselves.

This helps me understand, then, how liberals this past year became the “haters.” If you hadn’t noticed, the last election found the conservative movement adeptly playing the “hate” card at every turn.

Liberals do not stand for anything, the line went: They are blind in their hatred of Bush, religion, the military, America. Liberals don’t stand for anything. Liberals just want to complain, protest, attack. This even crops up now in local races.

“People want to vote for something,” said St. Paul Mayor Randy Kelly in the Sept. 19 Star Tribune. “You have to appeal to their instincts of a better future. He [Chris Coleman] hasn’t done that. He has a message of partisanship and ideology. ...”

This is a sanitized version of the official Republican script, which is to paint liberals as bereft of ideas, filled with hate, blind with anger. Nobody likes an angry person, after all.

Consider the handiness of this strategy: You take power with the slightest of electoral advantages, attempt to change nearly everything, and when the other side complains, accuse them of being against everything.

Forget about his endorsement of the most divisive political figure of our times—Kelly deserves to lose simply because of the way he has taken up this faux-populist, demonizing language about his opponent.

On a larger level, by painting such a pitiful caricature of the opposition, the right denies the fact of its robust trade in hate-mongering. It also insulates itself from ever having to take seriously any criticism to its failed policies. Don’t listen to them, it says, they’re just the America-haters.

In the eyes of Republicans we are shrill, hysterical, comical. Every day that the right entertains this narrative about the left is another day in which it knows nothing about 50 percent of the voting public, its own friends and neighbors, many of whom do not wear horns.

It is likely that the ringleaders behind this message think this is all a big game. It is no game at all. It is shards of glass thrown across the road. Next time you hear about the festering hatred in the hearts of liberals, ask yourself who the real haters are.

Paul Scott is a writer in Rochester, Minn.