As a political glue, hatred does have its limits. Love of country and attachment to community may work better.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/15/limitations-of-the-hatred-coalition/

By Paul Gottfried

Reading Michael Anton’s rejoinder to my response to an article that appeared in Chronicles, I noticed that he and I agreed categorically on certain points: Whatever madness is afflicting this country and the rest of the West can in no way be blamed on the founders of the American republic. The rot set in later, despite the political achievement of those who won American independence and framed the Constitution. 

Further, the woke enthusiasm and anarcho-tyranny now besetting us may have to burn out on their own, seeing that we’ve had exceedingly limited success as a country controlling these disorders.  Assuming that we are lucky and this combination of cultural radicalism and political totalitarianism does collapse, how exactly would that happen? 

According to ancient philosophers, political societies undergo deterioration (phthora) owing to both internal and external causes.  They lose the ability to deal with internal disorder, while they are increasingly threatened by foreign enemies. Adversaries jump in for the kill when aberrant political leadership acts consistently against the common good. The foreign challenges that the Biden Administration is now facing, from the hacking of fuel supplies to the war that Hamas has unleashed against Israelis, to the recent expressions of Chinese and Russian adventurism, are intended to take advantage of an administration that has turned inward toward bizarre diversions such as battling white “systemic racism,” to carrying out a “green revolution” while simultaneously paying off Democratic constituencies with increasingly devalued money. 

The present administration, which represents both the woke Left and partisan Democratic interests, refuses to pay attention to a hemorrhaging Southern border. Allowing illegals to overrun a largely unprotected border to fill the country, starting with Texas, with future Democratic voters, is the transparent reason for Biden’s inaction in the face of this stampede. Federalizing elections, while removing controls against fraud, and then awarding statehood to the District of Columbia and possibly Puerto Rico would allow the Left to create a permanent electoral majority, certainly at the federal level. Packing the Supreme Court with Democratic partisans, another project of the Biden Administration, will prevent these actions from being judicially overturned.

An American government that is preoccupied with such vagaries will not likely be inclined to meet foreign challenges boldly. Making sure that our military is taught critical race theory, that the CIA recruits plenty of lesbians, gays, and transsexuals, that American embassies fly the Rainbow Pride flag next to the Stars and Stripes, and that our president cheerleads an international crusade against global warming defines our supposed national interests. 

If readers of this website notice the dottiness of these priorities, so do foreign foes, who will take advantage of our nutty government. Why shouldn’t they? I certainly would do so if I noticed that the American federal administration was becoming a lunatic asylum. Our new foreign policy priorities have been accompanied by the emergence of internal problems that are likely to get worse—for example, increasing energy shortages and soaring crime rates in cities. Spiraling inflation is also underway. 

But these problems may have less historical significance than what will happen if the present leftist coalition comes apart. What will transpire if, say, Islamic activists and black nationalist rioters turn on their LGBT allies, once they decide not to put up with these weirdos any longer? Save for hatred for normal people and for those thought to be on the Right plus the drive for power shared by its leadership, little keeps this leftist coalition together. It is the quintessential alliance of the haters and the power-hungry aligned against the rest of us. 

What gives it cohesion is its wrecking mission. Unlike the Marxists, to whom this intersectional Left is often compared, this adversary does not offer a positive vision of a “scientific” future. It offers nothing more than an opportunity for cultural and social wreckage. 

The greater danger is not that these wreckers will usher in global managerial rule, as envisioned by the Davos crowd, but that they will totally devastate our society. And so far, they’ve had a free run. They’ve pushed around the weak-minded and weak-kneed with minimal resistance, while corporate capitalists have selfishly funded their war against constitutional liberties and public order. But what will happen if the intersectional Left falls out among its members? 

What if Black Lives Matter rioters fan out from inner cities to ransack fashionable leftist suburbs or, as almost occurred last year with CNN’s headquarters in Atlanta, vent their indiscriminate violence on their own apologists? What will happen to the leftist alliance if Muslim immigrants in France turn against LGBQ activists or show even more explicit contempt for the naïve sponsors of influential “antiracist” organizations like LICRA (la ligue internationale contre le racisme et l’antisémitisme)? Why should these wreckers imagine they share common interests beyond what they want to tear down? 

As a political glue, hatred does have its limits. Love of country and attachment to community may work better.

About Paul Gottfried

Paul Edward Gottfried is the editor of Chronicles. An American paleoconservative philosopher, historian, and columnist, Gottfried is a former Horace Raffensperger Professor of Humanities at Elizabethtown College in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, as well as a Guggenheim recipient.

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