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I get a lot of hate mail, especially in response to columns or posts critical of Donald Trump. My post the other day on Trump and fascism brought in some beauties.
Here’s an excerpt from one of the more printable ones:
I guess to a LIBTARD FOOL such as yourself, it’s only fascism if conservatives/Republicans/Trump are in power, even though they don’t even attempt to do such things. On the other hand, to a LIBTARD, Democrats actually BEING Fascists somehow equates to “protecting democracy” (which we don’t even live in, nor have been set up to ever be in). You fucking communist sack of disgusting, lying shit!
Some of these hate letters make a half-hearted effort to engage in arguments, but most are pure venom. Where does this hate come from, and what might damp it down so that we can return to a slightly more civil democracy?
The short answer, I think, is that the haters fomented by Donald Trump especially hate liberals. And if you bother to review the history of the past century, you can see why.
Since at least the presidency of Bill Clinton, the Democrats have become the party of educated, cosmopolitan bicoastal professionals, and have paid too little attention to the plight of ordinary working people, in small towns, rural areas, and once-thriving communities deserted by footloose factories. Along with this economic neglect has come cultural condescension. The phrase “flyover states” says it all.
If the Democratic Party were doing its job, some of the hatred would be directed at the billionaire bankers and monopolists who are raising costs, destroying jobs, and capturing income that should be going to regular Americans. But the haters don’t hate the billionaires. This would be a weird inversion of class interest, if the Democrats were a more credible populist party. But they aren’t.
Compare today’s form of hate with FDR’s day. There was hate in that era, but it was not the hate of ordinary people directed at Democrats. FDR neatly defined it when he said of bankers and economic royalists, “They are unanimous in their hatred of me, and I welcome their hatred.”
FDR, by delivering for ordinary Americans and constraining abusive capitalists, had earned their hatred. There were also elements of racial hatred during the New Deal era, which increased as Roosevelt became more of a racial liberal. At the 1936 Democratic National Convention, when a Black minister had been invited to deliver the invocation, Sen. “Cotton Ed” Smith of South Carolina, a leader of the racist Dixiecrats, loudly walked out in protest. Yet FDR carried all of the South.
Even in 1948, when Harry Truman had become far more of an explicit racial liberal than Roosevelt, Truman carried most of the white South because voters remembered with gratitude how the New Deal had saved their livelihoods.
This brings me to the tricky question of the connection between today’s anti-liberal hatred and the inevitable backlash against the post-LBJ Democrats as the party of racial and gender equality. White males suffered some relative loss of status in the household and the community, as Blacks, women, and later sexual minorities gained rights, so Democrats were guaranteed to suffer some losses.
But the losses—and the sheer hatred—would have been far less if this were not also an era of economic neglect of working people generally, combined with Clinton-style New Democrats getting in bed with bankers. Compared with two generations ago, it’s far harder to get a payroll job that supports a family, buy a home, finance college, get reliable health care, or look forward to a decent retirement. President Biden has taken some good first steps and Kamala Harris promises more, but not nearly enough to reverse the deeper trends.
And this brings me to the TV ad that the Trump campaign has been running on broadcasts of football and baseball games. The ad shows Harris with two transgender people, includes an edited clip of an old interview in which Harris appears to be saying she supports the right of prison inmates to get gender-altering surgery, and ends with the sly tagline “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you.”
Granted, it would be a heavy lift for Democrats to go all out to support trans rights, even with more attention to what’s happened to the working class. But in the absence of a credible class politics that delivers, the Democrats are waving red flags at the proverbial bull.
If Kamala does win, it will be a long road back to damp down the hate and win back working-class support. Maybe in the next generation.
