Out on a Limb

by Andrew Sullivan

  Above all, true conservatives have not been depressed by freedom. This, after all, is where the modern conservative movement in America started in the 1950s—in a revolt against the creeping power of the postwar welfare state. When American conservatives lose sight of that central strain in their philosophy, when their love of freedom becomes an afterthought to their concern for morality, then they lose sight of what makes them both conservative and quintessentially American. They lose sight of what distinguishes them from the darker history of European conservatism, and what sets them apart even from the government-friendly Toryism of their English cousins.

  Truly American conservatives would not recoil at the greater liberty enjoyed by women, racial minorities, and homosexuals, as the truly American conservative Barry Goldwater showed. In the last decade, true American conservatives would have been heartened by the declines in divorce, crime, and teenage births, and encouraged by the move among gay people for more stable, responsible relationships. They would have been elated by the collapse of collectivism and totalitarianism abroad, and encouraged by the return of fiscal prudence and social responsibility at home. They would have seen in Bill Clinton a dangerous proclivity for dishonesty and abuse of power, but they would not have seen him as the degenerate apotheosis of an entire generation—let alone an entire nation. And they would have seen the emergence of religious dogmatists on the far right as a threat to constitutional order and political civility, not as a boon for votes.

  Above all, true conservatives would not have fatally overplayed their hand and tried to impeach a president not for illegality but for immorality, and they wouldn’t have shredded the virtues of privacy and decency and common sense for the emotional release of a cultural jihad. Today’s conservatives—the intellectuals in particular—have begun to replace skepticism with certainty, faith in ordinary people with contempt for the masses, religion with theocracy. These are fools’ bargains. And unworthy of conservatism itself.

  Moreover, this shift has also undoubtedly weakened, rather than strengthened, the ability of conservatives to address moral issues in a limited but compelling way. When conservative extremists accuse Bill Clinton of murder, when Republicans make a divisive, difficult issue like abortion a litmus test for moral purity, then most Americans will be reluctant to listen to them when they worry about illegitimacy, juvenile crime, or presidential law breaking. Conservative moralizing, in other words, requires a certain temperance to be truly effective.

  Of course, conservatives have now achieved a political ascendancy regardless of these mistakes. Thanks in part to the collapse of the liberal alternative, and to the self-destruction of Bill Clinton, the flaws of religious zeal and moral authoritarianism have not prevented conservatives’ rise to cultural and political power. That makes the danger of hubris all the greater and the need for self-restraint all the more pressing. In the past, conservatives have rightly been praised as much for what they haven’t done as for what they have. Maybe today’s conservative generation, poised on the brink of unprecedented power, will heed that lesson. But maybe, God help us, they won’t.

  What’s So Bad about Hate?

  Schoolyard Shootings, Matthew Shepard, Genocide

  September 26, 1999 | THE NEW YORK TIMES

  I

  I wonder what was going on in John William King’s head two years ago when he tied James Byrd Jr.’s feet to the back of a pickup truck and dragged him three miles down a road in rural Texas. King and two friends had picked up Byrd, who was black, when he was walking home, half-drunk, from a party. As part of a bonding ritual in their fledgling white supremacist group, the three men took Byrd to a remote part of town, beat him, and chained his legs together before attaching them to the truck. Pathologists at King’s trial testified that Byrd was probably alive and conscious until his body finally hit a culvert and split in two. When King was offered a chance to say something to Byrd’s family at the trial, he smirked and uttered an obscenity.

  We know all these details now, many months later. We know quite a large amount about what happened before and after. But I am still drawn, again and again, to the flash of ignition, the moment when fear and loathing became hate, the instant of transformation when King became hunter and Byrd became prey.

  What was that? And what was it when Buford Furrow Jr., longtime member of Aryan Nations, calmly walked up to a Filipino American mailman he happened to spot, asked him to mail a letter, and then shot him at point-blank range? Or when Russell Henderson beat Matthew Shepard, a young gay man, to a pulp, removed his shoes, and then, with the help of a friend, tied him to a post, like a dead coyote, to warn off others?

  For all our documentation of these crimes and others, our political and moral disgust at them, our morbid fascination with them, our sensitivity to their social meaning, we seem at times to have no better idea now than we ever had of what exactly they were about. About what that moment means when, for some reason or other, one human being asserts absolute, immutable superiority over another. About not the violence, but what the violence expresses. About what—exactly—hate is. And what our own part in it may be.

  I find myself wondering what hate actually is in part because we have created an entirely new offense in American criminal law—a “hate crime”—to combat it. And barely a day goes by without someone somewhere declaring war against it. Last month President Clinton called for an expansion of hate-crime laws as “what America needs in our battle against hate.” A couple of weeks later, Senator John McCain used a campaign speech to denounce the “hate” he said poisoned the land. New York’s mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, recently tried to stop the Million Youth March in Harlem on the grounds that the event was organized by people “involved in hate marches and hate rhetoric.”

  The media concurs in its emphasis. In 1985, there were eleven mentions of “hate crimes” in the national media database Nexis. By 1990, there were more than a thousand. In the first six months of 1999, there were seven thousand. “Sexy fun is one thing,” wrote a New York Times reporter about sexual assaults in Woodstock ’99’s mosh pit. “But this was an orgy of lewdness tinged with hate.” And when Benjamin Smith marked the Fourth of July this year by targeting blacks, Asians, and Jews for murder in Indiana and Illinois, the story wasn’t merely about a twisted young man who had emerged on the scene. As The Times put it, “Hate arrived in the neighborhoods of Indiana University, in Bloomington, in the early-morning darkness.”

  But what exactly was this thing that arrived in the early-morning darkness? For all our zeal to attack hate, we still have a remarkably vague idea of what it actually is. A single word, after all, tells us less, not more. For all its emotional punch, “hate” is far less nuanced an idea than prejudice, or bigotry, or bias, or anger, or even mere aversion to others. Is it to stand in for all these varieties of human experience—and everything in between? If so, then the war against it will be so vast as to be quixotic. Or is “hate” to stand for a very specific idea or belief, or set of beliefs, with a very specific object or group of objects? Then waging war against it is almost certainly unconstitutional. Perhaps these kinds of questions are of no concern to those waging war on hate. Perhaps it is enough for them that they share a sentiment that there is too much hate and never enough vigilance in combating it. But sentiment is a poor basis for law, and a dangerous tool in politics. It is better to leave some unwinnable wars unfought.

  II

  Hate is everywhere. Human beings generalize all the time, ahead of time, about everyone and everything. A large part of it may even be hardwired. At some point in our evolution, being able to know beforehand who was friend or foe was not merely a matter of philosophical reflection. It was a matter of survival. And even today it seems impossible to feel a loyalty without also feeling a disloyalty, a sense of belonging without an equal sense of unbelonging. We’re social beings. We associate. Therefore we disassociate. And although it would be comforting to think that the one could happen without the other, we know in reality that it
doesn’t. How many patriots are there who have never felt a twinge of xenophobia?

  Of course by “hate,” we mean something graver and darker than this kind of lazy prejudice. But the closer you look at this distinction, the fuzzier it gets. Much of the time, we harbor little or no malice toward people of other backgrounds or places or ethnicities or ways of life. But then a car cuts you off at an intersection and you find yourself noticing immediately that the driver is a woman, or black, or old, or fat, or white, or male. Or you are walking down a city street at night and hear footsteps quickening behind you. You look around and see that it is a white woman and not a black man, and you are instantly relieved. These impulses are so spontaneous they are almost involuntary. But where did they come from? The mindless need to be mad at someone—anyone—or the unconscious eruption of a darker prejudice festering within?

  In 1993, in San Jose, California, two neighbors—one heterosexual, one homosexual—were engaged in a protracted squabble over grass clippings. (The full case is recounted in Hate Crimes, by James B. Jacobs and Kimberly Potter.) The gay man regularly mowed his lawn without a grass catcher, which prompted his neighbor to complain on many occasions that grass clippings spilled over onto his driveway. Tensions grew until one day the gay man mowed his front yard, spilling clippings onto his neighbor’s driveway, prompting the straight man to yell an obscene and common antigay insult. The wrangling escalated. At one point, the gay man agreed to collect the clippings from his neighbor’s driveway but then later found them dumped on his own porch. A fracas ensued with the gay man spraying the straight man’s son with a garden hose, and the son hitting and kicking the gay man several times, yelling antigay slurs. The police were called, and the son was eventually convicted of a hate-motivated assault, a felony. But what was the nature of the hate: antigay bias or suburban property-owner madness?

  Or take the Labor Day parade last year in Broad Channel, a small island in Jamaica Bay, Queens. Almost everyone there is white, and in recent years a group of local volunteer firefighters has taken to decorating a pickup truck for the parade in order to win the prize for “funniest float.” Their themes have tended toward the outrageously provocative. Beginning in 1995, they won prizes for floats depicting “Hasidic Park,” “Gooks of Hazzard,” and “Happy Gays.” Last year, they called their float “Black to the Future, Broad Channel 2098.” They imagined their community a century hence as a largely black enclave, with every stereotype imaginable: watermelons, basketballs, and so on. At one point during the parade, one of them mimicked the dragging death of James Byrd. It was caught on videotape, and before long the entire community was depicted as a caldron of hate.

  It’s an interesting case, because the float was indisputably in bad taste and the improvisation on the Byrd killing was grotesque. But was it hate? The men on the float were local heroes for their volunteer work; they had no record of bigoted activity, and were not members of any racist organizations. In previous years, they had made fun of many other groups and saw themselves more as provocateurs than bigots. When they were described as racists, it came as a shock to them. They apologized for poor taste but refused to confess to bigotry. “The people involved aren’t horrible people,” protested a local woman. “Was it a racist act? I don’t know. Are they racists? I don’t think so.”

  If hate is a self-conscious activity, she has a point. The men were primarily motivated by the desire to shock and to reflect what they thought was their community’s culture. Their display was not aimed at any particular black people, or at any blacks who lived in Broad Channel—almost none do. But if hate is primarily an unconscious activity, then the matter is obviously murkier. And by taking the horrific lynching of a black man as a spontaneous object of humor, the men were clearly advocating indifference to it. Was this an aberrant excess? Or the real truth about the men’s feelings toward African Americans? Hate or tastelessness? And how on Earth is anyone, even perhaps the firefighters themselves, going to know for sure?

  Or recall H. L. Mencken. He shared in the anti-Semitism of his time with more alacrity than most and was an indefatigable racist. “It is impossible,” he wrote in his diary, “to talk anything resembling discretion or judgment into a colored woman. They are all essentially childlike, and even hard experience does not teach them anything.” He wrote at another time of the “psychological stigmata” of the “Afro-American race.” But it is also true that, during much of his life, day to day, Mencken conducted himself with no regard to race, and supported a politics that was clearly integrationist. As the editor of his diary has pointed out, Mencken published many black authors in his magazine, The American Mercury, and lobbied on their behalf with his publisher, Alfred A. Knopf. The last thing Mencken ever wrote was a diatribe against racial segregation in Baltimore’s public parks. He was good friends with leading black writers and journalists, including James Weldon Johnson, Walter White, and George S. Schuyler, and played an underappreciated role in promoting the Harlem Renaissance.

  What would our modern view of hate do with Mencken? Probably ignore him, or change the subject. But, with regard to hate, I know lots of people like Mencken. He reminds me of conservative friends who oppose almost every measure for homosexual equality yet genuinely delight in the company of their gay friends. It would be easier for me to think of them as haters, and on paper, perhaps, there is a good case that they are. But in real life, I know they are not. Some of them clearly harbor no real malice toward me or other homosexuals whatsoever.

  They are as hard to figure out as those liberal friends who support every gay-rights measure they have ever heard of but do anything to avoid going into a gay bar with me. I have to ask myself in the same, frustrating kind of way: Are they liberal bigots or bigoted liberals? Or are they neither bigots nor liberals, but merely people?

  III

  Hate used to be easier to understand. When Sartre described anti-Semitism in his 1946 essay “Anti-Semite and Jew,” he meant a very specific array of firmly held prejudices, with a history, an ideology, and even a pseudoscience to back them up. He meant a systematic attempt to demonize and eradicate an entire race. If you go to the website of the World Church of the Creator, the organization that inspired young Benjamin Smith to murder in Illinois earlier this year, you will find a similarly bizarre, pseudorational ideology. The kind of literature read by Buford Furrow before he rained terror on a Jewish kindergarten last month and then killed a mailman because of his color is full of the same paranoid loopiness. And when we talk about hate, we often mean this kind of phenomenon.

  But this brand of hatred is mercifully rare in the United States. These professional maniacs are to hate what serial killers are to murder. They should certainly not be ignored; but they represent what Harold Meyerson, writing in Salon, called “niche haters”: cold-blooded, somewhat deranged, often poorly socialized psychopaths. In a free society with relatively easy access to guns, they will always pose a menace.

  But their menace is a limited one, and their hatred is hardly typical of anything very widespread. Take Buford Furrow. He famously issued a “wake-up call” to “kill Jews” in Los Angeles, before he peppered a Jewish community center with gunfire. He did this in a state with two Jewish female senators, in a city with a large, prosperous Jewish population, in a country where out of several million Jewish Americans, a total of sixty-six were reported by the FBI as the targets of hate-crime assaults in 1997. However despicable Furrow’s actions were, it would require a very large stretch to describe them as representative of anything but the deranged fringe of an American subculture.

  Most hate is more common and more complicated, with as many varieties as there are varieties of love. Just as there is possessive love and needy love, family love and friendship, romantic love and unrequited love, passion and respect; affection and obsession, so hatred has its shadings. There is hate that fears, and hate that merely feels contempt; there is hate that expresses power, and hate that comes from powerlessness; there is revenge, and there is ha
te that comes from envy. There is hate that was love, and hate that is a curious expression of love. There is hate of the other, and hate of something that reminds us too much of ourselves. There is the oppressor’s hate, and the victim’s hate. There is hate that burns slowly, and hate that fades. And there is hate that explodes, and hate that never catches fire.

  The modern words that we have created to describe the varieties of hate—“sexism,” “racism,” “anti-Semitism, “homophobia”—tell us very little about any of this. They tell us merely the identities of the victims; they don’t reveal the identities of the perpetrators, or what they think, or how they feel. They don’t even tell us how the victims feel. And this simplicity is no accident. Coming from the theories of Marxist and post-Marxist academics, these “isms” are far better at alleging structures of power than at delineating the workings of the individual heart or mind. In fact, these “isms” can exist without mentioning individuals at all.

  We speak of institutional racism, for example, as if an institution can feel anything. We talk of “hate” as an impersonal noun, with no hater specified. But when these abstractions are actually incarnated, when someone feels something as a result of them, when a hater actually interacts with a victim, the picture changes. We find that hates are often very different phenomena one from another, that they have very different psychological dynamics, that they might even be better understood by not seeing them as varieties of the same thing at all.