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Leftist Rage, Conservative
Hate
Years ago, when we were very young and contributing
promiscuously to the reviews departments of various intellectual
publications, a misguided editor sent out to me for review a leftist
rant by an author whose name I have long since banished from memory,
while clearly recalling the title. It was The Dying of the
Light--taken, of course, from the Dylan Thomas poem a stanza of
which was chosen to serve as an epigraph: "Go not gently into that
dark night/Rage, rage against the dying of the light." Lost to memory
also is the identity of the Good epitomized for the writer by the
Light-the Spirit of Liberalism, I suppose, or the Rights of Man as
established in 1789.
What did make a lasting impression is the use in
context of the word "rage," obviously considered by poet and author
alike as a fine, even a noble, thing. According to the Chinese
proverb, "So long as a man is angry he can't be in the right." Rage
and hate both are aspects of anger. They are not, however, the
equivalent of one another. "I love a good hater," said Samuel Johnson.
He meant that hate implies a corresponding love, which responds
reactively to its threatened opposite. For a man to hate, he must
first love; as he who loves, inevitably hates. Hate is a directed
thing, focused like a laser beam. By comparison, rage is undirected,
unfocused, generalized, indiscriminate: an adult tantrum. "Rage,"
Ernst von Feuchtersleben thought, "is a vulgar passion with vulgar
ends." Thus it is with good reason, if poor judgment, that the Left
boasts of the "rage" it nurtures in its bosom, while denouncing the
"hate" it relentlessly discovers on the Right.
Probably there is no genuinely conservative
organization, whether in America or western Europe, that by now has
not been publicly identified as a "hate group" by one or more of the
Leftist mastiffs self-appointed to police the public square in search
of dragons to slay. This is understandable. The Left, despising all
that exists, or ever has existed, loves nothing: Therefore, it rages.
The Right, from its grateful appreciation of what is (and was), loves
much: Hence, it hates. "Whoever hateth his brother is a murderer,"
warns St. John. But Dr. Johnson did not have murder in mind when he
spoke of good hating; anymore than Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty
Law Center spoke from the Love that is God when, in a recent outburst,
he attacked the restrictionist faction within the Sierra Club for
opposing mass immigration to the United States. "They want to keep
America white," Mr. Dees charged. The inference is that Morris Dees
wants to turn it brown, black, yellow, and red-surely not out of love
for America or his fellow Americans, against which he habitually
rages.
The rage motif has been a staple of Western culture
since the 1960s. For half a century now it has been associated with
the liberal and the radical Left which has never hesitated to claim
it, proudly and defiantly, as its hallmark. Anti-abortion, pro-war,
and so-called majoritarian activists could never have conceived
anything like the "Days of Rage" rampage in Chicago in 1968, not
because they are incapable of violence but because their
demonstrations characteristically are expressions of discriminate and
focused anger, not of indiscriminate, inchoate, and nihilistic fury.
Conservatives may have lost, along with their intellectual grasp on
reality, the habit of thinking straight, but they are mostly capable
still of feeling sanely. "Anger is a brief lunacy" (Horace). By
comparison with the Left, the Right has managed for the most part to
retain emotional sanity, at least.
That staunch Old Believer, Edward Abbey, complained
shortly before he died that everything he valued and cared for in the
world was not merely under assault but apparently doomed to
extinction. In his review of Desert Solitaire at the time of
the book's publication in 1968, Joseph Wood Krutch described it as "a
hymn of hate." Krutch, however, with equal plausibility could have
called Abbey's masterwork "a hymn of love." Edward Abbey was a good
hater of the rapacious industrial-consumerist system he despised in
proportion as he passionately loved the natural world that system is
bent on systematically destroying. Inevitably, therefore, this
life-long selfconsidered liberal was a marked man by the time of his
death in 1989, attacked by his politically correct enemies as a racist
for opposing Third World immigration and a male chauvinist pig for
mocking "wimmen's liberation," which Abbey viewed as another aberrancy
created by a perverse social and economic set-up. "Our only hope is
catastrophe," he believed. Yet this very angry, though also
goodnatured and humorous, man never stooped to rage against the world,
being too oldfashioned a liberal-and far too good a writer-to do
anything so stupid, childish, and crazy.
Joe Sobran, with cutting characteristic clarity,
has observed that one can't "tolerate" what one likes, but only what
one dislikes. In demanding toleration for everything, the Left
assumes on the Right's part a cultivated dislike for almost
everything. Since, for the Left, majoritarian distaste or even want of
sympathy for minorities (e.g. immigrants, homosexuals,
feminists, Muslims, Jews, blacks, etc.) is always the equivalent of
"hate," for Leftists hate necessarily appears as the universal reality
stretching like an arid and infinite plain beyond the shining walls
and towers of the New Jerusalem.
A profound and fundamental difference between Left
and Right is that the one tends to think and to feel reflectively, the
other reflexively. The distinction is between what Oakeshott called
"the reflective application of a moral criterion" and the "habit
of affection and behavior." Another way to put this is to say that
Leftists react ideologically, Rightists viscerally. "Visceral" is an
ugly-sounding word connoting the most primitive and violent instincts.
Yet, as a barbaric destructive force in history, visceral thinking
cannot compare with thinking of the ideological variety. What leftists
decry as conservative "hate" is actually resentment of, and resistance
to, the intrusion of the alien and the displacement of the familiar by
the unfamiliar, the old by the new, the traditional by the
untraditional, the proximate by the distant, the particular by the
universal. Leftists misinterpret conservative hate because they cannot
understand it, and they cannot understand it because it is
incomparably less radical, thoroughgoing, vicious, and nihilistic-in a
word, ideological--than their own, vaunted rage. The Leftist
perception of Rightist "hate" is a classic example of what the
Freudians call "transference," by which one automatically ascribes
one's own motives, sentiments, and thoughts to someone else. If
conservative "hate" were what Morris Dees and Alan Dershowitz think it
is, then people like Dees and Dershowitz would not be the millionaire
celebrities they are: They might not, indeed, be anymore. Jews
in America would long since have been rounded up and packed off to
concentration camps in the Aleutian Islands; black slavery would have
been reinstituted in a reconstituted Confederacy; the Indian tribes
would have been exterminated and their reservations seized; the gay
population would have been gassed in their bath houses; women would be
denied the suffrage along with the right to abortion. The
presumptively hate-filled majority remains the majority, after all,
and so there is no good reason why it should have tolerated the social
devastation that the Left has accomplished in the last hundred and
fifty years. No reason, that is, beyond the fact that conservative
hate lies in another moral dimension entirely than that occupied by
leftist rage.
The Left is offended by, above everything else, the
intransigent fact of the metaphysical reality it in certain moods
denies, at other times defies, and always despises. After reality, the
continued existence of a Right (no matter how relatively "Right" it
may be) incites it most efficiently to rage. If Leftists "hate"
anything, that thing is Rightists--and with a rage that surpasseth
understanding. The purpose of Leftist witch hunters who make a
(typically very good) living by identifying "hate groups" and
publicizing their existence is not to perform an act of good
citizenship by setting the public record straight. What they intend is
to brand these organizations and the individuals who comprise them as
public enemies, thus marking them for liquidation come the revolution
they are working for and fully expect in the long run. Whoever thinks
otherwise has failed to understand both the history of the twentieth
century, and the moral nature of the Left.
"Hate," which leftists view as a peculiarly
egregious symptom of moral and social perversion, in revolutionary
times is simply an expression of sanity, and even of humanity. Hatred
for persons is sinful and un-Christian; but personal hatred is not
really the issue here. For one thing, it is a waste of time: a fact of
which the great majority of resentful conservatives are aware. Even
immigration restrictionists do not go about talking of how they "hate
immigrants," while those who simply dislike having immigrants around
are for the most part content to move somewhere else, as frustrated
Californians have been moving to Colorado for the past decade and a
half. Of course, for the Left, "white flight" is unmistakably an
expression of hate. This sort of luxuriant false analogy, however, is
what leftists have instead of poetry, and perhaps we should leave them
to it. Meanwhile, responsible anti-immigration groups (and most of
them are responsible) go out of their way to insist that their
quarrel is not with the immigrants themselves but with the policies
responsible for their presence here. Policies, of course, are not
self-generated by machines in government printing offices. They are
created by individual flesh-and-blood persons, who may indeed be
"hated" by people who despise their policies and hold them responsible
for these. But hatred for traitors, quislings, opportunists, and
suborned politicians is not merely a human thing, it is the instinct
upon which the future of self-government, free institutions, and
civilization itself depends.
Leftists are quick to insist upon the distinction
between offensive and defensive war, and quicker still to declare
their own governments guilty of the former. Yet, for the past two
centuries, the Left has waged unremittant offensive warfare against
existing societies. "We must hate-hatred is the basis of Communism,"
Lenin declared. One wonders what Morris Dees would have to say about
that statement. (Does he, for instance, have any neo-Leninist or
-Maoist organizations on his executioner's little hate list?) One
wonders further what response Dees would expect from targeted victims
of revolutionary hatred besides reaction, which for the SPLC and its
friends and allies is not self-defense but hate, pure and simple.
Could there be, indeed, any conservative response to leftwing
aggression that the Left would not condemn as hate, excepting
immediate unconditional surrender? The answer is no: since anything
less than surrender would amount to resistance, and resistance to the
Left, according to the leftist dialectic, is simply another
manifestation of hate. (This, of course, is not logic; it is
ideological. That is to say, it is extralogic. As such, it is
unanswerable.)
Conservatives know as little of history as anyone
else does these days. Nevertheless, the Right does possess a residual
sense of history, or anyway of historical process. Unlike the
Left, it understands that history is linear and has no end, save in
the eschatological sense. That is a major reason why, at this point in
history, it is losing everywhere to the Left, which still believes in
the possibility, and even the inevitability, of triumphalism.
Conservatives, paradoxically, are accustomed to thinking in terms of
historical flux; if they are Christians also, they are resigned to
change as being an inescapable aspect of this world that is not yet
Christ's kingdom. Resignation does not tend to promote hate, let alone
rage; and here is another reason why the Right is losing the
apocalyptic battle. The Left prevails by rage over its enemies, who,
so far from being defined by hate, have shown themselves unable to
hate enough. This inability has Christian roots; that is why, for
certain post-Christian reactionaries, Christianity is as great or
greater an enemy than the anti-religious Left--an object of the kind
of hatred that truly hates.
There is something to be said for these people's
contempt and anger. The world has never been in greater need of good
haters than nowadays, but good hating requires more than an
appropriate measure of righteous anger. It requires also probity and,
above all, moral courage-which in modern times is not just in short
supply but nearly an outmoded concept. Nevertheless, it is the Right's
best weapon with which to combat Leftist rage. As such, it is
indispensable to the retaking and rebuilding of our beleaguered
civilization. |
