When Did We Get So Hateful?

Politics & Elections
81

How interesting, because I was going to trace the roots to Goldwater – or to be exact, Goldwater supporters (Barry Goldwater was by all accounts a blunt but very decent human being.)

At the 1964 republican convention, Goldwater’s supporters tried to boo Nelson Rockefeller out of the convention hall, succeeded in chasing two black reporters out of the hall, and had John Chancellor thrown out of the hall. Goldwater himself wished "We could just saw the Eastern seaboard and let it float out to sea."

Goldwater was just the warmup for the Nixon/Agnew ticket in 1968. By then, the Democrats had also gotten into the act and things have generally sucked since then.

82

Heh. You clearly don’t know me very well. The way I write here is the way I talk in person. I’d suffer silently with some propaganda-spouting Fox News junkie for just about as long as it takes your average PC to calculate 2 + 2.

Well, there is one friend of my folks’ that I’ve been given strict instructions not to aggravate. Lucky I don’t see her very often. You can hear my teeth gritting for miles.

83

Yeah, but that kind of thing was already a thing before the interwebs - letters to the editor, anonymous mail, phone threats, talk radio, that kind of stuff. Used to be only real cranks went through the effort though - the web facilitates spewing hate, to be sure.

But what it really facilitates, to a troubling degree, are echo chambers and little “villages” - back in the mid nineties pundits harped on how the 'net would allow the world to become like a “global village” that would allow the networking of people from all walks of life, cultures, nations.
What has really happened is that the majority of people have retreated into tiny closets filled only with people who share their ideas where dissenting voices are quickly silenced and inconvenient facts are easily filtered out.

This fosters tons of circular “logic”, isolation from critical thinking, groupthink/socially forced compliance. That’s unhealthy in and of itself ; but worse is that it’s not sustainable as even within these tiny bubbles there are wedge issues and differing opinions and the like. So the villages resort to what small villages, cloistered groups and large nations alike have always done whenever they were faced with internal strife : find an external enemy to collectively hate. That or eating each other, like the US alt-right seems to be doing these days.

84

I suspect the level of ‘hatefulness’ has a lot to do with the perceived desperate situation among people who are engaged in observing politics. It’s very easy to be laid back, collegial, and compromising when the stakes aren’t perceived to be so high.

As far a JFK’s acceptability I’m of the opinion he’d be far too progressive for today’s DNC.

85

The terrifying specter of payday loan regulation been keeping you up nights, has it?

86

That’s one thing that baffles me about Republicans. Are they so convinced that they are morally superior that they rejoice when the lower classes are ripped off by predator lenders?

87

Er, if you don’t want someone to post that, perhaps you shouldn’t have opened your first post with clear evidence pointing in that direction.

88

I think that the idea is that “government doing less” is a, no, the moral imperative. Any concern that individuals might have for the poor or disadvantaged takes second fiddle to the concern that the government might be doing something it “shouldn’t”.

And thus, Republicans can manage to say (and believe) in the same breath both that they care about the poor and also cut funding to programs that help the poor without another solution in place.

There is no problem that holds a candle to that of government where government doesn’t belong.

89

Which raises the question, why are the democrats so damn incompetent?

The GOP knows how to win. They destroy unions, make it harder to vote, bribe rich people with tax cuts, etc. and it makes it easier for them to win.

But when the democrats are in power they don’t empower unions, they don’t make it easier to vote. Plus they govern like 90s republicans, which demoralizes their voters until their voters don’t bother to show up anymore. Democrats when in power ignore their voters and pass a bunch of tepid, center-right legislation until their voters throw up their hands and say ‘why bother’ and stay home, allowing the GOP to win back power. After winning big in 2008 the democrats passed heritage foundation health reform, made fun of single payer, did nothing to strengthen unions, passed marginal tax hikes on the rich, refused to investigate the Bush admin and let the GOP in the senate run circles around them.

In a way I wish the democrats were a scheming, cynical team. Right now they act like a bunch of abused spouses.

90

There are a number of factors, but IMHO one of the biggest is that they care about what the editorial pages of the NYT and WaPo have to say about them. (The GOP doesn’t give a damn, which greatly liberates them from a tactical perspective.)

And what every bit of this came down to was the filibuster. If they’d axed the filibuster on January 3, 2009, it would have been a totally different ballgame, which I’ll get to in a moment. But they didn’t, partly because they were afraid of What People Might Say. Meaning people like Fred Hiatt of the WaPo calling them dangerous bombthrowers.

Take card check, for instance. They had the votes to pass this in 2009, but not enough votes to overcome a GOP filibuster. This would have made it a lot easier for workers to get union representation.

Or take the ACA. No, in 2009 they wouldn’t have done single-payer any which way. But if they’d only needed 50 votes rather than 60, they could have included a public option, and raised the income levels where subsidies applied.

Or take the stimulus bill. With 50 votes, it could have been a lot larger, and gotten us out of the Great Recession a lot faster.

Etc.

91

I think it’s unfair to pigeonhole it as moral superiority. That’s only one of several possible rationales.

The Superior Intellect: Hey, if people are stupid enough to agree to the ridiculous terms, they deserve what they get! Why not bilk money from morons?

The Superior Moralist: okay, maybe it’s desperation rather than stupidity— but if they hadn’t blown all their money on lottery tickets and menthol cigarettes, they wouldn’t be stuck in this position. I managed to get by on nothing but hard work and being white and upper-middle class and inheriting a trust fund, and you don’t hear me complaining, do you? Much?

The Superior Philanthropist: payday lenders are only providing a service to underprivileged people in their time of need, which they can’t get anywhere else. Why do you want the poor to suffer, you cruel bastard?

The Superior Libertarian: enough of this nanny-state nonsense. Desperate people have every right to make their lives worse, and it’s downright un-American if we don’t put a payday lender on every corner in poor neighborhoods and flood the airwaves with commercials showing people dancing and laughing with wads of cash, you unpatriotic bastard!
**
The Superior Capitalist:** if there’s no demand, there’d be no supply! Next I guess you’ll want to regulate elephant tranquilizers, dirty bombs and child labor, you commie bastard?

The Superior Ethno-Classist: eh, it’s only those people being exploited, not us, so who cares? It’s just the natural order of things, you unnatural disordered bastard!

92

When? Well, as posters have pointed out, there was Animosity towards Obama, and other have pointed out that Bush wasn’t all that liked either, nor Clinton, nor Bush sr, and not reagan even. Carter was a divisive figure, and Nixon destroyed democracy. LBJ stirred up quite a bit of resentment with the Civil Rights Act, and someone hated JFK enough to kill him. Everybody loved Eisenhower, of course, and Truman was there for the end of the war. No one agrees on whether Roosevelt saved the economy from the depression or if his policies exacerbated it, though many blame Hoover because it started on his watch. No one who knows who Coolidge is likes him, and Harding didn’t make it very long.

Well, that makes up most of last century, we must have gotten along better before that. Of course, there was a bit of a war when we were unable to settle our disagreements and instead found enough animosity for other americans to go out with the intent to kill them.

The civil war wasn’t the first schism between Americans, we almost went to was 30 years earlier over disagreements of the nature of handling other human beings.

Ah well, lets go all the way back to the founding fathers, they all got along great, didn’t they? John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Aaron Burr, and Alexander Hamilton were all best of friends, right?

I think the question in the OP is backwards. We were founded by different cultures from different countries with different reasons for coming. We have never been a cohesive monolithic culture that has agreed on pretty much anything.

The real question that should be asked, is when and how were we able to put aside our differences, forget our hate, and work together to do the great things that America has achieved.

93

I think the importance of this has been too frequently overlooked. You can’t create an alternate reality for your listeners (Rush Limbaugh and his many imitators) or viewers (Fox News) if you’ve got to give airtime to opposing viewpoints.

Ditching the Fairness Doctrine made Rush possible. IIRC, the Fairness Doctrine didn’t apply to cable TV, so Fox News could have happened anyway, but I’m not sure how well it would have done if Rush hadn’t done so much to build a market for it.

94

Right, it was for broadcast channels only, and so would have become decreasingly relevant anyway as cable and the Internet became more pervasive. I think the issue is that the principle behind it became increasingly ignored and dismissed as well - once there was no longer even moral pressure stemming from producers’ senses of responsibility and all that integrity stuff they learned back in J-School, the floodgates were opened, and they could say whatever they thought would rile up enough of a viewer base to make a profit.

Remember when Network was released? It was supposed to be a cautionary dystopic tale. Soon enough it became a documentary. Then Idiocracy became a documentary practically from Day 1.

Maybe. But what they’re doing is indistinguishable from what would be done by a party with respect for the institution, and a realization that fairness works both ways, and that they could and will be on the other side of it soon enough.

95

Good question. When, exactly, was the last time that we were able to work together? I think that the last time we were united as a country was in the aftermath of 9/11, but I’m not sure that much good came out of that. Unless, of course, you consider the DHS, TSA, and Guantanamo to be examples of great things.

96

I’m not sure about this. We’re talking about a party that still won’t oust Trump despite 1) Pence, a true-traditional deep-red Republican waiting in the wings, who would suit the GOP much better than Trump, and 2) it being obvious that as long as Trump is in office, the Republicans are in for a massive beating in the midterms and in 2020.

97

I think Democrats have disdain for their base and Republicans are terrified of theirs. We have maybe 20% of the country that thinks that Donald is incapable of error and is a god walking in our midst. If Republicans dump him, they will walk away from the party. They won’t vote Democratic, they just won’t vote.

98

I think *frustration *would be more accurate, and maybe *base *isn’t quite the right word for people who don’t give you credit for what you do for them or bother to get out and vote for you.

Now there I think *disdain *is the right word.

Naw, they’ll come out and vote the party line, they always do. They did before Trump, they did it with Trump, they’ll do it after him too.

99

I think voters would be happy if politicians actually tried to earn votes instead of take them for granted, or worse demand them.

When political ‘leaders’ like Chuck Schumer can talk like this:

“For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin …"

It becomes clear whose interests they want to serve.

100

the problem is that there are quite a number on the left and far left that only take interest in politics when they choose to be interested in politics. Sure, they helped get Obama elected in 2008, but then left him high and dry in 2010 when they didn’t go out to vote to keep a congress that would support him. They cam back out in 2012 to re-elect the president, but in 2014, once again, no where to be found.

Then 2016 rolls around, and they say, “Well, what have you done for me?”, so they stay home and let trump get elected.

The wanted to teach democrats a lesson by staying home or voting for a candidate with no chance to win, the democrats learned the lesson that these are not dependable voters, so they are looking somewhere else.