Hatred in the Age of Obama

Hatred in the Age of Obama
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A kind of grief gripped me while viewing PBS’ four-hour documentary “The Divided States of America.” Frame after frame reveals the unrestrained hatred of countless Americans for Barack Obama. It was there in the 2008 campaign. It is there under the yellow hair as Obama leaves office. What is the source of this huge river of hatred?

Hatred is always twinned with fear. When hatred is born from fears of injustice, the source hardly needs more explanation. For those terribly harmed, hatred may seem the only weight the powerless can lay in the balance against injustice. But sometimes a person full of hate can point to no wrong done or planned, to him or to any.

As the PBS documentary unrolled, voices multiplied calamitous claims of a world about to collapse under the evil manipulations of a President who, they were certain, desired the destruction of the USA. Scores of assertions were made, many like the next president’s drumbeat that Obama’s policies were “a disaster, the worst ever”—yet never any reason given. I pricked my ears for a shard of evidence of injustice in the bitter voices of the documentary. None. Just hate.

When a hate has no source in injustice, its cause harbors inside the one who hates. To make sense of the emotional sewage the documentary exposes, the lens needs to pull back from politics to examine the most basic needs of human consciousness.

The self-system is a complex wonder of extraordinary demands. Each must find a way to value herself and others well, while staggering under often terrible burdens, fully aware that the end is death. The great spiritual traditions put all their focus on this problem of valuing our self and others well, for getting this wrong is all wrong.

The self-systems of very many never find the balance. More fragile than birds’ eggs, their estimate of the validity of their own existence swings wildly between negative and positive poles. American culture supports this unhappy imagination in the belief that one’s worth is derived from dollars. Hence, the desperate features of the “American way of life,” driven by attempts to read the meaning of the self from others’ estimates of one’s material success or failure.

A classic element of class analysis is that humans are always trying to read who is above them and who below, much as social animals are driven to establish their place in the order of dominance. To the extent that social analyses of humans fail to account for how and why many people have no involvement in a scheme of social dominance, they press their theories too far, usually in service of a political theory. That said, when an adult’s self is constructed mostly from estimates of material success and dominance, he is a weak reed, psychologically speaking. He is in a rat race. Hatred is his go-to emotion.

In America, the white and the wealthy are tempted by their privileges toward hells and hatreds sadly similar. The wealthy tend to live apart from groups over against whom they measure themselves and set their value. Regardless how some compensate for their fragile conception of their own value, separation from the non-wealthy only serves to obscure their self-awareness. Disdain and arrogance perform the work of separation, but its real function is to shore up the weakly structured self. In a parallel fashion, the non-wealthy white American, especially the non-urban, lives apart from groups over against whom his class measure themselves and set their value. Emotions of race and class hatred may perform the daily work of separation, but here too, its real function is to obscure in those who hate their fear of how vaporous and meaningless are their self-systems, constructed of codes for dominance.

Everybody knows that Irish immigrants, and Italians, Greeks, Poles, etc. were objects of appalling hatred in the 19th and early 20th c. It now seems obvious that this animus was bound to dissipate for the simple fact that after a generation or two, the children of white immigrants were impossible to distinguish from a distance of twenty feet. If racism’s hatred cannot be ginned up accurately on the instant of encounter, it cannot serve its purpose: to shore up a weak self-system with invidious comparisons. To perform this complex psychological work, the self-system needs a thoroughly reliable criterion of exclusion. Only the sense of sight works at a distance, to keep the distance. The self-system battens of the fact that it has access to a hoard of social and economic goods which the despised are deprived of. These become the boards and nails of its structure. The only requirement is hate at first sight.

That is what is on display in the PBS documentary. It has not gone away because the need to feel superior never fades away in those whose selves are built on western society’s mismeasure of what is human. And unlike the white immigrants of a century ago, the passing of generations will never help Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, or Muslims become familiar. “One drop of black blood” was the criterion of segregation in the Jim Crow South. Only groups easily identified by sight can serve the fears of mis-built selves to have someone beneath them.

This fear is the fear of annihilation—but not as some claim. Dylann Roof, neo-Nazis, and alt-right partisans entertain fantasies both ridiculous and dangerous that in America. the “white race” risks elimination. The fear that is really stoking the engines of racism is that my self, my life, amounts to nothing. It is Willie Loman’s unspeakable fear of being worthless, pointless. The fear of annihilation cannot easily be brought to awareness, but while hidden, the errors it causes destroy human welfare. The great religious traditions know this. They address the fear of annihilation head on, but many religionists never swerve from it. Some religious leaders even labor to intensify the fear. Spread across millions of minds, the fear of annihilation, unacknowledged, is very useful to those who seek control over the fearful.

Obama symbolized and actualized a reality utterly unacceptable to the weakly structured selves of many white Americans. Suddenly, it was on the television and unavoidable: “There is no one lower than me. I am nothing. I am rage.” All four hours of the PBS documentary, tracing the Obama years from beginning to end, were soaked in the sewage of raging hatred.

No one so-minded to hate can understand herself, just as no two-year-old can understand its rages. While the child screams, the parent pleads, “Use your words!” But the child has no words. The unschooled, talk-radio-fed mind likewise has had no words for its fears and rages— except “Obama.” And if I am laid off, if my mortgage is underwater, if I am an addict of opioids—have I the will or wits to inquire into the evils of laws and law-makers which enable huge multi-nationals to advance their greed over every other concern of the nation? I do not. That would require words, and I have none. Rage turns on the dark-skinned faces now in town. Rage bellows “Obama.”

Many Trump voters say they voted happily for Obama. Many are not full of rage, hatred, and fear, and are not weakly constructed selves. They say they just want serious change from government, after years of . . . well, what? Obama presented a lot of opportunities for serious change. Most of his ideas were blocked by the U.S. Congress, almost always because they tended to distribute benefits to the non-wealthy at the expense of the sickeningly wealthy. Republicans will not permit any degree of power to shift away from the sickeningly wealthy.

So it is a fact of Obama’s presidency that a lot did not get done. Therefore, goes the story, a lot of people just voted for change, any change—no matter how irresponsible, manipulative, arrogant, selfish, mendacious, deceitful, and hateful the man who would gain power. Change for the sake of change has been a fact of our politics since the end of World War II. Consider.

Old-man-of-war Eisenhower begot Fresh-man Kennedy begot

LawnOrder Tricky Dick begot MoralMan Carter begot

MakeMyDay Reagan begot PolicyMan Clinton begot

ShockNAwe Cheney/Bush begot CareForAll Obama begot

LockEmUp Trump begets . . . . . . .

Back and forth we swing, unable to determine what sort of people to become. Yet for all that, a substantial majority of American voters absolutely did not offer the top job to the yellow hair. Those sliver-thin majorities in the three states whose electoral votes lifted the man up could not have formed at all without that core of hatred for the Other below, for Obama above. That hatred has lain in the stomach of America for hundreds of years. Its root is the unacknowledged fear of nothing at all, the fear of ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Only love can cast out that fear.

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