Haters Gonna Hate, Hate, Hate (And Win Office!)

The grocery store is a den of thieves. Every stop at the gas pump is a mugging. Four more American soldiers were mangled by Iranian munitions, bringing the total casualty count to 18—in a war doughboys were supposed to wage at a safe remove.

In a dolorous logline, things have been better in the happy-bright U.S. of A. All this death and squandery, plus those noxious plumes from our neighbors in the North, really shadows this summer. We Americans are used to better: less blood; more honey; full tanks of petroleum filled for a song.

The in-power party is—shock of shocks—not oblivious. The country’s default aristocratic faction is normally obtuse to fickle sways of passion. Not today’s Republicans, who, through the modern miracle of pushpoll-measured resentment, realize their ruling days are numbered.

So what’s an ineffectual, timeworn, bumbling party to do when marching to its own electoral demise?

Embrace the Sithian dark side. “It’s going to be a hate election,” is how one Dumbo functionary described the upcoming midterms. Speaking to Axios, this zeyd-cloaked flunky reasoned that “[v]oters have to hate the Dems more than they hate us” if Mike Johnson has a puncher’s chance of keeping the House gavel.

As with all journalism, running back to yellow gazeteers in the Founding-era, the underlying message must be sussed out. What Axios is reporting on isn’t so much as Republicans’ strategy of deflection. The juicy nut is the unsaid implication: those dastardly retrograde Republicans have nothing of substance to offer, thus they must traduce, villify, and assail the competition, like a rowdy class of kindergarten scamps. The second-order inference: the sweet, innocent Democrats, so brainy and bursting with material suggestions, fall victim to politicking as smearsport.

The Beltway narrative is neatly bowed. The Goon Old Party turns a race of ideas into a shootout.

The story, of course, is a non-story. It’s so well-tread that it sinks all the way into the earth’s molten core.

“The whole secret of politics is knowing who hates who,” said Kevin Phillips, not a few years ago, but decades, while he helped Richard Nixon reorient the Republican Party in a more southern, downmarket direction. It’s widely accepted that Phillips crafted the racist “Southern Strategy” to turn the Party of Lincoln into the Party of (figurative) Lynchin’. That PoliSci 101-précis is overblown. Nixon won the way many chief executives win office: savaging an incumbent clique who fumbled a war.

Just as well, angst and discontent have always made for tasty political chum. In the American wild, public officemongering has long been that great arena where men (and women and Hillary Clinton) of ambition vie for the brass ring. From the early days of Federalists slandering Jeffersonian Republicans as violent levellers, to the nullificationary schism that briefly halved the country, to the consolidation of laborers, blacks, and pale-male plowpushers into the New Deal hat-hold coalition, political contests have been less philosophical comparisons than hathotic mule kicks at a big bad.

Poor humble Abe was really well-wishing when, upon taking the solemn oath, he urged his countrymen to think of themselves as “not enemies, but friends.” Well, what fun—and most importantly, what money—is there in cultivating common ground for the betterment of our shared republic? More amusement and moolah in rattling off an inexhaustible list of bugaboos, including but not limited to: Chinese espionage, data centers, smartphones-in-schools, illegal aliens, I.C.E. aggression, fossil-fuel emissions, Hollywood inclusion riders, venal corporations, Elon Musk, D.O.G.E. cuts, MAGAfascists, Antifa, transgender perverts, fracking (wait, is that still a progressive nettle?), U.A.P.s, Hasan Piker, seed oils, Christopher Nolan’s wokecasting, PRIDE parades, the H.R. bitch always emailing about your “unprofessional” remarks over company Slack, Mark Zuckerberg always flagging your “inappropriate” Facebook posts, fake handicap dogs on planes, D.E.I. standards, and, of course, the outsized mango-mafioso turning the White House into a clipjoint.

These nits and more take up countless airtime hours on the country’s major news purveyors. Meanwhile, the national debt is a glutinous farce that will soon enough turn the greenback into Weimar Charmin. The dozenth ceasefire with Iran has collapsed, and the President is lobbing Tomahawks at the desert willy-nilly. Tipping-point cataclysms loom on the horizon. But our eyes are cast sharply downward, our brows anger-angled, to irritants we love to hate.

“[They] have become a party of freaks, weirdos, losers, and crazies,” is how one major Washington player framed November’s elections. Who occupies my authorial interpolation is irrelevant. Such comma-chained slagging is so typical of campaigning that fleshpressers who refuse to utter an unkind word are seen as hopeless deadweight from the start.

The chronically shortfused like to be, in Robinson Jeffers’s poetic formulation, “angry at the sun for setting.” But in American politics, anyone with a ballot eagerly jumps into the murk, gleefully slinging mud like kids on a snow day.

Politics, the art of the PO’d!

(The answer, by the way, for my bracketed anon is White House honcho and uber-immigration hawk Stephen Miller, speaking with Sean Hannity. But replace Miller with ex-NBCer Joy Reid or any cackling broiler from “The View” and the sentiment is interchangeable.)