Decency in the face of hate-mongering

Of course political hate-mongering is hardly new. Though Americans rightly like to fasten on their idealism, hate has played a significant role in defining our values and shaping our nation. Indians, blacks, Catholics, Jews, and immigrants have all been targets of hate, and anyone who promoted the interests of these groups was subjected to the most scurrilous attacks. Franklin Roosevelt's enemies whispered that he was confined to a wheelchair because of syphilis, not infantile paralysis. Harry Truman's enemies called him a drunkard. Martin Luther King Jr.'s said he was a communist agent. Bill Clinton's accused him of murder.

The good news is that due to a certain proclivity among Americans, this hatefulness is no more likely to last than the hateful smears of the past. The bad news is that this time, because of other proclivities in the country, the hate-mongering, even though it will eventually pass, may be more tenacious than before, more difficult to marginalize.

Let's begin with the more hopeful scenario. Hate movements and hate-mongers in America have generally followed a pattern. They emerge either out of fear - typically the reactionary fear that the status quo will be disrupted - or out of anger - typically the quasi-populist anger that the system is rigged against them.

Thus the Ku Klux Klan, which began as an antiblack movement in the Reconstruction era when the status quo was turned upside down, was revived in the mid-1910s as an anti-Catholic organization and wound up attracting millions of adherents, particularly in the Midwest and Far West, who were quaking in terror over immigration. In Indiana and Oregon, which passed a law forbidding parochial education, the Klan effectively ran the state governments.

In the 1930s, Father Charles Coughlin, the so-called radio priest, originally gained recognition as a populist by delivering fiery broadcasts with simple economic nostrums in support of Roosevelt. Coughlin broke with the president when the priest began placing the dislocations in the economy at the feet of Jewish bankers, but despite his anti-Semitism his influence didn't wane immediately.

Tens of millions of Americans listened to his weekly screeds, even, as historian David Kennedy put it, Coughlin "exhibited a wicked genius for unsealing some of the dankest chambers of the national soul," including "the all too human capacity for hatred."

In the 1950s, red-baiting Senator Joseph McCarthy combined the reactionaries' fear of communist infiltration with the populists' disdain for elites. Like both the KKK and Coughlin, McCarthy quickly won support from millions of Americans, and he commandeered the national debate for several years.

All of which is to say that neither the KKK, nor Coughlin, nor McCarthy, nor most of the other hate-mongers were exactly marginal forces. Yet despite the large number of adherents they won, each of these eventually waned. Ostensibly the demise was the result of miscalculation and misdeeds. The leader of the KKK, D.C. Stephenson, was convicted of rape and murder, undermining his movement. Coughlin lost his radio network when CBS decided he was too incendiary. And McCarthy was discredited when he tried to tar the Army with his communist brush.

Still, misdeeds don't tell the whole story. The real cause in each case may have been best expressed by Joseph Welch, the Army counsel during the McCarthy hearings, who called out the senator after one particularly cruel gibe. "Have you left no sense of decency?" asked Welch. What has happened to American hate-mongers in the past is a matter of decency. They become so emboldened as their movements grow, so flush with power, that they inevitably overreach.

It is at that point that they actually begin to embarrass some of their own supporters and actively repel most everyone else. In effect, shame has been the antidote to hate - a hard slap on the face that brings us to our senses, even if it may take a while to register. Or put another way, hate has a critical mass.

Now for the bad news. In another era, a vicious blowhard like Limbaugh would have been driven from the air just as Coughlin was because there wouldn't have been sufficient numbers of listeners who would have wanted to continue to identify with him. He would have disgraced them. That Limbaugh, Beck, Sean Hannity, and others remain on the air is partly a testament to how "nichified" our media have become - how much the mainstream has divided into rivulets.

In a world of 500 stations, much less the Internet, you don't need a very big audience to keep stoking the fires, and for all their bloviation about the millions of people who listen to them, the relatively paltry audiences for these peddlers of hate is far out of proportion to the large influence they wield. As for the Internet, it is like a virtual Munich beer hall. It circumvents shame.

But today's hate-mongers have something else that their predecessors only enjoyed sporadically: legitimacy. Partly this is a function of that ubiquity on the media. And partly it is a function of their cohabitation with the modern Republican Party. In the past, the national parties generally kept their distance from the most hateful elements. (The local parties were something else.) Even McCarthy divided the Republican establishment; it was a Republican who introduced the censure motion against him. Today's Republican Party, itself now largely reduced to a small cadre of reactionary fundamentalists, has embraced much of the demonization of its opponents. Limbaugh is practically the party's spokesman.

While not entirely unprecedented, this fusion of hate-mongering and a major political party nevertheless politicizes hate and helps shields it from moral opprobrium. Shame is less successful when hate speech becomes routine political discourse or when merchants of hate feel impervious to shame because they have institutional support. Most Americans obviously eschew hate, and when they constantly hear ugly and offensive attacks, some may be prompted to ask the hate peddlers and their audience: Have you left any decency? After all, that is the question that has always quarantined hate here.

Neal Gabler is the author most recently of "Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination."