I’ve been in politics since I was 15 years old. I was elected president of the Socialist
Party club on my university campus in absentia (and never went to a meeting)
and I organized and led a major student protest in 1958 at the University of
Chicago. My political career covered the next forty years including being a
campaign manager, presidential campaign advance man and legislative analyst. I’ve never
stopped being a social activist.
I’m beginning to see a pattern that has been on the political scene since I first arrived. There are hate groups. Those are the best two words for it. There have probably always been hate groups.
The definition of a hate group is: the glue that binds
members together is that the ideology (it is always ideological) is a cover for
pure and simple personal venom.
These people join together because they have a surplus of personal hate and they find comfort with other people who share their emotion. Ideology is a cover.
The first hate groups I encountered were the anti-civil
rights groups. Civil rights people I
worked with were always considerate and decent. The opponents I faced, time and again, were vituperous and filled
with hate. (I never saw hate as great as the mothers opposed to busing.) I met
the same hate in the Black Panthers (much as I liked Huey Newton), the Black
Muslims, the anti-porn feminists, the save-the-whale eco-freaks, the
anti-Vietnam War resisters, and countless other groups.
Today the hatred is overflowing in the pro-Palestinian
world, the anti-Iraq war crowd and the Michael Moore-Barbara Boxer-Howard Dean
crowd. The San Francisco Archdiocese published a letter recently complaining
about the malicious crowd that harassed the pro-life marchers in San Francisco. I believe it.
People have always told me to listen to right wing radio to find right wing hate. I can’t find it on my radio. I listen to Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage and they both have a sense of humor, they find interesting quotes that they play on the air and neither shows any sign of venom. So where are the people on the right who are supposed to be so bad? Pat Buchanan is surely one, but he has no following. I’m sure right wing hate groups exist but I don’t encounter them, these days.
In any case, I’m beginning to see the political scene differently. There are policy issues, party issues and partisan battles in which people find identity. The new vista, for me, is the ideologies that cover up hate groups.