In an appearance Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press, Scarborough offered Ronald Reagan as a model of temperamental moderation, saying, “We need to be conservative, but like Reagan. … We can’t scare little kids.” On his own MSNBC program the next day, he emphasized again, “They’ve got to drop the hate.”Actually, zealous conservative hatred has a long, long pedigree and you can find an unbroken trail of hate right back to the French Revolution. Post-WWII American conservatism has had several notable practitioners of demonization - Henry Luce, Robert Taft, Richard Nixon, Joseph McCarthy, Gen. Curtis LeMay, George Wallace, H.R. Haldeman, Oliver North, Newt Gingrich, William Kristol, Tom DeLay, Ann Coulter - the list is long.
“If you know you’re right, then why be angry?” Scarborough asked calmly. “I do a radio show, and a lot of callers that call in expect me to scream and yell and say I hate President Obama. Being against his policies, for some reason with a lot of people in the base that’s not enough. They want you to hate the man.”
...“If you’re mature enough,” Scarborough continued,” you realize Barack Obama doesn’t hate America, I don’t hate America — we just have different views of how to make America a better place And if you look at history over 250 years, that’s worked out pretty well.”
Scarborough and his guests were unable to agree, however, on the source of the current extreme polarization. Scarborough noted that “politics has been war, a nasty, bloody war for a very long time,” but he also suggested that Republican hatred for Obama now is a reflection of Democratic hatred for George W. Bush.
“They say, ‘Look what they did to us!’” Scarborough commented. “A lot of Republicans saw a lot of really unfair, nasty things said about George W. Bush … and so now Republicans want to pay back.”
Barnacle, however, pointed out that the hatred goes back at least to the 90s, and that Newt Gingrich was the first Republican leader for whom it was “not enough to defeat the Democrats — he had to demonize and destroy them personally. And it became infectious.”
Demonization waxes and wanes with the times. Just after 9/11, there was a rare time when conservatives angry with radical Muslims could find common cause with liberals angry with leftists that weren't angry enough at radical Muslims. I was part of that group of liberals - the ones annoyed with Michael Moore for not wanting to kick the terrorists around.
But soon, conservatives began to drift. They stopped paying attention to the real Muslim world and started paying much closer attention to a fantasy Muslim world of their own imagining - a world full of ticking time bombs, torture, and terrorists.
Plus, conservatives reverted to their old familiar game of demonizing liberals and questioning their patriotism. Conservative Democrats like Jimmy Carter felt their lash for not being pro-Israel enough.
In response, leftists like Michael Moore finally got a clue and got more lucid. Liberals grew a spine. And the rare moment of conservative/liberal amity was lost. Once the absence of WMD in Iraq revealed just how lost conservatives really were, it was too late. The rhetorical war of left/right politics was on again.
Every morning, I wake up with a little prayer on my lips: "Thank God, Ronald Reagan is dead!" It can be interpreted in two ways, of course - the demonizing way I actually intend, but also as a lament. For all his faults (and excepting welfare queens and communists, for whom he had an irrational dislike) Reagan had a hard time hating individual people. Reagan seemed to sense what hatred could do, and recoiled from it. Reagan wouldn't like the current situation.
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