Connecting the dots of America's diseased ethos of hate

In a profile appearing in Sunday's Inquirer, Canadian physician Gabor Maté ties together a lot of the puzzle pieces of our national predicament.  Maté specializes in treating people with addictions, and he talks in the interview about the roots of addiction in childhood trauma.  Unhealed early wounds continue to hurt; people do what they do to ease the pain and deal with the anger about it, which can mean use of substances as psychic analgesics or it can mean obsession with external targets onto whom they project outward the source of pain within.

The heart of the matter as it relates to the current American sickness of hatred and partisan/ethnic/racial violence is conveyed in a few paragraphs from the article:

People like the shooter from Pittsburgh have, according to Maté, “anger [that] has got nothing to do with what they think they are angry about. They are just angry because of what life has done to them as children and then they find external targets.” Politics plays a role, too. “It will give them a target and an explanation to their rage and an outlet to express their rage,” and “adds more and more fuel to direct their violence toward certain groups,” he says.

Two major forces contribute to hate: racism and inequality.

“The research is absolutely clear,” Maté says. “The more inequality in a society, the more hate, the more dysfunction, the more mental illness, the more physical illness.” It should come as no surprise, then, that we see more addiction and more mass shootings since “the inequality is rising all the time.” Violence against racial, ethnic, or religious groups “is a manifestation of a society that foments division amongst people and sets people against each other.”

This insight works for me in part because my own experience has shown me that anti-Semitism can inhabit -- and I believe most frequently does inhabit -- the minds of people who have no personal experience with actual Jews.  They were carefully taught.  The teaching comes from one's parents, conveying the mythos they inherited from their own parents.  But that mythos originally sprang at some point from a corrupt institution looking to deflect its victims from noticing their own victimhood.  As a dispersed tribe that has maintained the integrity of its identity through thousands of years and dozens of rounds of migrations, settlings-in and expulsions, Jews have been outsiders ripe for persecution whenever a scapegoat might come in handy.  

Not that the hate Maté is talking about is exclusive to Jew-hatred.  In our country, Repubicans have prospered by promoting and projecting hate toward racial and sexual minorities, abortion and those who facilitate it, women, liberals, socialists...  That's why the party is fully culpable for the hate having morphed into violence under rump's incitement and modeling.  

But after three years-plus of rump's spewing hatred toward black and brown people, women and Democrats, now it's the Jew-hatred that has come front and center.  Even though some commentators are allowing that "trump is not an anti-Semite", as Trudy Rubin lays it out in her Inquirer op-ed piece at minimum he facilitates anti-Semitism.  He is inclined to invoke any form of bigotry that he believes will help him achieve whatever his goal is.  (Rump may not hate Jews, or he may hate Jews, but he certainly traffics in -- and in my view fully believes -- the most invidious stereotypes about Jews [as well as the more benign ones, like Jews are great money managers -- I am proof against that stereotype, just ask my wife!].  He believes Jews are venal, blacks are stupid and Latinos are criminals.)  In her op-ed column, Trudy references the Times of Israel interview of Abraham Foxman.  I had printed out that TOI  interview before I saw her citation of it; it is compelling and highly recommended.)  

Now, I'm not saying that racism and inequality comprise a complete explanation for the rump nightmare specifically, nor for the rise of fascism in societies in general.  But Maté's analysis connects critical dots that are central to an explanation of the sickness -- and more importantly to an understanding of what a cure would require.  

The first thing required in the present circumstance, is to elect a Democratic majority in Congress.  Democrats absolutely have been complicit in the growth of inequality, notwithstanding that they've been pikers in that regard compared to the GOP.  The corrupting infection of boundless money has meant courting Wall Street to survive, so the Clintons and Obama have done that.  However, Democrats after 2016 have begun revisioning the party as a progressive force, returning to its erstwhile identity as the party of labor and social justice.  This year the hope an the strategy is that people power in the streets and the campaign offices and the polling booths can outweigh all the expensive, disgusting, cliché-riddled, carpet-bomb TV ad campaigns from the Lee Atwater/Fox News party.   

There has been speculation that a Democratic Congress could counterintuitively be a boon for rump politically, inasmuch as his success as a demagogue (and 2020 presidential candidate if God forbid he is still cage-free) is totally reliant on having enemies to tweet-attack incessantly, enemies that his cultists will lustily join him in hating.  No doubt the attacks will be non-stop.  

However, the alternative would mean an accelerated pace of destruction and degradation of American governance and democracy.  The kleptos and white nationalists would have no check, no accountability.  Nor would there be any chance of passing any legislation that would help working people or start to redress the cancerous inequality that is eating away the spirit and confidence that had made America the paradigm of hope for billions of people.