In the wake of the worst act of terror in US history the political ruling class is relying on you to hate.
What you hate largely will depend on what side of the political aisle you fall. For Republicans, the target is Islamism. In the more dirty corners of the alt-right movements it's Islam itself. For Democrats, the target is Constitutional freedoms and, more importantly to them, Republicans. Because to politicians every action is a political opportunity in the making both sides are rushing to judgment in a direction that they feel will cause the most damage to the other side.
GLBT/Liberal activist Sally Kohn has waged a single-person war against Republicans on Twitter all but claiming them to be accomplices in the shooting because of that nebulous term called "hate". It's not Omar Mateen who killed 50 people and injured another 53, it's Republican rhetoric against the GLBT community. Obama and Clinton (increasingly one and the same person) have called for suspending the Constitutional rights of law-abiding citizens, and ripped a page from Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner's book by suggesting that the key to all of this is love.
Trump? Well, he's scorched earth and taking the "look at me" approach by bragging he was "right" to have his stance on Islam. One thing Trump and Obama have in common is an extreme level of narcissism that requires them to always be the center of attention no matter the situation. As Conservative gadfly David Burge (@iowahawk on Twitter) "The bride at every wedding, the corpse at every funeral". None of these events are about the people, they're framed and messaged into being about the great leader, the supreme being whose elevation to the office of President will save us from our more base tendencies.
All of this creates two national conversations that have nothing to do with one another and no chance of ever finding common ground. While the useful idiots over at Vox are Voxsplaining Obama's so-called prescient foresight the in-the-tank-for-Trump sycophants at Breitbart are celebrating the supposed "threat to the left's agenda". Of course, both are wrong.
First, the idea that a so-called "lone-wolf" attacker could strike at any time was not some celestially received knowledge that Obama along possessed and second, the idea that the left's agenda is somehow threatened by reality is a pipe-dream.
No agenda is ever truly threatened by fact. Both sides function on hate, fear and greed and rely on the relatively uniformed electorate to push them across the line.
The easy solutions are gun control, suspension of Constitutional rights and rounding up the usual suspects. The hard slog is admitting the fact that, in a free, liberal, democratic society, there will always be threats and dangers that bad people can do harm. For years this has been the trade off that American's have accepted. We get that there are risks, but we're willing to take those risks in order to ensure our supposed freedoms.
The problem that we're starting to see is that the trade-off is becoming imbalanced. We still have the threat and risks (mainly due to lax-enforcement of law and political concerns) but we've lost the freedom to make our own choices. We've lost property rights and we're incarcerating more people than anyone else in the world and at a higher rate as well. The predominate number of those in jail are minorities. We like to play pretend that America is a free nation on a shining hill but the fact of the matter is we've morphed into a militarized police state where it's easier to break the law than it is to toe the line.
Besides the over-criminalization of society, the fact that the ruling class has decided to pick and choose which laws to enforce has led to the devolution of the United States into a large banana republic instead of a great experiment. There are few, if any, politicians left who seem to have the ability to turn this around, to reverse course and get things working again.
Freedom, and the politics associated with it, is based on hope and respect, tyranny is based on hate and fear. For all of Obama's "hope and change" rhetoric what he was really pushing for was the hatred of freedom, the expansion of government and a statist desire to expand government into every area of American life. Obama never had hope that the people would make the right decisions, he always feared how they would choose.
If you think this is going to get any better with either the Bronzed Ego or the Anointed One in the Oval Office you're fooling yourself. America is on the cusp of electing a President who will take the next step to authoritarianism regardless of which option they select. You can say this with confidence because neither candidate has the ability to deal with dissent in an adult manner.
In the interim however, get ready to see a lot more calls to hate. We're about to go from the "3 minutes hate" to the "5 months hate" and it's not going to be pretty. In fact, it's going to get worse until people realize exactly what we're about to do to ourselves.
I'm not sure we have it in us any longer to understand that. Nor would we prescribe the needed remedy even if we did.
(hint: it's not 'revolution' or Abbott's nitwits tying to form a "convention of the states", nor is it a rewrite of the Constitution, or the repeal of the Bill of Rights that Harry Reid so wants to see. In short, it's nothing that's being proposed by the two major parties currently.)
