I agree with Jay Fleitman that we should not lightly bandy about the word “hate” when speaking of our political landscape (Gazette, Aug. 2). He was most offended, he tells us in his most recent column, by “Hillary Clinton’s depiction of the Republican Party as the party of hate.”
I also agree that it is not true of Republicans generally that they are mainly motivated by hate. That is certainly not the case with my Republican friends and relatives, nor do I think it applies to Dr. Fleitman.
But there is another way to understand the Clinton claim, one that deserves careful consideration. For it is possible that the Republican Party cherished by Fleitman and so many others has been transformed beneath their feet, as it were, into something quite alien. Let us look carefully at the evidence for Clinton’s claim.
First, a definition. According to Dictionary.com, to hate is “to dislike intensely or passionately; feel extreme aversion for or extreme hostility toward; detest.”
Now, some data.
Item 1: There were the repeated chants at the Republican National Convention to “lock her [Clinton] up,” even though the director of the FBI, himself a Republican and a former prosecutor, told the nation she had committed no indictable offense. One Trump delegate, a Republican legislator, went so far as to call for Clinton to be put before a firing squad. Sounds like hate, a lot of it, to me.
Item 2: Gay rights — The Republican platform denounces the Supreme Court decision on gay marriage and supports the idea that people should be able to deny services to homosexuals on religious grounds. Defenders of the latter idea often claim to “hate the sin, not the sinner,” but that distinction might be lost on you if you are the gay person being denied service.
Item 3: A woman’s right to choose — It is the law of the land, but Republican-controlled legislatures have gone to extremes to deny it to as many women as possible. These efforts have been denounced and rejected by court after court, as in the recent Texas case. Candidate Trump even called for jailing women who have abortions.
Item 4: Voting rights — In spite of this nation’s deeply shameful history of denying the franchise to African-Americans, Republican legislatures have adopted laws that, as a circuit court most recently said, have targeted blacks “with almost surgical precision” to keep them from the polls. If this is not hatred, it is at the least a breathtaking example of contempt for the very people that Abraham Lincoln fought so hard to free.
Item 5: Turning to Mr. Trump himself: He has called Mexicans and other Latinos “rapists,” “criminals” and “killers.” This is surely extreme aversion. To say nothing of his proposed ban on Muslims or his repeated epithets for women he finds unattractive.
Item 6: At Trump rallies, his supporters chant “Build the wall, kill them all!” and worse. Is this not hatred? But the candidate does nothing to stop it.
Item 7: And ending with Trump: Those thinking of supporting him, or defending the party that gave him more primary votes than any Republican candidate in history, should read the list of the “250 People, Places and Things Donald Trump has Insulted on Twitter” (New York Times, July 29). A veritable mountain of vituperation and, yes, hate.
So we have a party, the once-proud GOP with its Lincoln heritage, that now wants to put the opposition’s leading candidate in jail, to allow discrimination against LGB, deny women their constitutional reproductive right to choose and keep blacks and other minorities from voting.
It is a party whose presidential candidate and supporters insult in the crudest terms Latinos, Muslims, (some) women and countless other figures.
I would say that calling today’s GOP — the institution defined by the Trumpists, by the 2016 platform and those Republican legislatures — the “party of hate” is not far from the mark. It would seem to be incumbent on Dr. Fleitman and other honorable Republicans to reject in no uncertain terms the candidate and the platform that define their party. And then we all need to get to work on the real issues of economic dislocation and industrial decline that have fueled the Trump phenomenon.
John M. Connolly of Haydenville is the Sophia Smith Professor of Philosophy Emeritus.