How the Left learned to hate like the Right
Shortly before President Donald Trump’s swearing-in, I spoke to Steve Cohen, a liberal congressman from Tennessee, about his decision to skip the ceremony. Cohen said his horror of Trump almost made him understand how Tea Partyers might have felt under President Barack Obama. “I want my country back!” he said, echoing the right’s rallying cry.
One hundred days into his administration, Trump has few legislative achievements to his name. But he has forced liberals to experience the near-apocalyptic revulsion conservatives have often felt toward Democratic presidents. In doing so, he has unwittingly created a new movement in American politics, as Democrats channel the sort of all-encompassing outrage that has long fueled grass-roots conservatism.
For decades, Democrats have envied the Republicans’ passionate, locally attuned base. It turns out that what Democrats were missing was a sense of existential emergency. Trump has provided it.
Objectively, there’s no comparison between the conservative demonization of Obama and the progressive case against Trump. People on the right saw Obama as a Kenyan-born secret Muslim with a hidden agenda to hobble American power and a health care reform plan to establish “death panels.” None of that is true.
People on the left believe Trump has incited hatred against minorities, and boasted about grabbing women by their genitals. Democrats think that the president and his family are blatantly profiting off the presidency, and that he welcomed the help of a hostile foreign power during the election. All this is grounded in fact.
Facts aside, there is an emotional symmetry between the conservative reaction to past Democratic presidents and the liberal response to Trump. Suddenly, left-of-center people get what it’s like to have a president who is the living negation of all they value, a president who makes them ashamed before their children and terrified for their future. Now they’ve learned what it’s like to worry that malevolent foreign conspirators are manipulating American affairs. And these feelings, it turns out, are an extremely powerful goad to political action.
I saw this recently in Georgia’s 6th Congressional District, a conservative area that had sent to Congress first Newt Gingrich and then Tom Price, now Trump’s secretary of health and human services. I was there to report on the special congressional election to fill Price’s seat. Before the April 18 open primary, a Democrat, Jon Ossoff, was showing unexpected strength. In the event, he only narrowly failed to win the district outright, and goes forward to a June runoff against the leading Republican vote-getter.
Lots of outsiders were paying attention to the race; Ossoff raised a staggering $8 million for what was widely seen as a referendum on Trump’s presidency. On the ground, though, the people powering the campaign were locals, many of them previously apolitical suburban women shocked into action by the presidential election.
In November’s aftermath, Amy Nosek, a 42-year-old stay-at-home mother of two living in an affluent Atlanta suburb, sank into depression, though she’d never been depressed before. “I didn’t even want to go pick up my kids from the school bus because I didn’t want to talk to the other parents, or see anybody,” she told me.
As an antidote, she and a friend founded a local chapter of Indivisible, the network of anti-Trump groups that sprang up after the election. Soon, they were consumed by political organizing. “We’re working all the time,” Nosek said. “Sometimes, I fall asleep on the couch at 9 or 10 p.m., and then I wake up at 2 and I’m working until 4.”
Like her, most of the activists I met were new to electoral politics. Some had not even known what district they lived in or who their local representatives were. Now, thanks to Trump, they were obsessed.
I was struck by how their stories echoed tales of conservative political awakening. Until the rise of Trump, wave after wave of right-wing Republican activism was driven by comfortable but morally scandalized suburbanites, particularly suburban women. Shaken by what they saw as liberal attacks on beloved institutions – family, church, law enforcement, private property – they organized politically, and found meaning and community in it.
This phenomenon long predates the Tea Party movement that so galvanized Republican voters for the 2010 midterm elections. In her 2001 study, “Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right,” Lisa McGirr described how Orange County, California, became ground zero for militant conservatism in the early 1960s: “At living room bridge clubs, at backyard barbecues, and at kitchen kaffeeklatsches, the middle-class men and women of Orange County ‘awakened’ to what they perceived as the threats of communism and liberalism.”
Campaigning to save the nuclear family from the depredations of the Equal Rights Amendment, Phyllis Schlafly induced housewives to become local activists.
“These were local women whom most politicians feared to alienate,” wrote Schlafly’s biographer, Donald Critchlow, “because these women talked politics, volunteered in political campaigns and wore political buttons when they came to meetings.”
Democrats have their passionate local leaders, but they’ve lacked a Schlafly-style nationwide network of kitchen-table activists. And outside big cities, the party has allowed its local infrastructure to whither. Trump is changing all that. For many Democrats, his election was a traumatic event that demands a response, lest their country become unrecognizable. Democratic women, especially, find it intolerable and degrading to call Trump their president.
“The story we hear again and again and again is that it’s moms and other women who came together after the election and said, ‘This is totally unacceptable,’” said Ezra Levin, one of Indivisible’s founders.
Alan Abramowitz, a professor at Emory University who studies political polarization, said of Democratic antipathy to Trump, “If anything, I think it’s gotten stronger since he became president because the stuff he’s been doing has just exacerbated those negative feelings.”
There are dangers for Democrats in this absolute loathing. Hatred obliterates nuance and fosters conspiracy theories, a particular temptation when the country is sorting through real evidence of the Trump campaign’s worrisome foreign entanglements. It’s probably not good for America that every election – even an off-year special election in placid suburban Georgia – feels like a struggle over the future of civilization.
Yet, as the right has repeatedly shown over the past 50 years, disgust is politically potent. Nothing, Abramowitz said, works as well as what political scientists call “negative affect” – intense dislike – for “getting people energized and mobilized.”
So far, the lesson of this presidency is that when it comes to building political power, love does not, in fact, trump hate.
Liberals discover that negative energy is a powerful force in politics
Michelle Goldberg, a columnist for Slate, is the author, most recently, of ‘The Goddess Pose: The Audacious Life of Indra Devi, the Woman Who Helped Bring Yoga to the West’ and a contributing opinion writer.