A Heroine for Our Times: We Now Have a Politics of Meanness and Spite, Where Hatred is a Sign of Legitimacy

Photo Credit: Chip Somodevilla / GettyThe narrative of decline is one of a slow and silent accumulation of ills. Looking backwards, we don’t remember a special moment when the evil days came, or the years drew nigh when all would be changed, but only the painful contrast between the days of our youth and the decrepitude of age. So it is with countries. We fail to see sharp breaks where we can say: There, there is where it all happened.

And yet such moments do exist, the points of inflection where the curve changes from positive to negative. We might have thought little of the changes at the time, perhaps, but they made all the difference, and it is the task of the historian to bring them to light.

I am no historian, but I have one such moment in mind. It was when The New Republic’s senior editor Jonathan Chait wrote in 2003, “I hate President George W. Bush.” TNR was always a liberal journal, but under editors such as Andrew Sullivan (before he went mad) and the restraining hand of Martin Peretz, it prided itself on its reasonableness. The magazine might have been coma-inducing boring, but by God it was reasonable.

And then came Chait’s tirade. For conservatives who seek to be loved by the Left, it was deeply painful. More cynical conservatives took it in stride. And just what was it anyway? Merely an op-ed. But then it was more than that too. It was a sea change in which the swimmer suddenly finds himself in frigid water. And Chait’s permission slip for hatred explains what has happened to American politics since then, the bitterness, the calls for revenge, the IRS campaign against the Tea Party.

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