Still Don't Know What Hate Means

What actually is the state of hatred in 2024?

A screengrab from ‘The State of HATE 2024’

Love, love, it’s who you know.

-The Smashing Pumpkins

In the series of lectures collected in English under the title Society Must Be Defended (1975-76) Michel Foucault presents us with an inversion of Clausewitz’s famous maxim: ‘Politics is the continuation of war by other means’. The political arena, he tells us, can be understood as a covert domestic cold war waged by the mainstream against outsiders, in which the latter are increasingly conceptualised as ‘abnormal’, impure, degenerate, threatening - and in the end, disposable. Their fate is at best exile, and at worst destruction. Tracing this basic dynamic from the ancient past to his then present, he suggested that communism and fascism are thus to be understood as two sides of the same coin. Both have their identifiable classes of degenerate ‘outsiders’. Both in the end reduce that class to disposability in the most brutal sense.

Foucault also implies the coin had a third side: liberalism. But his later work took him away from properly elucidating this. It is not, though, difficult to tease out the logic here. What is liberalism? For Leo Strauss, modern liberalism (as distinct from ancient liberalism) can be best described using the language of his sparring partner, Alexandre Kojève: ‘liberals’, says Strauss, ‘aim at the greatest possible approximation to the universal and homogenous state [emphasis added]’ meaning an equal, classless, global society in which distinctions between individuals are rendered politically unimportant and indeed become features merely of the exercise of choice - aesthetic, even, rather than political. It follows that liberals wage their war against people who believe that distinctions between individuals should not be merely chosen or only considered aesthetically relevant but, indeed, are sources of value in themselves - people who believe in the family, for example, or immutable differences between the sexes, or in the church, or the nation: in short, conservatives.

It would obviously be melodramatic to suggest that this puts liberalism in the same position as communism and fascism with respect to its outcomes, and I do not mean to indulge in bleating about a real or imagined ‘culture war’ being carried out against people who are on the political right. But we shouldn’t allow fear of being labelled histrionic to distract us from making the observation that, philosophically at least, the (admittedly very big) difference between liberalism on the one hand and communism and fascism on the other is one of degree rather than kind. The central dynamic is still one of conflict between in-group and out-group; four legs and two legs; angels and demons; goodies and baddies. It’s just that liberalism much more effectively cloaks this by presenting itself as being tolerant of diversity. It is tolerant of diversity to a point. But it really is only to a point: diversity of opinion about the achievability or desirability of a ‘universal and homogenous state’ is rather to be stomped on with maximum prejudice.

The salience of all of this was brought home to me last week when Hope not Hate, the noted anti-far right extremist campaign group, issued a report (on ‘The State of HATE [sic]’ in the UK) that purports to act as a ‘comprehensive and analytical guide to the state of far-right extremism in Britain today’. It makes for interesting reading. On the one hand, it is plainly evident a few sentences into the opening editorial that these people are - I will use the technical term - as daft as a brush. I don’t want to play down the significance or odiousness of far-right extremism, but it is a vanishingly small phenomenon in the UK in 2024; the problems that we face really, really are not those facing the Weimar Republic in 1932. (I sometimes wonder if the biggest problem our society faces is that the only historical episode that seems to be taught in schools in any depth is the rise of Nazism, which causes vast swathes of the populace to see the story as an analogy to literally everything that happens politically in the present day.)

But on the other hand, the report is worth taking seriously for what it, unconsciously, seems to be destined to achieve - the casting of what would hitherto have been seen as perfectly normal and acceptance conservative positions as hateful and therefore beyond the pale, and indeed in the end the stoking of precisely the kind of resentment and hatred which Hope not Hate claims to oppose. It is, in other words, ripe for what if I was Max Horkheimer I would call ‘immanent critique’: an analysis which reveals the fundamental contradictions within the conditions of thinking about a given concept. And it also nicely demonstrates the way in which liberalism replicates the underlying dynamic which I earlier identified.

The basic conceit behind The State of HATE 2024 is straightforward enough. Britain is in the doldrums economically, and this has created the space for something called the ‘Radical Right’ (the capitalisation seems important) to flourish. But this Radical Right is not the same as the ‘far right’, which Hope not Hate accepts is ‘splintered and marginalised’. (Foreign readers may not appreciate just how marginalised: the British National Party, the most recognisable far-right outfit to most voters and the only one with real name recognition, received a grand total of 510 votes in the entire country in the 2019 General Election. If you class the UK Independence Party, a chaotic band of misfits who have drifted rightwards since their heyday in the 2010s, as ‘far right’, the total number of far right voters in the nation may approximate just over 20,000.) The Radical Right is, rather, something which Hope not Hate defines as follows - with a charmingly cavalier attitude to the niceties of syntax:

[A] political phenomenon we define as right-wing populist in outlook, with strongly anti-immigration and anti-elite rhetoric, but differs from the traditional far right in that it advocates an illiberal democracy rather than overthrow of the system itself.

This ‘Radical Right’, we are told, has ‘emerge[d] as a major force in the UK, especially inside the Conservative Party’, where it is represented by MPs like Miriam Cates, Danny Kruger, Sir John Redwood and Sir Iain Duncan Smith. It also encompasses GB News, The Telegraph, The Spectator and political commentators in the media such as Matthew Goodwin, Melanie Phillips, and Douglas Murray. The overseas contingent includes those associated with ARC, such as Jordan Peterson, Vivek Ramaswamy, ‘two former Prime Ministers of Australia’ (who are, mysteriously, not named) and ‘two members of the US House of Representatives’, as well, inevitably, as Elon Musk. And various think tanks are in there too; in particular are singled out the TaxPayers’ Alliance, Restore Trust, Net Zero Watch and the Institute of Economic Affairs. The Reform Party, Nigel Farage’s successor outfit to the Brexit Party, also gets a mention.

This is a broad umbrella, clearly, but what is most notable about it is that it basically comprises people who would until yesterday have been classed as pretty mainstream conservatives, with mainstream conservative policy positions. The Tory MPs who are singled out as ‘Radical’, for example, are said to advocate for:

‘“[L]egal” immigration to be halved; substantial tax cuts; the abolition of the workers’ rights we have achieved whilst in the European Union; preventing young people who fail their A-Levels from securing loans to enter Higher Education; banning “gender ideology in schools”; and giving all parents the right “to oversee the Sex Education their children receive”.’

Meanwhile, ARC is identified as:

‘claim[ing] to “explore a better story for the family, community and nation, while also exploring how each individual can be empowered to live a fulfilled, responsible life as a citizen”.’

Setting aside the rights and wrongs of these positions, the word ‘hateful’ does not on its face seem the most appropriate one to use. If one were moved to disagree with any of them, one might stretch to ‘misguided’, ‘ill-advised’, or perhaps even ‘foolish’ or ‘short-sighted’. But, leaving aside the sheer viciousness and bile which evidently informs the desire to ‘empower individuals to lived fulfilled, responsible lives as citizens’, what exactly is hateful about tax cuts? Or wanting immigration to be more carefully controlled? Or parents having the right to know what their children are being taught in sex education classes? Or discouraging young people who are not academically inclined from taking on mountains of debt to go to university?

This is, to be clear, in a document which later goes on to provide an overview of almost every obscure band of wannabe fascists from across the UK - tiny fringe groups who practically nobody in the country will have even heard of, let alone considered supporting. The whole thing seems to be deliberately designed to present ordinary conservative opinions as being in the same category as those held by genuinely dangerous outcasts, and thereby to cast a ‘hateful’ pall over any opinion that is not fully signed up to the maximalist liberal cause.

Putting the most charitable spin on things possible, this could just be because Hope not Hate’s founder and CEO, Nick Lowles, has been involved in anti-fascist activism for so long that he has difficulty letting go and now sees incipient Nazism everywhere - he’s just, as the Warren Zevon song goes, an excitable boy, in love with the idea of himself as a crusader against ‘hate’, and thus prone to excesses of enthusiasm. There is probably something to this. There is probably also something to the notion that this is really all about re-litigating Brexit, which certain elements of Britain’s elite are still unwilling to let go: note how one of the features of ‘hate’ the report identifies is ‘the abolition of the workers’ rights we have achieved whilst in the European Union’. (The animus which Hope for Hate evidently bears against Nigel Farage, who politically is basically a bog-standard Thatcherite, is also obviously rooted in this desire to some day get revenge for what happened in 2016).

But there is clearly something deeper going on: an attempt to deligitimise disagreement - and particularly conservative disagreement - and thereby cast even mainstream conservative positions out of polite discourse and into metaphorical exile. Where does one go as a conservative, other than into the exile of self-censorship and polite nodding along with opinions which one thinks are wrong, if not even advocating for tax cuts or showing an interest in your children’s education are acceptable things to demonstrate at a dinner table in polite society in 2024?

The punchline, of course, is that while Hope for Hate sees hate everywhere - the word appears so frequently in The State of HATE 2024 that it begins to lose any sense of meaning - and while the organisation claims to want to realise a ‘hopeful’ society, it is absolutely purblind to the fact that its own entire enterprise is so despairing and, well, hateful. It is predicated on the idea that all of society should be motivated by a particular set of political objectives, that these represent ‘hope’, and that if people are not in this narrow sense ‘hopeful’, then they are by definition in favour of ‘hate’ and rightly to be denied political expression, denied a voice, and denied even a sense that their concerns matter. If you are concerned about the scale and rapidity of ‘legal’ immigration, about the size of the state, about the ever more dominant role of universities in society, about what is being taught in sex education in schools, about ‘the family, community and nation’ or indeed ‘empowering’ people to live ‘responsible lives as citizens’, then you must be metaphorically outlawed - any party or politician which seeks to represent your views must be considered abnormal and threatening (‘Radical’), and any media outlet which seeks to give those views expression must become alienated from mainstream public debate.

This is not a recipe for a hopeful society, I hope (no pun intended) it goes without saying. It is a recipe for a miserable one, in which vast swathes of ordinary people would feel that their perfectly legitimate opinions are being ignored, and their perfectly legitimate concerns do not matter - and, worse, in which they could not even enter into reasoned debate with other people about the things they care about.

And nor is it a recipe for a society characterised by the opposite of hate, which is of course love. And it is worth here dwelling for a moment on what that really signifies. Michael Oakeshott, famously, described being a conservative as:

‘to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.’

Another way of putting this is that people tend naturally to be conservative about the things they love. One loves one’s home, one’s family, one’s country, one’s community, for the very fact that it is familiar. It is a particular thing which, warts and all, one knows intimately and values for itself. This does not mean that one wishes for it to be preserved in aspic or that one considers it to be perfect and in no need of improvement. But it does mean that, presumptively, one does not wish to see it swept aside or radically altered.

There is of course something that, one must as a conservative admit, is unbearably self-satisfied and pompous about Oakeshott’s description of what conservatism means when seen from the outside. To be trite, one can well imagine an aristocrat parroting those sentiments over a glass of dry sherry while surveying a scene in which the bucolic local peasantry labour back-breakingly over their daily toil; it is harder to imagine the peasants expressing things in the same way. And the impulse to improve things for the poor and downtrodden - when imbued with the abstract love for humanity, for the stranger - is undoubtedly a noble sentiment (for all that it can also manifest itself in a Lenin, Pol Pot, or Robespierre). But at its best conservatism in this Oakeshottian sense is something which we all understand in respect of the particular things which we do indeed love and value.

The thing which in the end makes The State of HATE 2024 so poisonous, then, is the fact that it presents as hate what is properly conceptualised as a category of love - that, indeed, it makes no distinction between conservatism and the kind of particularism - fascism - that ultimately manifests itself as hatred of the outsider. In this, it aptly deserves the Foucauldian descriptor of being ‘the continuation of war by other means’ - a broadside for the liberal ‘universal and homogenous state’, levelled at any who would seek to object. It seeks to categorise perfectly normal conservative impulses (to conserve what one loves) as being dangerous, dark and threatening, and thereby to categorise the people who manifest those impulses as ‘Radical’ and abnormal - not shared members of the political community, but embittered and malevolent outcasts who rightly are denied any say in where society is going.

This would be bad enough, of course, but the report’s worst sin is that it casts politics as a division between good and bad, hopeful and hateful, right and left, when the truth of the matter is that the central tragedy of politics is that it for the most part represents a battle between different loves: between the love of the particular and the general, the love of the familiar and the love of the stranger, the love of the country and the love of humanity, and so on - and, indeed, between different ideas about what would be best for the things that one loves. A mature democracy would recognise this, and would recognise that politics is a matter of finding ways that people who feel these different loves can rub along together. But we are very far from that vision, and getting further away all the time. What is ultimately so damaging about Hope not Hate’s efforts is that they seem so evidently and indeed flagrantly hell-bent on driving us yet further from that vision still; the future which the organisation’s work heralds seems to be strongly marked neither by hope nor love but by much darker and more destructive forces: it is a future in which politics itself is imagined as conflict, and in which political differences are understood to be reasons not to disagree with one’s opponents, but to seek to expunge them from society entirely. This is a bleak prospect indeed for an organisation which defines itself as being in favour of ‘hope’.