"only light can do that"
on loving one's enemies, and the psychic cost of hate
Since descending the mythic golden escalator nearly a decade ago, Donald Trump has debased our society in ways too numerous to catalog. Now in his second term, he and his administration are carrying out an anti-democratic agenda characterized by cruelty, chaos, greed, and incompetence. But there’s one particularly pernicious achievement I want to underline, one that goes too often overlooked: Trump has taught all of us to hate. Millions of Americans are aghast at the wreckage of the first hundred days of this openly authoritarian regime, and a spirited opposition is growing by the day. But what kind of opposition will it be? Without a course correction, I fear that this movement will be doomed by its tendency to mirror, rhetorically, much of what it sees on the other side. We may march with signs reading LOVE TRUMPS HATE, but if we do so while dehumanizing our opponents, those words will be rendered meaningless.
In short, left-liberals seem increasingly given to pugilism. Here they are, insulting the intelligence of their ideological foes; there, mocking their opponents’ physical disabilities or diseases. To be sure, we are not the ones snatching people from street corners and ferrying them to ICE detention centers or Salvadoran gulags. Yet there is a moral and psychic cost to the liberal appetite for verbal cruelty: it diminishes us, and perpetuates a cycle of hatred. What is the endgame of such a politics? If we were suddenly in power, would we cease to demean the other side? Do we dehumanize our ideological opponents only because they dehumanize us? And if that’s the case, who stops first? How do we end the state of exception that declares this behavior acceptable?
Spend five minutes on social media, and you will find left-liberals slinging verbal mud, whether at each other, or in the direction of their ideological opponents. Here’s one instance of the latter, which I find troubling precisely because of its surface appeal. The text, which has gone viral on every platform from TikTok to Bluesky, originally appeared in a 2017 blog post by the writer A.R. Moxon:
Historians have a word for Germans who joined the Nazi party, not because they hated Jews, but out of a hope for restored patriotism, or a sense of economic anxiety, or a hope to preserve their religious values, or dislike of their opponents, or raw political opportunism, or convenience, or ignorance, or greed.
That word is "Nazi." Nobody cares about their motives anymore.
They joined what they joined. They lent their support and their moral approval. And, in so doing, they bound themselves to everything that came after. Who cares any more what particular knot they used in the binding?
This seems an exercise in moral clarity, conveyed in punchy declarative sentences. It doesn’t matter why people support Trump, Moxon implies, only that they do.1 The word ‘Nazi’ is used for blunt impact, stamping out inquiry (“nobody cares about their motives anymore”) while collapsing seventy million Americans into an ideological monolith (“they joined what they joined”). Once the specter of evil has been invoked, we are meant to cast judgment and walk away (“who cares anymore what particular knot they used in the binding?”).
But beneath the veneer of rectitude lies a war-like stance. Whatever goodness exists in our opponents—each of whom has a singular and vivid life—is dismissed in favor of their collective branding as moral reprobates. On the popular Instagram account @mattxiv, Moxon’s words have been liked 246,000 times, suggesting that a quarter million liberals would rather erect walls with epithets than evince curiosity about their opponents. I suspect that many of them did not give much thought to what they were “liking.” On some level, it was likely a means of performing their ideological identity.
I’m harping on this because it’s indicative of a destructive imaginative failure: the inability or unwillingness to inhabit the worldview of another person, or more crucially, to seek an understanding of the ways in which another person’s experience overlaps with one’s own. There are strategic reasons for exhibiting an interest in one’s opponent—if you’ve just lost an election, it helps to know why—but what concerns me more is the moral argument: that redemption is achieved by focusing on what’s best in people, rather than what’s worst. Yet how can we be expected to turn the other cheek when so many of us are brimming with anger?
The order of the day is to defeat authoritarianism, and to remake society so that government serves the masses, rather than a small coterie of billionaires and a Christofascist think tank. This will require a coalition that cuts across ideological lines (for reasons I laid out here). As that coalition grows, it will be crucial to locate the pro-democratic struggle in realms where the regime is weak. Armed resistance fails more often than it succeeds because the regime typically has more military might than the opposition. But if a regime is rooted in hatred and exclusion, it may yet be defeated through a groundswell of love and inclusion. And this brings me to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 1957 sermon, “Loving Your Enemies.”
In his philosophy of nonviolence, Dr. King argues that the outcome of nonviolence is the creation of the Beloved Community; the end result is not the defeat of one’s opponent, but redemption and reconciliation. If we are, as we claim to be, the party of restorative justice, then it follows that we should embrace King’s dictum. But how, exactly? In the most often quoted portion of the sermon, King argues that “returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction… Have we not come to such an impasse in the modern world that we must love our enemies—or else? The chain reaction of evil…must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation…”
Achieving this state of grace requires an abiding commitment to forgiveness:
He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love. It is impossible even to begin the act of loving one’s enemies without…forgiving those who inflict evil and injury upon us… Forgiveness does not mean ignoring what has been done or putting a false label on an evil act. It means, rather, that the evil act no longer remains as a barrier to the relationship… It is the lifting of a burden or the cancelling of a debt…
I have often wondered if forgiveness is particularly difficult in an era of permanent memory: the internet, the wayback machine, the endless archive. In an earlier time, without a fixed record, our memories of injury could be thoroughly transformed. Now, every utterance and image remains indelible in the digital world. But while forgiveness in such a paradigm may be more difficult, it is not an excuse to give up on the principle. Consider that at the time King gave this sermon, the KKK was terrorizing Birmingham civil rights leaders, bombing their homes and beating people in the streets. Emmett Till had been buried less than two years earlier. And still, King counseled love and forgiveness.
[W]e must recognize that the evil deed of the enemy-neighbor, the thing that hurts, never quite expresses all that he is. An element of goodness may be found even in our worst enemy. Each of us is something of a schizophrenic personality, tragically divided against ourselves… This simply means that there is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us. When we discover this, we are less prone to hate our enemies.
When I embarked on a lengthy railway journey after the presidential election in 2016, I was animated by an awareness that my own heart was hardening, that my capacity to view the ideological adversary with grace was shrinking. As a city dweller in deep blue Brooklyn, my conception of my “neighbor-enemy” was often little more than an abstraction, a caricature that came to me primarily through headlines, video clips, or social media posts. At worst, I saw them not as human, but as dots on a demographic scattergram. Seldom did I account for the complications and contradictions, the cross-cutting social pressures that might inform the political behavior of the culturally distant “other.” I watched my friends and colleagues mock their fears, grievances, and insecurities, or dismiss them outright, claiming instead that they must be driven by bigotry. The train, and in particular, the Amtrak dining car, was a bracing salve. I returned humbled by the extent of my own prejudices, and by the breadth of human experience that revealed itself to me during those two weeks, which in turn taught me how much I didn’t know, couldn’t know, would never know.
King’s sermon is worth reading in its entirety, but the final point of his argument, in which he addresses the self-harm done by the one who injures, is perhaps the most urgent:
Hate is just as injurious to the person who hates. Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. Hate destroys a man’s sense of values and his objectivity. It causes him to describe the beautiful as ugly and the ugly as beautiful, and to confuse the true with the false and the false with the true.
It is easy to feel powerless in the face of an authoritarian regime that has rejected the rule of law. But one thing we can control is the way we treat our neighbors, near and far. Loving our enemies may not be easy. But where hate diminishes us, love costs us nothing, and brings dividends. To love one’s enemies is to move beyond victimhood, and to seek out the root of their hatred for us. Almost invariably, it springs from a wound, from fear. To love one’s enemies is to recognize an aspect of ourselves in that wound, in that fear, in that tendency to lash out. If we are able to create the template for a loving community—the Beloved Community—we may yet neutralize that fear, and bring the opponent to our side.
On Friday, I’ll be hosting the composer Katie Balch at the Alberta Rose Theatre for the Oregon Symphony’s Open Music series. The program, in addition to works by Katie, includes music by J.S. Bach, Franz Schubert, Caroline Shaw, Hannah Kendall, Emily Liushen, Iannis Xenakis, and Bobby Schumann (a couple movements from Dichterliebe, sung from the piano by yours truly). Tickets are here.
Thank you, as always, for reading. If your 401(k) hasn’t been decimated by the penguin tariffs, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription, which enables me to spend more time writing these newsletters while subsidizing my children’s taco habit.
The original essay carries on for some 5,000 words without anything resembling a good-faith inquiry into what led Americans to support Trump. The words “wages,” “deindustrialization,” “working class,” and “globalization” do not appear anywhere in the text. Any traces of class analysis or the effects of globalization are not to be found.
I always come back to Derrida, who said that forgiveness only has value if/when it's applied to the unforgivable. If we reserve it only for what we already deem forgivable, then what are we even doing?
100%. The anger is valid but it cannot be allowed to swallow whole every ounce of goodness left in us.