Chris
11-08-2016, 09:42 AM
The author here means an older, peculiar meaning of the word.
The Collectivist Election (http://reason.com/archives/2016/11/05/the-collectivist-election)
When Henry Adams wrote in the early 20th century that "politics, as a practice whatever its professions, had always been the systematic organization of hatreds," there was ample reason to take him literally.
The world back then was on the verge of a cataclysmic war that would kill 17 million people and help incubate both communism and fascism. Adams had come of age in London as the son of the American ambassador under President Abraham Lincoln, a man who knew all too well how political disputes can turn bloody. And Adams' great-grandfather, the second president of the United States, was accused by Thomas Jefferson's supporters during the famously acrimonious 1800 election of having, among many other unpleasant things, a "hideous hermaphroditical character."
So maybe the one positive of the 2016 version of American political hatred is that it probably won't make people work double shifts down at the morgue. But everything else about this repellant contest between the two most reviled major-party nominees in modern history points to an alarming resurgence of that foul and dangerous defect of judgment known as collectivism.
When we hear the c word nowadays it's usually in the context of Stalin's agricultural five-year plans or the rah-rah slogans on 1930s posters. But there's another, more personal meaning of the term that has dwindled in usage, even while its application to major-party politics seems to ratchet up each cycle. And that is: treating the disparate individuals within any given bloc as sharing a collective set of characteristics, intentions, and pathologies. It's what Hillary Clinton meant with "basket of deplorables," it's what Donald Trump has done with "Mexican heritage" and its variants, and it's all too often the nightstick that our friends and loved ones grab for when talking about politics in a presidential year.
...
The Collectivist Election (http://reason.com/archives/2016/11/05/the-collectivist-election)
When Henry Adams wrote in the early 20th century that "politics, as a practice whatever its professions, had always been the systematic organization of hatreds," there was ample reason to take him literally.
The world back then was on the verge of a cataclysmic war that would kill 17 million people and help incubate both communism and fascism. Adams had come of age in London as the son of the American ambassador under President Abraham Lincoln, a man who knew all too well how political disputes can turn bloody. And Adams' great-grandfather, the second president of the United States, was accused by Thomas Jefferson's supporters during the famously acrimonious 1800 election of having, among many other unpleasant things, a "hideous hermaphroditical character."
So maybe the one positive of the 2016 version of American political hatred is that it probably won't make people work double shifts down at the morgue. But everything else about this repellant contest between the two most reviled major-party nominees in modern history points to an alarming resurgence of that foul and dangerous defect of judgment known as collectivism.
When we hear the c word nowadays it's usually in the context of Stalin's agricultural five-year plans or the rah-rah slogans on 1930s posters. But there's another, more personal meaning of the term that has dwindled in usage, even while its application to major-party politics seems to ratchet up each cycle. And that is: treating the disparate individuals within any given bloc as sharing a collective set of characteristics, intentions, and pathologies. It's what Hillary Clinton meant with "basket of deplorables," it's what Donald Trump has done with "Mexican heritage" and its variants, and it's all too often the nightstick that our friends and loved ones grab for when talking about politics in a presidential year.
...