The Politics of Hate: Power, Scapegoats, and the Crisis of Democracy

 

What Is the Politics of Hate?

The politics of hate refers to the organised and systematic use of hatred, fear, resentment, and hostility toward particular groups as a resource for political mobilisation, the acquisition of power, and the maintenance of social hierarchies. It is not simply the presence of hateful attitudes in political life, which has always existed in some form, but the deliberate cultivation and deployment of those attitudes as the primary engine of political identity, political loyalty, and political action. In the politics of hate, the definition of who we are is inseparable from the definition of who they are, and the emotional energy that drives political commitment is not primarily hope, solidarity, or a positive vision of the common good but fear, resentment, and hostility toward designated enemies, outsiders, and scapegoats.

The politics of hate is not a single phenomenon with a fixed content. It has taken different forms in different historical contexts, targeted different groups, and used different ideological frameworks to justify and organise hostility. What unites these different forms is a shared political logic, the mobilisation of negative emotion toward out-groups as the primary mechanism of political cohesion and political action.

Historical Roots

The politics of hate has deep historical roots that predate the modern period but that take specifically modern forms in the context of mass politics, mass media, and the nation state. The use of religious difference to generate political hostility has a long history in European politics, from the persecution of Jews in medieval and early modern Europe to the religious wars that tore Europe apart in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The use of racial categories to organise political domination and social hierarchy has its most systematic modern form in the colonial period, when the racialisation of conquered peoples provided an ideological justification for their dispossession and exploitation.

But the specifically modern form of the politics of hate emerges with the development of mass politics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when the expansion of political participation and the development of mass media made it possible to mobilise large populations through systematic campaigns of hatred toward designated out-groups. The pogrom, the lynch mob, the ethnic cleansing campaign, and the genocide are all forms of the politics of hate that have their specifically modern character precisely because they involve the organised mobilisation of mass populations through ideological campaigns that construct and amplify hostility toward specific groups.

Fascism as the Paradigm Case

Fascism, particularly in its Nazi form, represents the paradigm case of the politics of hate in the modern period, and much of the theoretical work on the politics of hate has been developed in response to the specific phenomenon of European fascism. The Nazi regime was not simply a political system that tolerated or exploited anti-Semitism as one element among others. It made hatred, specifically hatred of Jews but also of Roma, of disabled people, of homosexuals, of communists and socialists, the organising principle of its politics, the source of its mobilising energy, and ultimately the purpose of its state power.

Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951, remains one of the most important analyses of how the politics of hate became the organising principle of totalitarian government. Arendt argued that totalitarian movements were distinguished from ordinary political movements by their relationship to ideology, specifically by their willingness to pursue ideological consistency to its logical conclusion regardless of practical consequences or moral constraints. The Nazi pursuit of the Holocaust to the point of diverting military resources from the war effort was not an irrational aberration but a logical consequence of a regime that had made the elimination of its designated enemy the primary purpose of state power.

Erich Fromm's analysis in Escape from Freedom, discussed elsewhere in this series, provides the psychological complement to Arendt's political analysis. Fromm argued that the appeal of fascist movements was not primarily based on rational political calculation but on the psychological needs of people who were experiencing the anxieties of modern freedom and who found in the fascist movement's combination of submission to authority and hatred of a designated enemy a relief from those anxieties. The politics of hate serves a psychological function, providing a sense of identity, belonging, and purpose through the shared hatred of a common enemy.

Scapegoating and the Construction of the Enemy

A central mechanism of the politics of hate is scapegoating, the projection of social anxieties, economic frustrations, and existential insecurities onto a designated out-group that is held responsible for the problems and failures of the in-group. The scapegoat is a figure onto whom the anger and fear that cannot be directed at their actual causes, which are typically structural, diffuse, and difficult to identify, is displaced and given a human face and a human target.

René Girard's theory of the scapegoat, developed in Violence and the Sacred and subsequent works, argues that scapegoating is not an aberration of social life but a structural feature of it, a mechanism through which communities manage the violence that is inherent in their own internal conflicts by directing it outward toward a victim who can be sacrificed to restore social cohesion. Girard's analysis is anthropological and universal in its ambition, but its implications for understanding the politics of hate are significant. The politics of hate always involves the construction of a scapegoat, the designation of a group whose persecution or elimination can be presented as the solution to the problems of the in-group.

The construction of the scapegoat requires ideological work, the production of narratives, images, and arguments that make the designated out-group appear threatening, alien, and responsible for the problems of the in-group. This ideological construction is never simply a reflection of pre-existing social reality. It is an active process of meaning-making that shapes the perceptions and emotions of its audience, making what are in reality ordinary human beings appear as dangerous and alien others whose presence constitutes a threat to the survival and wellbeing of the in-group.

Authoritarian Populism and the Politics of Resentment

The most important contemporary form of the politics of hate is what Stuart Hall and others called authoritarian populism, a political form that combines the emotional energy of popular resentment against elites with the construction of racialised or culturalised enemies who are blamed for the failures and frustrations of the majority. Authoritarian populism does not typically present itself as a politics of hate. It presents itself as a politics of the people against the establishment, of common sense against elite ideology, of national identity against cosmopolitan dissolution.

But beneath this populist rhetoric lies a politics of hate in the precise sense, a mobilisation of hostility toward designated out-groups, typically including immigrants, racial minorities, religious minorities, and cultural and intellectual elites, as the primary engine of political identity and political loyalty. The specific content of the hostility varies across different national contexts, but the underlying logic is consistent, the construction of an authentic people whose interests and values are threatened by alien forces, and the mobilisation of that construction as the basis of political power.

Wendy Brown's analysis in In the Ruins of Neoliberalism, discussed elsewhere in this series, argues that the rise of authoritarian populism in the contemporary period is not simply a political aberration but a symptom of the specific forms of anxiety, resentment, and loss that neoliberal capitalism has produced. The dismantling of welfare state institutions, the destruction of stable employment, the erosion of community and social solidarity, and the cultural disruptions of globalisation have created the conditions of frustration and resentment that authoritarian populist movements exploit and direct toward their chosen enemies.

The Role of Media

The politics of hate has always depended on media for its capacity to construct and amplify hostility toward designated out-groups, and the transformation of media technology has transformed the forms and the reach of hate politics at every stage of its development. The printing press enabled the mass production and distribution of anti-Semitic and anti-heretical propaganda that fuelled the persecutions of the early modern period. The mass circulation press of the nineteenth century enabled the production of racial stereotypes and hostile narratives about colonised peoples and immigrant communities on a scale previously impossible. Radio and film were central to the Nazi propaganda machine that constructed the ideological framework for the Holocaust.

In the contemporary period, digital media and social media platforms have created new and specifically powerful mechanisms for the production and amplification of the politics of hate. The algorithmic logic of engagement-driven platforms, which prioritise content that generates strong emotional responses, systematically amplifies hateful and extreme content because hatred, fear, and anger are more engaging than thoughtful or nuanced content. The filter bubble effect, through which algorithms deliver content that confirms existing beliefs and attitudes, creates information environments in which hateful narratives are reinforced and normalised without challenge.

The speed and scale of digital communication also enables new forms of coordinated hate campaigns, from the organised harassment campaigns of online communities to the rapid global spread of conspiracy theories that construct enemies and mobilise hostility. The research of Shoshana Zuboff on surveillance capitalism is relevant here, since the same mechanisms of behavioural data collection and targeted messaging that serve commercial advertising also serve the political mobilisation of hate.

Hate Speech and Freedom of Expression

One of the most contested political and legal questions in liberal democratic societies is the relationship between the politics of hate and the principle of freedom of expression. The liberal tradition has generally held that freedom of expression, including the expression of hateful and offensive views, is a fundamental right that the state should not restrict except in the most extreme cases of direct incitement to imminent violence. The harm principle formulated by John Stuart Mill holds that the only legitimate ground for restricting individual freedom is the prevention of harm to others, and on a narrow reading of this principle, most hate speech does not cause the kind of direct and immediate harm that would justify its restriction.

But critics of this position, drawing on the work of legal scholars like Mari Matsuda, Charles Lawrence, and Catharine MacKinnon, and on the analysis of philosophers like Jeremy Waldron, argue that hate speech causes real and serious harm that the liberal harm principle fails to capture. Hate speech attacks the social standing and equal dignity of its targets, making clear that they are not recognised as full members of the political community. It creates environments of fear and hostility that effectively silence the speech of its targets. And it constructs and amplifies the ideological frameworks that have historically preceded and enabled discrimination, persecution, and violence against targeted groups.

Hannah Arendt on Totalitarianism and Banality

Hannah Arendt's contribution to understanding the politics of hate extends beyond her analysis of totalitarianism to her concept of the banality of evil, developed in Eichmann in Jerusalem, her account of the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961. Arendt argued that Eichmann was not the demonic monster that the prosecution presented but an ordinary bureaucrat who had participated in mass murder not out of hatred or ideological fanaticism but out of thoughtlessness, a failure to think, a failure to exercise the moral judgment that would have required him to recognise what he was actually doing and its implications for the people it was done to.

The concept of the banality of evil is important for understanding the politics of hate because it suggests that the most devastating expressions of political hatred do not require individual perpetrators who are themselves consumed by hatred. They require ordinary people who have been brought by ideological conditioning, institutional pressure, and the mechanisms of bureaucratic normalisation to participate in systematic harm without exercising the moral imagination necessary to recognise it as harm. The politics of hate operates not just through the passionate hatred of demagogues and true believers but through the complicit thoughtlessness of ordinary people who follow institutional logics and social norms without asking what those logics and norms are actually producing.

Frantz Fanon and Colonial Hate

Frantz Fanon's analysis of colonial racism in Black Skin White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth provides a crucial dimension of the politics of hate that is often underemphasised in analyses focused primarily on European fascism. Fanon argued that colonial racism is not simply a prejudice or a mistake that can be corrected through education and goodwill. It is a structured system of domination that produces the colonised person as a radically inferior other, systematically denied the attributes of full humanity, and that this system of domination is sustained through the constant production and reproduction of racial hatred and racial fear.

Fanon's analysis of the psychological dimensions of colonial racism, drawing on both psychoanalysis and existentialism, showed how racial hatred is internalised by both the coloniser and the colonised, shaping the self-understanding and the emotional life of both in ways that are deeply damaging. The colonised person who internalises the racial ideology of the coloniser experiences themselves as inferior, as lacking the attributes of full humanity that the coloniser possesses, and this internalisation of the coloniser's hatred is one of the most damaging effects of colonial domination.

The Psychology of Dehumanisation

A consistent feature of the politics of hate across different historical contexts is the dehumanisation of its targets, the systematic representation of the designated out-group as less than fully human. Dehumanisation serves a crucial ideological function in the politics of hate because it lowers the psychological barriers to violence and persecution by making the target appear not as a human being with the full range of human emotions, relationships, and vulnerabilities but as a threat, a pest, a disease, or a subhuman creature whose suffering does not command the moral consideration owed to fully human persons.

David Livingstone Smith's research on dehumanisation, documented in his book Less Than Human, shows that dehumanising language and imagery has preceded virtually every major episode of mass violence in modern history. The Nazi propaganda that represented Jews as rats and vermin, the Rwandan radio broadcasts that called Tutsis cockroaches before and during the genocide, the American propaganda that represented Japanese people as snakes and insects during the Second World War, all used dehumanising imagery to lower the psychological barriers to violence and to make the participation of ordinary people in mass atrocity psychologically possible.

Intersectionality and Multiple Axes of Hate

The politics of hate rarely operates along a single axis of hostility. More typically it involves the construction of enemies who are defined by multiple overlapping characteristics, racial, religious, gender, sexual, and class based, that are combined and recombined in different ways depending on the specific political context and the specific needs of the movement. The Nazi construction of the enemy combined anti-Semitism with misogyny, homophobia, ableism, and anti-communism in a single ideological framework that identified multiple groups as threats to the imagined purity and strength of the German nation.

Kimberlé Crenshaw's concept of intersectionality, developed in the context of feminist legal theory and subsequently applied across a wide range of social and political analysis, is relevant here because it provides a framework for understanding how multiple systems of domination interact and reinforce each other. The politics of hate targets people not simply as members of a single out-group but as members of multiple intersecting categories whose combination produces specific forms of vulnerability and specific forms of hostility. Black women, for example, are targeted not simply as Black or simply as women but as Black women, in ways that are irreducible to either category alone.

Contemporary Forms of the Politics of Hate

The politics of hate in the contemporary period takes multiple forms that vary across different national and cultural contexts but share the underlying logic of mobilising hostility toward designated out-groups as the primary engine of political identity and political action. The rise of right-wing populist and nationalist movements across Europe and North America has brought forms of the politics of hate into mainstream political discourse that were previously confined to the margins.

Anti-immigrant politics constructs the immigrant, typically the non-white or non-Christian immigrant, as a threat to national identity, economic security, and cultural continuity. The rhetoric of invasion, replacement, and cultural destruction that has become common in mainstream political discourse across the Western world is a form of the politics of hate that draws on long traditions of nativist and racial hostility while presenting itself as a legitimate defence of national sovereignty and cultural integrity.

Islamophobia, the systematic construction of Muslims as a threatening and alien presence in Western societies, has become one of the dominant forms of the politics of hate in the post-September 11 period, providing a religious and cultural framework for hostility that overlaps with but is not reducible to racial hostility. The construction of Islam as inherently violent, incompatible with democratic values, and threatening to Western civilisation has been central to the political mobilisation of numerous right-wing movements and has also influenced mainstream political discourse and policy in ways that have had serious consequences for Muslim communities.

Anti-Black racism, the oldest and most persistent form of racial hatred in the United States and across the African diaspora, continues to organise political mobilisation in ways that are sometimes explicit and sometimes coded through the languages of crime, welfare dependence, and cultural pathology. The backlash against the Black Lives Matter movement and the broader movement for racial justice has demonstrated the continuing power of anti-Black hatred as a resource for political mobilisation.

Antisemitism, despite the apparent discrediting of the most extreme forms of Nazi ideology, has proved remarkably persistent and remarkably adaptable, taking new forms in the contemporary period including conspiracy theories that attribute global economic and political power to Jewish elites and that circulate through digital media networks in ways that reach far beyond the traditional boundaries of explicitly fascist politics.

The Politics of Hate and Democratic Crisis

The relationship between the politics of hate and the crisis of liberal democracy is one of the most urgent questions in contemporary political theory and practice. Liberal democracy depends on a set of norms and institutions, the rule of law, freedom of expression, equal political rights, the peaceful transfer of power, and the recognition of the equal dignity of all citizens, that the politics of hate systematically erodes. When hate becomes the primary organising principle of political life, these norms and institutions are threatened because the politics of hate requires the denial of equal dignity to its targets, the subversion of legal protections for minority groups, and the replacement of deliberative democratic politics with the emotional mobilisation of in-group solidarity against out-group enemies.

The analysis of democratic backsliding in the contemporary period, developed by political scientists like Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way, shows how authoritarian movements have used the politics of hate as a tool for undermining democratic institutions from within, using the formal mechanisms of democratic politics to accumulate power while systematically dismantling the norms and institutions that make democratic accountability possible. Viktor Orbán's Hungary, Jair Bolsonaro's Brazil, and the trajectory of the Republican Party under Donald Trump in the United States are all examples of how the politics of hate can be used to erode democratic institutions while maintaining the formal appearance of democratic legitimacy.

Resistance to the Politics of Hate

Understanding the politics of hate is inseparable from thinking about how it can be resisted. The literature on resistance to hate politics identifies several dimensions that are important and that operate at different levels of social and political life.

At the individual and cultural level, the work of developing critical consciousness about the mechanisms of hate politics, about how scapegoating, dehumanisation, and ideological construction work, is a necessary foundation for resistance. The analysis of thinkers like Arendt, Fanon, Fromm, and the others discussed in this series provides intellectual tools for recognising and naming the dynamics of hate politics in their various contemporary forms.

At the institutional level, the defence of the norms and institutions of democratic accountability, of a free and independent press, of judicial independence, and of the equal protection of the law for all citizens, is a crucial dimension of resistance to the politics of hate. The politics of hate depends on the erosion of these institutions because they provide mechanisms for holding hate politics accountable and protecting the rights of its targets.

At the community level, the building of cross-community solidarity, of relationships and institutions that connect people across the boundaries of race, religion, and cultural identity, is one of the most effective long-term forms of resistance to the politics of hate because it undermines the construction of clear boundaries between in-group and out-group on which hate politics depends.

At the political level, addressing the material conditions, including economic insecurity, social dislocation, and the erosion of community, that create the fertile ground for hate politics is necessary but not sufficient. The politics of hate cannot be reduced to economic anxiety, and addressing economic grievances while leaving the cultural and psychological dynamics of hate untouched is inadequate to the challenge.

Key Thinkers at a Glance

Hannah Arendt analysed the origins of totalitarianism and the banality of evil, showing how organised hatred becomes the organising principle of state power and how ordinary people participate in its consequences through thoughtlessness rather than fanaticism. Erich Fromm explained the psychological appeal of authoritarian hate politics through his analysis of the escape from freedom and the authoritarian character structure. Frantz Fanon analysed the specific forms of racial hatred produced by colonial domination and their effects on the psychology of both coloniser and colonised. Stuart Hall developed the concept of authoritarian populism to analyse the specific form of hate politics that combines popular resentment against elites with the construction of racialised and culturalised enemies. Wendy Brown argued that neoliberalism prepared the ground for contemporary hate politics by producing the economic and psychological conditions that authoritarian movements exploit. René Girard developed the theory of the scapegoat as a structural mechanism of social life that provides the anthropological foundation for the politics of hate. Kimberlé Crenshaw developed the concept of intersectionality that allows for the analysis of how multiple systems of domination interact in the construction of hate politics targets. David Livingstone Smith documented the role of dehumanisation as the psychological mechanism through which hate politics lowers barriers to violence.

Key Idea to Remember

The politics of hate is not simply the presence of hateful attitudes in political life. It is the organised and systematic cultivation and deployment of hatred, fear, and resentment toward designated out-groups as the primary engine of political identity, political loyalty, and political power. It works through the construction of enemies, the projection of social anxieties onto scapegoats, the dehumanisation of targets, and the amplification of hostility through media and institutional mechanisms. Understanding its logic, its historical forms, and its contemporary expressions is not an academic exercise. It is a necessary condition of democratic self-defence in a period when the politics of hate has moved from the margins to the centre of political life in many of the world's most powerful societies.