Those who study marriage tell us that there is one thing a marriage cannot withstand: contempt. When either or both spouses regard the other with contempt, their relationship will decline to that degree and may possibly be killed by it. In the heart of him who bears contempt for his partner, contempt undermines the other’s credibility; it gives him license to devalue and ultimately disregard his partner’s thoughts and feelings and to treat her with less dignity, less humanity than he would an equal. Contempt is an often fatal drug that chokes out love and terminates marriages. Likewise, friendship and simple uplifting human mutuality cannot thrive when contempt’s toxic influence prevails.
Contempt is the actuating motive that drives and justifies white supremacists in their racism, which is based in contempt for nonwhites. All bigotries are founded on presumptions that the marked group or person is less than the beholder, whether it be against women, LGBTQ people, African Americans, the poor, the homeless, etc.
It is an extreme example to invoke the Nazis and the Holocaust they perpetrated, and I am not alleging that we will become like the Nazis’ Third Reich; however, it is instructive to remember that the foundation for Hitler’s genocide was contempt for Jews as inferior and having undesirable characteristics as a group. That led to the stereotype of Jews being sub-human and therefore not worthy of living.
Think about how 6 million Jews from more than a dozen nations over a dozen years and in fairly open ways were subjected to ruthless tracing, systemic discrimination, repression, seizure of their properties, denial of their livelihoods, mass arrests and internment in concentration camps. Many were forced to work under the most brutal conditions, suffering starvation, torture, rape, bizarre medical experimentation, separation from friends and family, mass murder, and inhumane treatment of every kind. This could only happen at this scale because hundreds of thousands of supporters, participants or passive observers in some degree shared the Nazis’ contempt for Jews in order to justify what was happening.
I do not suggest all Germans supported, or even knew about, the Holocaust. Nor do I say that today’s political cacophony, as mean as it is, will necessarily lead to a Holocaust-like outcome. But I do assert that when a society lets itself be taught or conditioned to feel contempt for its political opponents, or when individuals as a matter of participating in national politics give themselves the license to feel contempt and then full-blown hatred for their fellow countrymen and women, that society will decline and become nonfunctional to that extent. It will spawn division, physical separation and even violence. If you think I stretch my thesis, why do white supremacists channel Nazi themes and tokens so often and so readily? Because they believe as Hitler believed. Who can say where those beliefs may lead them?
Donald Trump overflows with abject contempt for his enemies. As our elected leader, he has set a terrible tone for our country. Amped up as he is by the impeachment battle, his pronouncements grow ever more bitter and hateful. Impeachment and the other investigations have given him cause, some unjustified but some legitimate, to feel unfairly persecuted by enemies. Still, his hateful, spiteful antics are deplorable in the leader of the free world.
He is not the only leader afflicted with hatred and contempt. While I do not say the Democrats acted solely out of contempt and loathing of Donald Trump when they impeached him, there is plenty of it in the stew they have served us.
My fear is that we are letting contempt and hatred for our political opponents carry us away to regions we will regret visiting.
We need a public prophet of Lincoln’s kindly disposition to urge us to resist the temptation to hate, abandon contempt for our adversaries, refuse to indulge our base emotions and suspicions against those we disagree with, and reject the vitriol-filled opinions and inflammatory conclusions on both the left and the right.
This is a difficult pass through which our country must travel. May we do it with much more tolerance and far less contempt than our leaders have shown so far.
Greg Bell is the former lieutenant governor of Utah and the current president and CEO of the Utah Hospital Association.