Two Minutes Hate, GOP-Style

Before the Hate had proceeded for thirty seconds, uncontrollable exclamations of rage were breaking out from half the people in the room. The self-satisfied sheep-like face on the screen, and the terrifying power of the Eurasian army behind it, were too much to be borne: besides, the sight or even the thought of Goldstein produced fear and anger automatically. He was an object of hatred more constant than either Eurasia or Eastasia, since when Oceania was at war with one of these Powers it was generally at peace with the other. But what was strange was that although Goldstein was hated and despised by everybody, although every day and a thousand times a day, on platforms, on the telescreen, in newspapers, in books, his theories were refuted, smashed, ridiculed, held up to the general gaze for the pitiful rubbish that they were - in spite of all this, his influence never seemed to grow less. Always there were fresh dupes waiting to be seduced by him. A day never passed when spies and saboteurs acting under his directions were not unmasked by the Thought Police.

George Orwell, 1984

Orwell would either be horrified or grimly satisfied at the way the Republican Party and the conservative movement in general - Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, Sean Hannity, and so on - have absorbed the concept of the Two Minutes Hate. In the novel, the Hate is used to channel the emotions of the Oceanian populace into hating this person or that, rather than have them start thinking about why life is as miserable as it is.

So it is with today's conservatives. Watching them switch their hatred from topic to topic and from person to person is like watching Orwell's dark vision come to life. One week, the object of their fear-and-loathing agenda is Mexican migrants looking for work. The next week, it's MoveOn.org. The week after that, it's a boy who asked why President Bush wants to take away his health care. Today, it's FreeThought Radio, a new atheism-centric show on Air America Radio, about which Fox News is screaming that it's a "war on God." And every year around this time, it's the "War on Christmas."

But the basic pattern of the Hate never changes, even if its target does so regularly. It's always a dire threat to civilization as we know it. We are always under attack from someone or other, and the latest target is always - always - the most evil and blackhearted enemy in the history of everything, topping only the one that came before it. And once the Hate has run its course, whether it is refuted by simple facts or met by public revulsion or simply runs out of steam, it switches effortlessly to its next target.

And it is always used to distract the American people from asking questions, from thinking for ourselves. Why run the risk of people wondering why our soldiers are needlessly dying in Iraq when they can be told to hate Sean Penn instead? What better way to prevent people from asking why the United States is the only industrialized nation in the world which does not provide some form of national health coverage than by focusing their worries and fears on a twelve-year-old boy with brain damage? It can certainly backfire temporarily, as with this week's aborted smear campaign against Graeme Frost and his family, but then it simply changes direction to target the next threat.

One wonders if the Republicans' Two Minutes Hate strategy will ever run its course, whether the people being so callously manipulated will ever wake up to that simple fact.

I hope it will, but I fear it won't.

UPDATE: With the Frost smear having gone down in flames, the Two Minutes Hate has switched to Al Gore, who in 2000 won the popular vote and this morning won the Nobel Peace Prize for his climate-change work. To nobody's surprise, Fox News and various right-wing blogs have started attacking Gore en masse.