Despite nation’s strides, hate groups grow in number

There are now 926 hate groups in this country.

Take a second and consider that number. It represents an increase of
more than 50 percent since 2000. And by “hate groups,” I don’t mean
guys in their bathrobes who go online and pretend their followers are
legion. No, I mean actual Klan cells, Neo-Nazi sects, gay-bashing
“churches,” cliques of black separatists, white nationalists,
nativists, racist skinheads and other merchants of venom who meet, plot
and recruit in all 48 contiguous states. (Alaska and Hawaii have no
known hate groups.) Nine hundred twenty-six of them. The number is a
record.

We learn all this from the Southern Poverty Law Center
( http://www.splcenter.org) in Montgomery, Ala., which has, since its founding
in 1971, become a leading authority on the business of hate. According
to the latest issue of Intelligence Report, the organization’s
quarterly magazine, that business is booming.

Maybe you wonder how this can be. How can hate enjoy such phenomenal
growth in a nation in which a Jew serves as senator from Connecticut, a
Muslim serves as representative from Minnesota, a Hispanic is governor
of New Mexico and a black man is president? The answer is that we are a
nation where a Jew serves as senator from Connecticut, a Muslim serves
as representative from Minnesota, a Hispanic is governor of New Mexico
and a black man is president. Because if those things strike you as
signs of progress, well, they are signs of apocalypse to those who
believe only white, male Christians are fit to lead.

That’s not the only reason for the increase. The Southern Poverty Law
Center also cites the debate over illegal immigration that has
dominated much of this decade. Though former President Bush offered
thoughtful, moderate leadership on the issue, he was drowned out by
demagogic extremists competing to see which could most effectively
scapegoat undocumented workers. They, too, bear responsibility here.

Finally, there is the economy. When things get tough, people become
more receptive to the idea that their miseries are all the fault of
some alien other. So the stock market, too, is implicated. Hate rises
when the Dow falls.

I imagine the Southern Poverty Law Center findings land like cold water
in the faces of those who took Barack Obama’s ascension to the
presidency as proof that the nation was finally cured of the sickness
of hate. The truth, I’m afraid, is more nuanced than that.

Maybe it helps to think in terms of alcoholism, a disease that can,
with treatment, be contained, controlled, put into remission — but
never cured. Even when you have years of sobriety under your belt, the
germ of it lurks in your bloodstream. Which is why alcoholics do not
call themselves cured. Rather, they say they are recovering.

Hate is something like that, a fact some of us have never quite
understood. Such folks are convinced there is a goal line out there
somewhere which, once crossed, will allow the nation to declare itself
cured. And once cured, we’ll never have to grapple with hatred again.

But it doesn’t work that way.

In a nation so deeply riven by culture, race and religion, there is
always a temptation to hate somebody, to blame some group of others for
the job you lost, the crime committed against you, the fear and
uncertainty you feel. There is a simplicity and a seductiveness to it
that are all too easily mistaken for righteousness.

So there is no “cure” for a nation’s hate. There is only a continuing
process of getting better, not unlike the alcoholic who must daily earn
his sobriety anew. This explosion of hate is a reminder of what happens
when we forget that, when we are undeservedly sanguine about how
enlightened we’ve become.

It is said that eternal vigilance is the price of freedom. Well, that’s
the going rate for tolerance, too.
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