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David Livingstone Smith, Ph.D., wrote an essay titled “Fighting hate is a losing battle,” that was published by the Boston Globe's website on August 29 and on the front page of the Globe's Ideas section of its Sunday print edition on September 3. In the piece, Smith addresses the problematic nature of the concept of the “war against hate,” a popular catch phrase being batted around in today’s post-Charlottesville American culture. The essay was the focal point of another essay, “Contemplations on the Topic of Hate,” that appeared the following day in the Washington Monthly.

In the Boston Globe essay, Smith asserts that the notion of “fighting hate” is meaningless. “There’s good hate and there’s bad hate,” he explains. He poses the question: Does hatred of Nazis place a person on the same side of the moral divide as a Nazi who hates Jews? Hate, in and of itself, he argues, is neither good nor bad. “Hate is morally neutral when it’s considered all on its own; what makes it good or bad depends on what it is that’s being hated.”

Smith goes on to apply the same principle to love, noting that much of the alt-right rhetoric is more focused on fear, loyalty, nostalgia, pride, outrage, and love of whiteness than it is on hate. Even Nazi propaganda, he states, was less about hate than it was about providing answers to life’s questions, cultivating ethnic pride and honoring one’s ethnicity and ancestors.

Smith points out that the oversimplification of the solution to the problem of prejudice and bigotry – to simply fight hate – is not only ineffective, but it is potentially harmful. “The uncomfortable truth is that sentiments like love, honor, terror, and moral righteousness have immensely greater power to move human beings to commit appalling acts of violence than hate does,” he writes. “The language of the ‘fight against hate’ is a blunt instrument. It impoverishes our moral vocabulary and restricts our capacity to truly understand what we are up against at the present historical moment.”

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