Love Your Enemies: How Decent People Can Save America from the Culture of Contempt

by Arthur C. Brooks

Political scientists find that our nation is more polarized than it has been at any time since the Civil War. This is especially true among partisan elites—leaders who, instead of bringing us together, depict our differences in unbridgeable, apocalyptic terms.

Without meaning to, she was effectively presenting me with a choice: my loved ones or my ideology. Either I admit that those with whom I disagree politically—including people I love—are stupid and evil, or I renounce my ideas and my credibility as a public figure. Love or ideology: choose.

Have you been subjected to a similar choice? Have you been told by a newspaper pundit, politician, college professor, or television host that your friends, family, and neighbors on the other side are knaves and fools, implying that if you have any integrity, you must stand up to them or leave them behind? That people with a different perspective hate our country and must be completely destroyed? That if you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention? That kindness to your ideological foes is tantamount to weakness?

We need national healing every bit as much as economic growth. But what are we getting instead from many of our leaders in media, politics, entertainment, and academia? Across the political spectrum, people in positions of power and influence are setting us against one another. They tell us our neighbors who disagree with us politically are ruining our country. That ideological differences aren’t a matter of differing opinions but reflect moral turpitude. That our side must utterly vanquish the other, even if it leaves our neighbors without a voice.

Tommy Hodges, the organizer of the pro-Trump rally, invited Hawk Newsome onto his stage. “We’re going to give you two minutes of our platform to put your message out,” Tommy told Hawk. “Whether they disagree or agree with your message is irrelevant. It’s the fact that you have the right to have the message.”

“I said that I am an American. Secondly, I am a Christian,” Hawk said, once again connecting with his audience. “We don’t want handouts. We don’t want anything that’s yours. We want our God-given right to freedom, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

“I decided I’d rather go with love. I’m not out to blast people anymore. I’m not out to argue, to fight. I’m there to make people understand, to make people come together. I’m here for progress.”

What exactly is contempt? Social scientists define contempt as anger mixed with disgust.7 These two emotions form a toxic combination, like ammonia mixed with bleach.

When I talk about love in this book, I am describing not something fuzzy and sentimental but clear and bracing. In his Summa Theologica, Saint Thomas Aquinas said, “To love is to will the good of the other.”10 The modern philosopher Michael Novak refines this further by adding two words: “To love is to will the good of the other as other” (emphasis mine).11 He continues: “Love is not sentimental, nor restful in illusions, but watchful, alert, and ready to follow evidence. It seeks the real as lungs crave air.”

Just because you disagree with something doesn’t mean it’s hate speech or the person saying it is a deviant.

Finally, there is a practical, albeit self-interested, reason to avoid contempt, even for those with whom you disagree most strongly. It’s horrible for you. You will see in this book that contempt makes you unhappy, unhealthy, and unattractive even to those who agree with you. Hating others is associated with depression. Contempt will wreck your relationships and harm your health. It is a dangerous vice, like smoking or drinking too much.

You will see why the current model of contemptuous leadership is a losing proposition in the long run, as well as why better, not less, disagreement holds the key to greater harmony.

You see, whether or not we want to admit it, political contempt and division are what economists call a demand-driven phenomenon. Famous people purvey it, but ordinary citizens are the ones creating a market for it. Think of it like methamphetamine: People who cook it and sell it are doing a terrible thing, and they should stop—but why they do it is no surprise: there’s a lot of money in it.

Either way, just as the rejoinder “he started it” never cut any ice for me when my kids were little and fighting in the back seat of the car, it has no moral weight here, where our goal is to undercut the culture of contempt.

Think about what this means: We are headed to the point where achieving bipartisan compromise, on issues from immigration to guns to confirming a Supreme Court justice, is as difficult as achieving Middle East peace. We may not be engaging in daily violence against each other, but we can’t make progress as a society when both sides believe that they are motivated by love while the other side is motivated by hate.

Gottman calls contempt “sulfuric acid for love.” However, it doesn’t just destabilize our relationships and our politics. Gottman tells me that it also causes a comprehensive degradation of our immune systems. It damages self-esteem, alters behavior, and even impairs cognitive processing.10 According to the American Psychological Association, the feeling of rejection, so often experienced after being treated with contempt, increases “anxiety, depression, jealousy, and sadness” and “reduces performance on difficult intellectual tasks.”11

As important, contempt isn’t just harmful for the person being treated poorly. It is also harmful for the contemptuous person, because treating others with contempt causes us to secrete two stress hormones, cortisol and adrenaline. The consequence of constantly secreting these hormones—the equivalent of living under significant consistent stress—is staggering. Gottman points out that people in couples who are constantly battling die twenty years earlier, on average, than those who consistently seek mutual understanding. Our contempt is inarguably disastrous for us, let alone the people we are holding in contempt.

America’s politics right now are similar to most periods of partisan disagreement, or do you think problems have reached a dangerous low point?” Seventy-one percent of respondents chose the latter.14 Almost two-thirds of Americans say that the future of the country is a very or somewhat significant source of stress, more than the percentage who say they are stressed by money concerns or work.15 Even more disconcerting, 60 percent of Americans consider our current political moment the lowest point in U.S. history that they can remember—a figure, the American Psychological Association points out, that spans “every generation, including those who lived through World War II and Vietnam, the Cuban missile crisis and the September 11 terrorist attacks.”16 More than 70 percent of Americans believe that the country will be greatly hurt if opposing parties don’t work together.17

Social media intensifies our addiction by allowing us to filter out the news and opinions we disagree with, thus purifying the contempt drug.

“Ideological siloing” means we stop interacting entirely with those who hold opposing views. Polls show that a majority of both Republicans and Democrats have “just a few” or no friends who are members of the other party.21 By contrast, just 14 percent of Republicans and 9 percent of Democrats have “a lot” of close friends from the opposing party.22 The results of not knowing people of opposing viewpoints and seeing them only through the lens of hostile media is predictable. Today, 55 percent of Democrats have a “very unfavorable” view of Republicans, and 58 percent of Republicans hold that view of Democrats. This represents a threefold increase since 1994.

There is evidence that as we become less exposed to opposing viewpoints, we become less logically competent as people.

Notable among these modes are: extreme binary opinions (“I am completely right, so you are completely wrong”); seeing any uncertainty as a mark of weakness; motivated reasoning (looking only for evidence that supports your own opinion—which is easier when one can curate one’s news and social media); argumentum ad hominem (“You have selfish and immoral reasons for your opinion”); and a refusal to agree on any basic facts (“Your news is fake news”).

Primaries often devolve into a competition to see who can take the most extreme positions in order to prove party fealty and turn out the hard-core base. The inevitable result is the demonization of the other side.

One of their biggest regrets is that important issues that require cooperation become a political Ping-Pong match. One side gains power and imposes its vision on strict party-line voting, and then the other side gains power and tries to impose its vision in the same way. The people caught in the middle are those with the least power.

As an old African proverb has it, “When elephants fight, it’s the grass that suffers.” The weak get hurt in conflicts between the powerful. Americans at the bottom of the income scale are always the ones who lose when contempt crowds out cooperation at the top. The politics of contempt never hurts the rich very much. It hurts people in poverty. We should all be able to agree that that’s bad.

Contempt is driving us apart and making us miserable. It is holding us hostage.

But here’s what I learned from that lucky interaction: contempt is no match for love. The cycle of contempt depended on me, and I broke it with just a few words of gratitude. Doing so felt great for me, and it changed another person’s heart.

So don’t sacrifice a friendship or family relationship over one either, and don’t pass up a possible new friendship just because of politics.

The Founding Fathers knew that social harmony would form the backbone of America. In his celebrated pamphlet Common Sense, Thomas Paine held that “it is not in numbers, but in unity, that our great strength lies.”38 James Madison, in the fourteenth Federalist Paper, warned that the “most alarming of all novelties, the most wild of all projects, the most rash of all attempts, is that of rendering us in pieces, in order to preserve our liberties and promote our happiness.”39

John Adams believed that the cancer of faction in America was to be “dreaded as the greatest political Evil, under our Constitution.”

First, unity does not necessarily mean agreement.

Unity not uniformity

We have a cultural addiction to contempt—an addiction abetted by the outrage industrial complex for profit and power—and it’s tearing us apart.

It’s hard; we are prideful, and contempt can give a sense of short-term purpose and satisfaction, like one more drink. No one ever said that breaking an addiction was easy. But make no mistake: Like Bartimaeus, we can choose what we truly want, as individuals and as a nation.

Go where people disagree with you and learn from them. That means making new friends and seeking out opinions you know you don’t agree with. How

He was not advocating surrender to the views of those with whom we disagree. If I believe I am right, I have a duty to stick to my views. But my duty is also to be kind, fair, and friendly to all, even those with whom I have great differences.

Kindness and warm-heartedness are the antivenom for the poisonous contempt coursing through the veins of our political discourse. Contempt is what we saw when Tommy Hodges and Hawk Newsome—the Trump rally organizer and the Black Lives Matter activist we met at the start of this book—arrived on the National Mall. By inviting Hawk up onstage, Tommy did more than give Hawk a platform to speak. He acknowledged his dignity as a fellow American. He effectively said, I may not agree with you, but what you have to say matters. That simple demonstration of respect broke through the wall of mutual contempt that had separated them and completely transformed their interaction.

When you are treated with contempt, don’t see it as a threat but as an opportunity.

Conquer anger through gentleness, unkindness through kindness, greed through generosity, and falsehood by truth.

Your opportunity when treated with contempt is to change at least one heart—yours. You may not be able to control the actions of others, but you can absolutely control your reaction. You can break the cycle of contempt. You have the power to do that.

Much of the time, we feel under siege and have little niceness in our hearts. Given the vitriol we experience, to be truly nice probably requires years of meditation and intense study. If you’re up for that, great! But that’s a long-term solution. Want a couple of hacks instead? Here’s the first one: fake it. Even if you don’t feel like being nice, act the way a nice person would. Soon enough, you’ll actually become a nicer person and reap the rewards.

For me, the last part is key to national unity: gratitude based on a recognition that we need others, even—perhaps especially—those with whom we disagree. Why? Because we are blessed to live in the greatest, freest country in the history of the world—a place where, when you have a difference of opinion, nobody’s going to knock on your door and haul you off to a forced-labor camp. We take this for granted, but in the scope of history, it is truly a miracle. If you join me in being grateful that we don’t live in a one-party state, then by definition you must be grateful for people who disagree with you. They are the ones who make pluralism and democracy possible. You should be grateful and express that gratitude for people who are on the other side in the competition of ideas.

Daniel Goleman calls “coercive leaders” in his seminal Harvard Business Review article “Leadership That Gets Results.”

Authoritative leaders in a company, according to Goleman, are visionaries who set a course for an institution and inspire each member to take responsibility for getting to the final destination. While coercive leaders drive people away by belittling and blaming, authoritative leaders garner their support by offering their encouragement and trust. They foster a culture that affirms each team member’s importance to the work being done, and in doing so, convince individuals to invest deeply in the long-term prosperity of the organization. The aspirational approach of authoritative leaders produces the kind of success that builds on itself over time.

While authoritative leaders promote their own overarching vision, they are not authoritarian. They do not suppress dissent, instead granting employees the freedom to disagree and solve problems on their own. The operational freedom granted by authoritative leaders promotes the individual creativity, accountability, and initiative that is essential to the success of any business. Authoritative leaders inspire a can-do spirit and enthusiasm for an organization’s work because they ensure that no one feels muzzled or left behind. By letting every person know how her role helps accomplish the organization’s mission, an authoritative leader empowers and motivates employees to become creative problem solvers.

Authoritative leaders are not peacemakers. They aren’t conflict-averse. They just understand how to manage conflict in a way that is not destructive.

the words of James Q. Wilson in The Moral Sense, “Anger is the necessary handmaiden of sympathy and fairness, and we are wrong to try to make everyone sweet and reasonable.”22

Of course, presidential candidates set the national tone, and political arguments—from television, to the dinner table, to even the campuses that were once bereft of moral absolutes—have turned into moral battlefields. Nothing is about honest disagreement; it is all about your interlocutor’s lack of basic human decency. Thus, no one with whom you disagree is worth engaging at all. The result is contempt.

Haidt was finding that there are in fact five innate moral values that exist among humans of all races and cultures, which he calls the “five foundations of morality.”2 They are: (1) fairness, (2) care for others, (3) respect for authority, (4) loyalty to one’s group, and (5) purity or sanctity. (Later, he added liberty to the list.)

Psychologists from the University of Toronto have found that our bodies issue a negative physical response when we entertain the idea of cheating on a test, even if there is no risk of being caught. In an experiment involving undergraduate test takers, participants deciding whether or not to cheat—and who had been explicitly told that cheating would not be punished—had elevated heart rates, shortened breath, and sweaty palms.5 In other words, we’re even physically averse to behaving unfairly.

The iconic conservative libertarian economist Friedrich Hayek wrote, in his seminal free-market text, The Road to Serfdom, “There is no reason why in a society which has reached the general level of wealth which ours has . . . security should not be guaranteed to all . . . there can be no doubt that some minimum of food, shelter, and clothing . . . can be assured to everybody. . . . Nor is there any reason why the state should not assist the individuals in providing for those common hazards of life against which, because of their uncertainty, few individuals can make adequate provision.”