We Americans Glimpsed the Promised Land of Brotherhood. We Chose the Wilderness of Hatred.

Reflecting on the Romans’ destruction of the ancient Jewish Temple in Jerusalem in the year 70 CE, the rabbinical sages later said the tragedy was the result of “senseless hatred.” In their taut way, they were referring to the deadly factional infighting that plagued the city during the Jewish Great Revolt against Rome, which had begun four years earlier, and which the historian Josephus recounts in detail. It was the kind of dynamic that has become horrifying familiar in our own time, of fanatics attempting to outflank one another by murdering anyone who shows any signs of openness to compromise, along with countless apolitical innocents whose deaths ratchet up the hatred even more. Islamist terrorists have been doing this for decades now, and MAGAs and Q-Anons are sinking deep into the same mentality.

It is a tragic truth about human nature that hatred feeds on itself, like an out-of-control wildfire, while love and fellowship need to be carefully nurtured, like a flickering candle flame. The feedback loop of the brutality the Very Stable Genius spews at the MAGA mob, and their vicious glee in inciting him to yet further atrocities, has consequences beyond themselves, as we who oppose them begin to lose our own humanity in response. It’s just too tempting to retort, in the face of white…