By David Bittinger

July 22^nd, 2026

Some philosophers believe the opposite of hatred is indifference. Less philosophical folk think the opposite is a more common word. Maybe today’s hard-edged digital culture has made that word seem quaint, old-fashioned, like “morality” or “values.” In fact I wasn’t comfortable using it in the headline above.

You know the word. It’s in the title of countless songs and Hallmark Channel movies. The opening lines of the 1967 Beatles song All You Need Is Love have nothing else: 

Love, love, love / Love, love, love / Love, love, love. (Is that amorous or tedious?)

What a wild-eyed, tie-dyed, mixed blessing of a time that was. For some, “1967 Beatles” recalls the lads’ visit to a celebrity guru in India. For others, 1967 marked the lamentable conclusion of the group’s pre-Yoko period. (Cue the shrieking.)

Reviews vary, but I still prefer the Beatles’ brilliant 1966 LP Revolver to their later work, which seemed a bit more herbinfluenced. Their early energy was also golden, especially the greatest R&B cover ever, Twist And Shout.  

On a love-hate axis, American culture has obviously moved toward hatred. If that development strikes you as strange and unaccountable, you’re probably one of those hale, hearty folks who see the sunny side of life and try to make it sunnier. If it strikes you as reasonable, you might say something like “He earned it.”

The hatred dominant in America now was prefaced by an insult joke. At the 2011 White House Correspondents Dinner, following President Obama’s snarky “roast” of attendee Trump, comedian Seth Meyers tossed off this howler: “Donald Trump has been saying that he will run for president as a Republican, which is surprising, since I just assumed he was running as a joke.”

Trump sat in the audience stone-faced but probably pondering. Four years later he did decide to run for president. With a casino owner’s luck, he ended up running against Hillary “Basket of Deplorables” Clinton, who was a more effective political joke than Meyers’.

Here we are 10 years later. Trump supporters would say that the driving force in our country over that decade has been the man himself: the tough-talking, deal-making, supremely confident, irascible patriot-salesman.

But that force can be viewed from another angle. Despite strong Trump support by as many as 77 million voters — especially for his 2024 shutting down the Democrats’ globalization of U.S. entitlements and further voter importation — the dominant force over the past decade has been Trump hatred.

Believing the presidency should remain theirs forever, Obama worshippers dealt with the Trump shock through sustained crazed hatred (also by building the world’s strangest house of worship / tourist attraction.)

They hate President Trump with a malevolence not even directed at Reagan or Obama. It was promoted so incessantly during the 2024 presidential campaign that within 64 days two progressives took it dead seriously.

A CNN pundit might have claimed the assassination attempts were mostly peaceful. But when Democrat politicians and leftist pundits repeatedly call the U.S. president a Nazi, a fascist, and a threat to extinguish democracy, some progressives will be inspired to end the threat.

The examples of this ideological illness are countless, from the previous president and vice-president to the party-decreed 2024 presidential nominee’s goofball running mate, the governor and enabler of Minnesota’s famous “Learing Center” Tim Walz: “No one has ever been more dangerous to this country than Donald Trump, and he is a fascist to his core.”

This hatred isn’t a simple matter of political preference; it comes from a vacuum in leftist ideology. They ran out of things to love (there’s the word!). The problem was that those loves were just poses, worse, poses turned insolvent. They’d spent so much on them, they had to ramp up the left’s go-to strategy: free everything, including their demand to give idle people other people’s money.

Free-everything is serious though crazy, proposed in the service of a federal government that’s become increasingly obese and decreasingly nourished by rational policy.

The free-everything strategy starts with education — or semblance of education. “Public schools” (the pseudonym for government schools) began their pivot toward semblance in the 1960s when teachers’ professional associations morphed into labor unions. Union dues increasingly financed a focus on pay, benefits and mushrooming administrative jobs while placing government authority above educational proficiency.

Even high school students got the message: Government is your friend and benefactor, unlike those profiteering businessmen, Simon Legree types, all of them. College students learn that lesson at grade peril.

Anyone who doubts that teaching reality should ask this question of someone who went through primary and secondary schools in this century or has children who did: Just how many conservative teachers or professors did you (or your offspring) have — how many anywhere to the right of Bernie Sanders? Ask them to recall just one.

I had fun asking this question of liberal friends of mine who live in Minnesota, “Land of 10,000 Educational Leftists.”

Over four decades, higher education kept upping its price tag — three times higher than the general inflation rate. The DemocratCollege Complex mandated this hyper-inflation of college costs through a backhanded ploy: trillions of dollars in juiceman-easy loans, many financing degrees in professionally laughable majors. (Good luck with your diploma in Weight Stigma Gender Studies.)

Then the Complex began crying progressive tears over the many students buried under the mountain ranges of student debt the Complex itself had created. Government compassion leaders like Sen. Elizabeth Warren demanded these loans be forgiven by “the government,” as if our 21st century government had any financial instruments left other than Treasury Bonds, that is, even deeper debt.

Another decades-long doomed Democrat freebie crusade: health care. In 1993 President Clinton’s “Task Force on National Health Care Reform” (headed by the president’s wife and dominated by lawyers and political advisers) went nowhere and retired to K Street. The president husband conceded, “We bit off more than we could chew.” Smooth, Bubba.

Now gone but forever the genius chronicler of real-world comedy, P.J. O’Rourke wrote in 1993, “If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it’s free.”

Democrats’ next serious effort to drive the free health care road came 15 years later, when they had the magical navigator of a president who won a Nobel Prize for doing nothing at all. Only 14 months into the Obama deity, Democrats proudly produced “Obamacare” backed by the pledge that all could keep their insurance plan and doctor (“wrong” buzzer!) and this system would cut costs for everyone (louder “wrong” buzzer!!) 

Sixteen years later, the free health care crowd is angrier than ever. They wail as if the system everyone hates dealing with is Trump. No, it’s Obamacare, Freebie Democrats. Your baby.

And recall the Covid Requires Free-Everything Era, not letting your head explode at Fauci’s press-backed lies. Remember it for being authoritarian, insanely budgeted, and aggressively fraudulent. Six years on, the federal budget baseline remains $3 trillion larger than the pre-Covid budget of 2020. And what substantial benefits to citizens does that $3 trillion provide? More debt.

A new avenue for Freebie Democrats opened up in 2024. It had a

Broadway feel to it, if you could imagine Broadway in Red

Square. In 2021, former Foreclosure Prevention Housing Counselor Zohran Mamdani said the quiet part out loud in a speech to a group of young comrades, quoting Marx’ famous “Seize the means of production.” In 2024 he set out to seize New York City.

He succeeded, elected mayor by NYC voters who’d discovered something disturbing about their city. After 35 years as a sanctuary city supporting every citizen and non-citizen who wanted support, enforcing heavy-handed regulation and taxation, and counting on the base of a wealthy financial sector it wanted to push out, New Yorkers finally noticed that their city was — what? how did this happen? — too expensive to live in.

Zohran believed “the people” deserved more free stuff, or as free as communists calling themselves socialists could provide: free buses, child care, CUNY tuition, “baby baskets,” Deliverista Hubs, city-run grocery stores, an increased Trans Equity Fund, Office of LGBTQIA+ . . . .

That list isn’t the half of it. Not even close.

Of course, the free-everything campaigns of socialists / communists never work in the real world, but they’re a dreamy success in the left’s utopian fantasy. They feed on the hardships they create in sanctuary asylums where mostly young, ideologically-educated, lazy oafs can vote for a revolutionary movement from 1917. Their numbers are growing, so look for New York fantasies to keep spreading like bad music. Residents of Chicago, Minneapolis, Seattle and other sanctuaries already struggle to survive in these progressive dystopias.

Don’t love it? Too bad. It’s hard to fight “Democratic Socialism,” because they are the revolutionaries, aggressively revolting. Ask Europe, ask England.

Or ask the Chicagoans who elected Brandon Johnson mayor. I’m reaching for optimism here, but if those Chicagoans pay property taxes, you might be able to engage them in conversation. They might come to understand that they can go broke supporting a structurally bankrupt city.

Texas, Florida and other sanctuaries of capitalism are available. If you find yourself still trying to live in Dystopia, please consider that proximity of loved ones is valuable, but keep all the costs in mind.

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Bittinger lives in Wisconsin as a long-time White Sox refugee and glad grandfather/babysitter. Recalling the Chicago and Glen Ellyn of the previous century with affection, he admires fellow JKN readers brave enough to still try surviving in Chicago, also music fans of high character who risk the thug takeovers to go hear the world’s greatest orchestra play Mahler.