"In politics shared hatreds are almost always the basis of friendships"
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Friendship in politics, Tocqueville suggests, is less a warm bond than a cold alliance: a pact forged by what two people can’t stand. The line has the chill of diagnosis, not advice. Coming from a historian of democracy, it’s a warning about how coalitions actually congeal when power is on the line: not around a shared blueprint for the future, but around a mutual enemy who gives the group its shape.
The phrasing matters. “Almost always” leaves room for nobler exceptions while still painting the dominant pattern as grimly predictable. “Basis” implies foundation, not occasional accelerant; hatred isn’t a side effect, it’s structural. And “friendships” is deliberately intimate, even domestic, dragging something we want to imagine as principled into the realm of interpersonal neediness. Political actors, Tocqueville hints, borrow emotional shortcuts from private life: it’s easier to feel together against someone than to think together toward something.
Context sharpens the bite. Tocqueville watched early American democracy and revolutionary France with the same anxious fascination: mass politics expands participation but also intensifies faction. In that environment, hatred is efficient. It simplifies messy policy into moral clarity, it creates instant trust (“you hate them too”), and it disciplines the group by making dissent feel like betrayal. The subtext isn’t that disagreement is bad; it’s that negative solidarity scales faster than positive vision.
Read now, the line feels less like 19th-century cynicism than a field guide to modern polarization: the quickest route to belonging is still a shared target.
The phrasing matters. “Almost always” leaves room for nobler exceptions while still painting the dominant pattern as grimly predictable. “Basis” implies foundation, not occasional accelerant; hatred isn’t a side effect, it’s structural. And “friendships” is deliberately intimate, even domestic, dragging something we want to imagine as principled into the realm of interpersonal neediness. Political actors, Tocqueville hints, borrow emotional shortcuts from private life: it’s easier to feel together against someone than to think together toward something.
Context sharpens the bite. Tocqueville watched early American democracy and revolutionary France with the same anxious fascination: mass politics expands participation but also intensifies faction. In that environment, hatred is efficient. It simplifies messy policy into moral clarity, it creates instant trust (“you hate them too”), and it disciplines the group by making dissent feel like betrayal. The subtext isn’t that disagreement is bad; it’s that negative solidarity scales faster than positive vision.
Read now, the line feels less like 19th-century cynicism than a field guide to modern polarization: the quickest route to belonging is still a shared target.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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