In Defence Of The Right To Hate

In recent decades hate has become thoroughly politicised to the point that the mere mention of the word serves as a prelude to discrediting, delegitimating and criminalizing its target. In public life the charge of practising the politics of hate is frequently deployed by leftist promoters of identity ideology against their opponents. The claim promoted by The Guardian that states that ‘a Tory party that stokes hatred is the real threat to our democracy’ is illustrative of the attempt to associate conservatives and other critics of identity ideology with the politics of hate[i].

The project of transforming hate into a malevolent ideological standpoint is underpinned by the assumption that all displays of the emotion hate are potentially malevolent. In effect the very human emotion of hate is now frequently demonised as a pathology.

In recent decades hate has been transformed into a stand-alone cultural stigma. According to dominant cultural conventions it is sufficient to use the word hate without any reference to the object of this emotion. It is now common to use the word, Haters. It is not necessary to indicate who the Haters hate. The term Hater serves as a negative identity. As one study acknowledged, ‘persons branded as “haters” are effectively excommunicated from the polity’[ii]. The use of the term hater morally contaminates its target.

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According to the cultural script that prevails in the West, hate serves as a secular form of moral evil. One expression that captures this evil is that of ‘The Hate’. By placing a definitive article in front of hate a permanent threat to society is invented. This reified public threat demands vigilance and willingness to mobilise to defeat its manifestations. For example, this is the approach of the campaigning group Stop The Hate.[iii] The content of The Hate is deliberately left vague so that it can serve as the target of a variety of different campaigns.

The politically motivated designation of hate to describe the behaviour of an individual or a group is not simply an act of description but also a boundary-setting manoeuvre. It basically works as a warning that signals the claim that The Hater cannot be included within the confines of a democratically governed public space. The Hater exists on the wrong sides of the boundary between legitimate and illegitimate politics. This sentiment is frequently communicated by the slogan ‘Hope Not Hate’, which establishes a moral boundary between legitimate and illegitimate politics. From this perspective hate serves as a diagnostic label for illegitimate public life. Imposing a moral quarantine on those branded as haters is regarded is necessary for the maintenance of a just democratic society.

The frequent use of the slogan ‘Hope not Hate’ smuggles a moralising ethos into public discourse. Through the drawing of a moral contrast between the secular evil of hate, hope emerges as a progressive political virtue. The transformation of hate into a morally toxic antithesis of hope assists the political polarisation that afflicts society. Since haters are regarded as beyond redemption dialogue with them is pointless. The only appropriate response to their words is to criminalise it. Hence the proliferation of rules and laws criminalising Hate Speech.

The narrative of hate is fundamentally dishonest because it refuses to acknowledge the fact that it is not against hate as such but against the hate that it ascribes to its political opponents. For example, promoters of the narrative of The Hate, hate those who they accuse of practicing the politics of hate. That is why their anti-populist rhetoric often communicates a sense of bitter hatred towards their enemies. The Danish academic Mikkel Thorup argues that ‘when democracies hate, they hate the hater’[iv]. What that means is that promoters of the hate narrative have permission to hate if their animosity is directed at what Thorup characterizes as the ‘hating other’. In other words, they assume that because of their exceptional superior moral status, they alone have the right to hate.

The Yale legal scholar, Robert Post recognizes that content of the narrative of hate ‘always necessarily reflects the views of elites who control the content of law’. It is possible to go a step further and assert that the politicization of hate is an accomplishment of the ruling elites, who have weaponized the term hate to de-legitimate political opponents.

Aside from its manipulative and coercive use the narrative of hate also serves the project of politicizing the internal lives of people. The emotion of hate is an entirely legitimate response to a variety of circumstances. The attempt to turn displays of this emotion into a generic form of evil is likely to have the effect of rendering people’s reaction to hateful people and experiences passive. In some instances, the reluctance to hate can actually represents an acquiescence to evil.

In defence of hate

Hating is as human as loving. That is why hate has been regarded as a normal reaction to evil throughout the ages. Hate is regarded as a legitimate response to evil in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Those familiar with the Old Testament will know that they were taught to ‘love the Lord, hate evil’.[v] ‘The fear of the LORD is to hate evil, pride, and arrogancy, and the evil way, and the forward mouth, do I hate’, states Proverbs 8’013. In some instances, the Judeo-Christian tradition hatred of evil was perceived as an obligatory act of the faithful. The Cappadocian church father Basil of Caesarea declared that ‘If your temper is not roused against the Evil One, you will not be able to hate him as much as he deserves. For I hold that it is necessary to have equal zeal for the love of virtue and for the hatred of sin’. For Basil, as for numerous Christian theologians hatred of evil and sin represented a religious obligation

How hate should be viewed depends on the impulses that drive this emotion and on the context of its use. No doubt often public expressions of hate represent an entirely negative phenomenon. However, not all forms of hate are bad and they can sometime represent an entirely legitimate response to attempts to degrade, dehumanize or discredit an individual.

Within the philosophical tradition of the Ancient Greeks – Plato, Aristotle – certain forms of hatred were frowned upon as a form, of irrational prejudice, whilst other expressions of this emotion were interpreted as responses that were underwritten by reason. Unlike the wholesale demonization of hatred in contemporary society, the ancient Greeks possessed a more nuanced understanding of this emotion and were able to distinguish between its positive and negative manifestations.

In an interesting account, ‘Hate and the State in Ancient Greece’, David Konstan noted that unlike anger, ‘hatred was not singled out by Greek and Roman writers as a particularly abhorrent emotion, or one that was, like envy, beneath the dignity of a virtuous person’[vi]. Aristotle regarded hatred as a moral emotion that represented a response to the perception of vice. Aristotle regarded hatred as a rational reaction ‘to the perceived features of its object’[vii].

In her book Hatred: Understanding Our Most Dangerous Emotion, the Danish philosopher Berit Brogaard Offers a nuanced defence of this emotion. The kind of hatred Brogaard defends are critical rather than dehumanising. She claims that hatred as a reactive moral outlook can be appropriate. For example, hatred directed at acts of malevolence is entirely justifiable. From this standpoint hatred can serve the purpose of defending the moral standards prevailing in society. What that means is that if people become dispossessed of the right to hate they will become helpless when confronted by those attacking their moral norms and values

It was during the second half of the 20^th century that hate became politicised. Initially the politicisation of hatred was motivated by the goal of criminalising racist behaviour. Since the 1990s its use expanded to mean a public danger to a variety of minority and identity groups. In recent times the narrative of hate plays an important role in the determining what people can or cannot say. It assists the policing of behaviour and of speech and in practice defends the ruling elites from criticism.

Challenging the weaponisation of hate is essential for the revival of a robust spirit of democratic debate. It is time that society regained the conviction that the freedom to hate is no less important than the freedom to love.

[i] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/mar/04/a-tory-party-that-stokes-hatred-is-the-real-threat-to-our-democracy

[ii] Post, Robert, ‘Concluding Thoughts: The Legality and Politics of Hatred’, in Thomas Brudholm, and Birgitte Schepelern Johansen (eds), Epilogue, in Thomas Brudholm, and Birgitte Schepelern Johansen (eds), Hate, Politics, Law: Critical Perspectives on Combating Hate, Studies in Penal Theory and Philosophy (New York, 2018; online edn, Oxford Academic, 21 June 2018), https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190465544.003.0013, accessed 12 Mar. 2026.

[iii]

https://www.stopthehate.uk

[iv] Thorup, Mikkel, ‘Democratic Hatreds: The Making of “the Hating Enemy” in Liberal Democracy’, in Thomas Brudholm, and Birgitte Schepelern Johansen (eds), Democratic Hatreds?, in Thomas Brudholm, and Birgitte Schepelern Johansen (eds), Hate, Politics, Law: Critical Perspectives on Combating Hate, Studies in Penal Theory and Philosophy (New York, 2018; online edn, Oxford Academic, 21 June 2018),

https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190465544.003.0011, accessed 12 Mar. 2026.

[v] See
Psalms: 97:010 (King James Version).

[vi] Konstan, David, ‘Hate and the State in Ancient Greece’, in Thomas Brudholm, and Birgitte Schepelern Johansen (eds), Historicizing Hatred, in Thomas Brudholm, and Birgitte Schepelern Johansen (eds), Hate, Politics, Law: Critical Perspectives on Combating Hate, Studies in Penal Theory and Philosophy (New York, 2018; online edn, Oxford Academic, 21 June 2018)

[vii] Brudholm, Thomas, ‘Hatred Beyond Bigotry’, in Thomas Brudholm, and Birgitte Schepelern Johansen (eds), Conceptualizing Hatred, in Thomas Brudholm, and Birgitte Schepelern Johansen (eds), Hate, Politics, Law: Critical Perspectives on Combating Hate, Studies in Penal Theory and Philosophy (New York, 2018; online edn, Oxford Academic, 21 June 2018),

https://doi-org.chain.kent.ac.uk/10.1093/oso/9780190465544.003.0004,