What modern politics increasingly reveals is not a simple map of left versus right, or secular versus religious, but a far stranger cartography of overlapping aversions. Hatred, or at least intense political hostility, is rarely tidy. It travels along multiple axes at once. Groups that denounce one another in one register may discover deep affinities in another. Enemies can become temporary cousins, bound less by shared ideals than by shared resentments.
Take the familiar antagonism between conservative Christians and Muslims in many Western debates. Each may cast the other as a civilisational threat. Yet on questions of gender, sexuality and family authority, their differences can narrow considerably. Comparative survey research has long shown that strongly religious communities, across traditions, are often more likely to endorse traditional gender roles and social hierarchy. In many Muslim-majority societies, attitudes to women’s autonomy, divorce and mixed workplaces remain deeply contested; in Christian communities too, greater religiosity often correlates with more traditional views on women’s role in the home and labour force. The point is not that these traditions are identical, still less that all believers think alike. It is that hostility across religious boundaries can coexist with a tacit agreement about who should obey whom.
This creates a peculiar dilemma for progressives. Liberal societies often pride themselves on pluralism, multicultural accommodation and freedom of worship. Yet tolerance becomes morally complicated when minority communities preserve norms that sit uneasily with feminism, gay rights or liberal individualism. The result is an anxious balancing act: defend diversity without romanticising patriarchy; reject bigotry without excusing illiberalism. Too often, public debate swings between two bad habits — treating minority cultures as beyond criticism, or treating them as uniquely backward while ignoring similar impulses in majority traditions.
The same criss-crossing appears in geopolitics. South Korean conservatives, suspicious of progressive domestic agendas, can still admire Taiwan’s ruling camp less for its liberal social record than for its resistance to Beijing. Anti-PRC sentiment rearranges old ideological lines. Nationalism becomes a solvent, dissolving previous objections. If a political actor is sufficiently useful against a greater enemy, then feminism, gay marriage or social liberalism may suddenly become forgivable, or at least conveniently invisible.
Something similar explains why some conservatives who define themselves against communism nevertheless embrace strongman methods that resemble the very tendencies they claim to oppose: centralisation of power, contempt for dissent, moral policing, and a preference for order over liberty. Their objection, in such cases, is not always to authoritarianism itself. It is to who wields it, and in whose name. Political science has a term for part of this dynamic: affective polarisation, in which attachment is organised less around coherent programmes than around dislike of an out-group. One is united not by a vision of the good, but by a certainty about the enemy.
That helps explain why these hatreds are so promiscuous. They are not rooted solely in doctrine. They are structured by threat, status anxiety and hierarchy. Misogyny, nationalism, religious certainty and authoritarian longing can interlock even when their carriers despise one another. In this sense, hate is intersectional too. It forms unstable coalitions across faiths, ideologies and nations, joining people who would never share a table but are willing, for a moment, to share a target.
The lesson is sobering. Political conflict is not merely a clash of principles. It is often a marketplace of grudges, where consistency is optional and enmity is the strongest currency of all.
Sources: Pew Research Center reports on religion and gender attitudes (2012, 2013, 2017, 2025); Brookings analysis on South Korean views of Taiwan (2023); CSIS analysis on international support for Taiwan (2024); Cambridge and Sage research on affective polarisation, out-group hostility and authoritarianism (2024–2026).