by Adam Serwer
The Republican Party, by contrast, has grown more racially and religiously homogeneous and its politics more dependent on manufacturing threats to the status of white Christians. This is why Trump frequently and falsely implies that Americans were afraid to say “Merry Christmas” before he was elected, and why Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham warn Fox News viewers that nonwhite immigrants are stealing America. For both the Republican Party and conservative media, wielding power and influence depends on making white Americans feel threatened by the growing political influence of those who are different from them.
In stoking such fears, anger is a powerful weapon. In his book, Anger and Racial Politics, the University of Maryland professor Antoine J. Banks argues that “anger is the dominant emotional underpinning of contemporary racism.” Anger and racism are so linked, in fact, that politicians need not use overtly racist language to provoke racial resentment. Anger alone, Banks writes, can activate prejudiced views, even when a given issue would seem to have little to do with race: “Anger operates as a switch that amplifies (or turns on) racist thinking—exacerbating America’s racial problem. It pushes prejudiced whites to oppose policies and candidates perceived as alleviating racial inequality.” This is true for politicians on both sides of the political divide—but the right has far more to gain from sowing discord than from mending fences.
Trumpists lamenting civility’s decline do not fear fractiousness; on the contrary, they happily practice it to their own ends. What they really fear are the cultural, political, and economic shifts that occur when historically marginalized groups begin to exert power in a system that was once defined by their exclusion. Social mores that had been acceptable become offensive; attitudes that had been widely held are condemned.
Societies are constantly renegotiating the boundaries of respect and decency. This process can be disorienting; to the once-dominant group, it can even feel like oppression. (It is not.) Many of the same people who extol the sanctity of civility when their prerogatives are questioned are prone to convulsions over the possibility of respecting those they consider beneath them, a form of civility they deride as “political correctness.”
In a different political system, the tide would pull the Republican Party toward the center. But the GOP’s structural advantage in the electoral college and the Senate and its success in gerrymandering congressional and state legislative districts all over the country allow it to wield power while continuing to appeal solely to a diminishing conservative minority encouraged to regard its fellow Americans as an existential threat.
The Trump administration’s attempt to use the census to enhance the power of white voters was foiled by a single vote on the Supreme Court on the basis of a technicality; it will not be the last time this incarnation of the Republican Party seeks to rig democracy to its advantage on racial terms. Even before Trump, the party was focused not only on maximizing the influence of white voters but on disenfranchising minority voters, barely bothering to update its rationale since Taft praised Jim Crow–era voting restrictions for banishing the “ignorant” from the polity.
The end of polarization in America matters less than the terms on which it ends. It is possible that, in the aftermath of a Trump defeat in 2020, Republicans will move to the political center. But it is also possible that Trump will win a second term, and the devastation of the defeat will lead the Democrats to court conservative white people, whose geographic distribution grants them a disproportionate influence over American politics. Like the Republicans during Reconstruction, the Democrats may bargain away the rights of their other constituencies in the process.
The true threat to America is not an excess of vitriol but that elites will come together in a consensus that cripples democracy and acquiesces to the dictatorship of a shrinking number of Americans who treat this nation as their exclusive birthright because of their race and religion. This is the false peace of dominance, not the true peace of justice. Until Americans’ current dispute over the nature of our republic is settled in favor of the latter, the dispute must continue.
In the aftermath of a terrible war, Americans once purchased an illusion of reconciliation, peace, and civility through a restoration of white rule. They should never again make such a bargain.
5
THE CRUELTY OF
THE MOB
This is one of those pieces that basically write themselves. The phenomenon it describes had been apparent from the start of the Trump campaign, but I had lacked the words to describe it, until the night in 2018 when I saw the president of the United States use a woman who had come forward with an allegation of sexual assault as a laugh line.
It did take me a minute to wrap my head around what I had seen. I took a walk down the street in San Antonio, trying to put it together. I thought back to the Trump rallies I had covered in 2016 and how much fun the people there were having. They enjoyed the insults, the mean jokes, the apocryphal stories about killing Muslims with bullets dipped in pigs’ blood or humiliating Mexico by forcing them to pay for a wall on the southern border. Even if they didn’t believe the wall or the Muslim ban would happen—and many of the people I spoke to didn’t—they enjoyed Trump’s gleeful expression of their hatreds.
This is probably the most-read piece I’ve ever written, and it shares its title with this book. I never expected the response it got, but I think the reason it resonated was that it articulated something many of us implicitly felt but struggled to put into words: that the president enjoyed hurting people in ways large and small, and that many of his supporters enjoyed it when he hurt people. The more anguish you felt, the more fun it was for them. This is not simply an ethos but a policy approach.
On a smaller level, communities are forged through disdain every day. When people in an office share juicy gossip about a colleague who annoys them; when jazz enthusiasts roll their eyes at the lack of sophistication in today’s popular music; when Red Sox fans bond over how much they hate the Yankees. It’s not just the satisfaction of finding someone who hates the same people or things that you do—it’s the sense of acceptance that comes from knowing you are not alone, the high of feeling like you belong. Many of us have experienced a friendship that began with the discovery of something or someone neither of you could stand. What distinguishes Trumpism from the personal indulgences of our own individual pettiness or cruelty is the way that its adherents collectively savor attacks on the vulnerable and, through the alchemy of politics, turn them into public policy.
Trump weaponized this feeling, taking advantage of a politics increasingly polarized not just along party lines but along lines of religion, race, and culture. The homogeneity of the Republican Party meant there was little price to pay for dehumanizing groups perceived to be outside its coalition—black people, Muslims, Latinos, trans people—groups reliant on diverse coalitions to wield political power. This insight applies just as much to the smaller communities I mentioned above—a racist joke in a workplace with only white people plays differently than one in which someone targeted by the joke is present. I speak from personal experience, as one of the few black people who end up in a room where these jokes get told.
These moments, however, are often private. They take place in whispers, in group texts, through phone conversations, over email and on Facebook. One of the reasons white supremacist groups latched on to Trump was their belief that, by taking these moments public, he was helping to resurrect a culture in which casual bigotry did not result in social sanction. By saying, in the words of many of the Trump supporters I spoke to, what “we were all thinking,” he was making it okay for them to say such things too. This not only made them feel free; it made them feel protected by the others around them seeking the exhilaration of saying what they wanted to say without being judged. At a Trump rally, there are no scolds to spoil the fun—and no one who could remind you of the humanity of those being attacked.
The flip
side is that culture can change rapidly when the community is expanded. When I was a teenager, it was extraordinarily common to hear words like “gay” and “fag” as pejoratives. But as more Americans came out of the closet—and more Americans realized people they loved were part of the LGBT community—public opinion changed rapidly. In 2004, overt anti-gay politics were seen as effective and popular; today, Republicans with statewide or national aspirations try to couch such politics in euphemism. For most people, enjoying cruelty requires a healthy distance from the target.
That said, sometimes when the community expands, that merely means redrawing certain lines so that new members can enjoy the privilege of looking down on and exploiting others. The cruelty isn’t necessarily the point then, but it is a sign that you’ve finally made it. That feels pretty good too.
THE CRUELTY IS THE POINT
OCTOBER 3, 2018
The Museum of African American History and Culture is in part a catalog of cruelty. Amid all the stories of perseverance, tragedy, and unlikely triumph are the artifacts of inhumanity and barbarism: the child-size slave shackles, the bright-red robes of the wizards of the Ku Klux Klan, the recordings of civil-rights protesters being brutalized by police.
The artifacts that persist in my memory, the way a bright flash does when you close your eyes, are the photographs of lynchings. But it’s not the burned, mutilated bodies that stick with me. It’s the faces of the white men in the crowd. There’s the photo of the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Indiana in 1930, in which a white man can be seen grinning at the camera as he tenderly holds the hand of his wife or girlfriend. There’s the undated photo from Duluth, Minnesota, in which grinning white men stand next to the mutilated, half-naked bodies of two men lashed to a post in the street—one of the white men is straining to get into the picture, his smile cutting from ear to ear. There’s the photo of a crowd of white men huddled behind the smoldering corpse of a man burned to death; one of them is wearing a smart suit, a fedora hat, and a bright smile.
Their names have mostly been lost to time. But these grinning men were someone’s brother, son, husband, father. They were human beings, people who took immense pleasure in the utter cruelty of torturing others to death—and were so proud of doing so that they posed for photographs with their handiwork, jostling to ensure they caught the eye of the lens, so that the world would know they’d been there. Their cruelty made them feel good, it made them feel proud, it made them feel happy. And it made them feel closer to one another.
The Trump era is such a whirlwind of cruelty that it can be hard to keep track. This week alone, the news broke that the Trump administration was seeking to ethnically cleanse more than 193,000 American children of immigrants whose temporary protected status had been revoked by the administration, that the Department of Homeland Security had lied about creating a database of children that would make it possible to unite them with the families the Trump administration had arbitrarily destroyed, that the White House was considering a blanket ban on visas for Chinese students, and that it would deny visas to the same-sex partners of foreign officials. At a rally in Mississippi, a crowd of Trump supporters cheered as the president mocked Christine Blasey Ford, the psychology professor who has said that Brett Kavanaugh, whom Trump has nominated to a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court, attempted to rape her when she was a teenager. “Lock her up!” they shouted.
Ford testified to the Senate, utilizing her professional expertise to describe the encounter, that one of the parts of the incident she remembered most was Kavanaugh and his friend Mark Judge laughing at her as Kavanaugh fumbled at her clothing. “Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter,” Ford said, referring to the part of the brain that processes emotion and memory, “the uproarious laughter between the two, and their having fun at my expense.” And then at Tuesday’s rally, the president made his supporters laugh at her.
Even those who believe that Ford fabricated her account or was mistaken in its details can see that the president’s mocking of her testimony renders all sexual-assault survivors collateral damage. Anyone afraid of coming forward, afraid that she would not be believed, can now look to the president to see her fears realized. Once malice is embraced as a virtue, it is impossible to contain.
The cruelty of the Trump administration’s policies and the ritual rhetorical flaying of his targets before his supporters are intimately connected. As Lili Loofbourow wrote of the Kavanaugh incident in Slate, adolescent male cruelty toward women is a bonding mechanism, a vehicle for intimacy through contempt. The white men in the lynching photos are smiling not merely because of what they have done but because they have done it together.
We can hear the spectacle of cruel laughter throughout the Trump era. There were the border-patrol agents cracking up at the crying immigrant children separated from their families, and the Trump adviser who delighted white supremacists when he mocked a child with Down syndrome who was separated from her mother. There were the police who laughed uproariously when the president encouraged them to abuse suspects, and the Fox News hosts mocking a survivor of the Pulse nightclub massacre (and in the process inundating him with threats), the survivors of sexual assault protesting to Senator Jeff Flake, the women who said the president had sexually assaulted them, and the teen survivors of the Parkland school shooting. There was the president mocking Puerto Rican accents shortly after thousands were killed and tens of thousands displaced by Hurricane Maria, the black athletes protesting unjustified killings by the police, the women of the #MeToo movement who have come forward with stories of sexual abuse, and the disabled reporter whose crime was reporting on Trump truthfully. It is not just that the perpetrators of this cruelty enjoy it; it is that they enjoy it with one another. Their shared laughter at the suffering of others is an adhesive that binds them to one another, and to Trump.
Taking joy in that suffering is more human than most would like to admit. Somewhere on the wide spectrum between adolescent teasing and the smiling white men in the lynching photographs are the Trump supporters whose community is built by rejoicing in the anguish of those they see as unlike them, who have found in their shared cruelty an answer to the loneliness and atomization of modern life.
The laughter undergirds the daily spectacle of insincerity, as the president and his aides pledge fealty to bedrock democratic principles they have no intention of respecting. The president who demanded the execution of five black and Latino teenagers for a crime they didn’t commit decries “false accusations” when his Supreme Court nominee stands accused; his supporters who fancy themselves champions of free speech meet references to Hillary Clinton or a woman whose only crime was coming forward to offer her own story of abuse with screams of “Lock her up!” The political movement that elected a president who wanted to ban immigration by adherents of an entire religion, who encourages police to brutalize suspects, and who has destroyed thousands of immigrant families for violations of the law less serious than those of which he and his coterie stand accused now laments the state of due process.
This isn’t incoherent. It reflects a clear principle: Only the president and his allies, his supporters, and their anointed are entitled to the rights and protections of the law and, if necessary, immunity from it. The rest of us are entitled only to cruelty, by their whim. This is how the powerful have ever kept the powerless divided and in their place and enriched themselves in the process.
A blockbuster New York Times investigation on Tuesday reported that President Trump’s wealth was largely inherited through fraudulent schemes, that he became a millionaire while still a child, and that his fortune persists in spite of his fumbling entrepreneurship, not because of it. The stories are not unconnected. The president and his advisers have sought to enrich themselves at taxpayer expense; they have attempted to corrupt federal law-enforcement agencies to protect themselves and their cohorts, and they have exploited the nation’s darkest impulses in
the pursuit of profit. But their ability to get away with this fraud is tied to cruelty.
Trump’s only true skill is the con; his only fundamental belief is that the United States is the birthright of straight, white, Christian men, and his only real, authentic pleasure is in cruelty. It is that cruelty, and the delight it brings them, that binds his most ardent supporters to him, in shared scorn for those they hate and fear: immigrants, black voters, feminists, and treasonous white men who empathize with any of those who would steal their birthright. The president’s ability to execute that cruelty through word and deed makes them euphoric. It makes them feel good, it makes them feel proud, it makes them feel happy, it makes them feel united. And as long as he makes them feel that way, they will let him get away with anything, no matter what it costs them.
6
THE CRUELTY OF
THE NATIVISTS
Provoking street fights with communists was a crucial part of the Nazi strategy in the 1920s and 1930s. The chaos helped stoke fears of a communist takeover and frightened middle-class Germans into accepting the Nazi Party’s arguments that it was their only protection against a Bolshevik overthrow.
“Bourgeois Germans across the country had feared the contagion of revolution,” the historian Paul Hanebrink wrote in A Specter Haunting Europe. “Nazi Party activists preyed on memories of postwar revolutionary upheaval, warning that Germans must defend themselves against a new wave of revolutionary unrest or else become slaves to alien masters.”
Combining their propaganda that communism was a Jewish plot with their fomenting of chaos in the streets, “[the] Nazi Party worked tirelessly to present street fights there as a sign that the republic was rotten to the core everywhere,” and “presented the Nazi Party’s own acts of violence as a justified response to leftist provocations that could redeem Germany from the humiliation of” defeat in World War I. The social and economic instability of the Weimar Republic, fears of the Soviet Union, and a long tradition of anti-Semitism helped the Nazis to win over conservative Germans who might have been skeptical otherwise.