Trump and his supporters find community by rejoicing in the suffering of those they hate and fear.

[riversedge]

This is a really chilling article--perhaps because it rings so true.

Link to tweet

President Trump and his supporters find community by rejoicing in the suffering of those they hate and fear.

Link to tweet

The Cruelty Is the Point

President Trump and his supporters find community by rejoicing in the suffering of those they hate and fear.


https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/the-cruelty-is-the-point/572104/
Oct 3, 2018
Adam Serwer
Staff writer at The Atlantic
Reuters / Jonathan Ernst

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.

Further reading: Conservative women are standing by Kavanaugh.

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.

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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 decrying “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!”.....................................................



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.
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[riverwalker]

1. I don't know this country anymore

I just don’t understand the hate and ignorance. I’m losing hope.

[Anon-C]

2. These people are hate.

[Crutchez_CuiBono]

3. What's w the goony green folks and the strange vocal nature of the president?

They finally got to a state where the people needed a job so bad they filled a stadium. If you don't think they are pre-planning these...then HOW did the people on the floor paint themselves green like that fricken racist frog? OMG.
This guy thinks he's such an entertainer. You can tell when they have really packed the place w paid crowds when he starts to google and gush like some parent talking to infants and thinking he's a comedian. Do NOT fall for the theatre. Get your yard signs now and start pushing back. Most every state allows yard signs a month before the election. Get some stones...and get your yard "signed up" to vote too.
Today is another pivotal point....let's all stop letting them pass w just editorials on DU. ACT about something today BEYOND making comments on line. This message is meant for ALL of us as an addition to the OP above. Get up...and get outside, and get going on something tangible. Have a good weekend everyone.

[C_U_L8R]

4. These wannabe authoritarians profit

by appealing to our very worst instincts. An easy tactic as old as politics. But also not a very good long term strategy. Eventually the bullshit machine runs out of fuel and people realize they've been cheated. On the other hand, truth and goodness do have a knack for rising above tyranny and hate and cruelty. But it takes a lot of work and vigilance. Let's GOTV and show these fuckers.

[marylandblue]

5. This is asymmetric warfare, and our main weapon is love

They have given in to the hate within all of us. We are tempted to the same but we can't. We can never match them cruelty for cruelty, hate for hate. But we can match love for hate. It isn't easy, loving your enemy. But it is how Martin Luther King won in his day. And how we can win in ours.

Love your enemy is not a moral imperative, it is a weapon.

There is a book on this called "The Power Tactics of Jesus Christ."

[uponit7771]

7. amen and amen, most will be shamed with truth once the prevailer of lies has no more platform

[anarch]

8. what I really wish would happen to anyone who supports this evil regime

is that they would somehow have some revelation and be able to see themselves, their cult-leaders, and the whole situation objectively, rationally...that they would miraculously develop empathy for their fellow humans and see how wrong-headed the whole "conservative" mindset is, from the perspective of the general welfare of our society.

That is, I don't (at least when I myself am thinking clearly) wish them to come to harm--I wish for them to see things clearly and open their hearts to their brothers and sisters of whatever color, creed, gender, etc.

I mean, sometimes I just want them to shut the fuck up and go away, but at the end of the day we all have to share this planet, so we need to find a way to co-exist. That, or fight to the death...really not the ideal solution.

[uponit7771]

6. Mostly "fear" genned up by Red Don. What are these people going to do when their "protector" is not

... in power?

What are they going to do when their enabler is gone?

Off themselves like Hitlers true believers did?

Strange bunch of logic they have