Hurry it up
Human cruelty has been a constant. Many have experienced it, some have caused it, and others have ignored it. In today’s political climate, there are people actively cheering for it.
In 2018, Adam Serwer of The Atlantic wrote an article called “The Cruelty is the Point,” which argued that instead of gelling around policy, Trump supporters have bonded over their shared delight in the pain and suffering of others. And that this perverse kinship only emboldens Trump to crank up the rhetoric.
Serwer said:
“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.”
These people’s contempt knows no bounds. It’s evident in their rabid support for ethnic cleansing and orphaned children at the border. In their disdain for people of color, the disabled, the incarcerated, and the LGBTQ community. In their shaming of rape survivors (and adoration of the perpetrators). In their calls for vigilantism. And in their delight when sick and vulnerable Americans are denied life-saving federal aid. (I can only imagine what a revised version of this article would say today about their behavior during the pandemic.)
From my perspective, this cruelty cabal is made up of three segments:
The conservative mega-donors who underwrite it
The poor and working poor who have long been disenfranchised by nearly every administration, and vote for it out of habit or hopelessness
The middle class who feel they have worked hard for what they have and embrace cruelty as a means of self-preservation
Depending on how this election goes, I believe the last group — the good ‘ol middle class that politicians love to invoke on the campaign trail — might actually save us all.
The idea of the American middle class as it’s known today didn’t emerge until the New Deal in the 1930s, which pulled millions of Americans out of poverty. During the post-WWII period, the economy boomed, well-paying jobs were aplenty, and the G.I. Bill helped thousands get a college education. The middle class was killing it.
By the late 1970s, about 60% of Americans belonged to that moniker. And that’s about when things went to shit. Once Reagan got into office, policy priorities dramatically shifted away from the middle class and instead focused on the wealthy.
Things have been going further down the tubes ever since.
Population-wise, about the same percentage of Americans are in the middle class today as in years past, but economically there’s been a drastic decline. Their median income never recovered from the Great Recession, and even though non-white families saw a slight uptick in income, they still face a huge mobility gap. (It should also be screamed from the rooftops that during that same period, the wealth gap between the middle and upper class widened exponentially).
Despite those obstacles, many in the middle class have squeaked by, whether through second jobs, a dual income household, or moving to lower cost areas. They’ve bought homes with low interest rates. They’ve sent their kids to college (student loan debt be damned), and took a vacation or two. They’ve traded up into a new car every few years and seen their 401ks rise in the bull market. It hasn’t been a luxurious existence by any stretch, but more comfortable than perhaps their working class counterparts.
That is, until Covid came along.
Now, for probably the first time in their lives, the same families who shopped at Costco are now at the food bank. The ones who eeked out loan payments are facing eviction or repossession. Moms who dropped their kids off at school or daycare, are getting pushed out of the workforce … and losing a much-needed paycheck. Covid made an already tenuous situation even worse.
For now though, there might still be a feeling that this is temporary. The stimulus and unemployment payouts bridged their financial gaps, while the speed of vaccine research is giving hope for a quick fix. Which sadly means many will lean on this false sense of security when they vote for cruelty once more at the ballot box.
What they don’t know yet is that by doing so, they’ll soon have more cruelty than they know what to do with.
If Trump wins a second term, he’ll have carte blanche for his dystopian agenda. Seeing as the system he runs was designed for the rich, that group won’t feel a thing. In fact, they will get even richer. The poor and working poor will of course feel those decisions deeply, like they always have and then some, which is its own tragedy.
But the middle class? The class that has enjoyed a faux sense of security until now? They’re going to feel it hard.
They will feel it when, amidst all their shrieking over Black Lives Matter, the Supreme Court quietly guts the health insurance they’ve depended on. They will feel it when they mock minimum wage workers for being lazy, only to see their own jobs disappear. They will feel it when their homes burn down or slide away from the government’s callous disregard for the environment. And they will feel it when they plead for the same federal dollars they so gleefully denied to others.
But it’ll be too late.
Another stimulus isn’t coming and neither is a quick economic rebound. It will now be their turn to get kicked to the curb by the politicians they enabled for so long, who by then will have moved on to some other form of destruction. It will be a new and unwelcome feeling.
Meanwhile, the rest of us — the ones who see the obvious benefits of single payer healthcare, who support science and educated thought, and who want to live in an empathetic, inclusive world — can do nothing but watch it happen. It’s awful to think about because this race to the bottom will take us down as well. And these things often take a while to unfold, which means we’re in for some dark times.
It pains me to say it, but … we need to let it ride. Let these whiny, smug, selfish instigators finally suffer the consequences of their belief system. To be clear, I am not advocating for reverse cruelty as a punitive measure. But like the many Covid deniers who came to their senses from a hospital bed, sometimes the best medicine is the hardest to swallow.
It’s naive to think that everyone in this group will eventually become lucid. In fact, it might only make them scream louder. But we don’t need every single one of them to change. All we need is for a small percentage on the margins to get tired. For a few hundred thousand in this minority to finally realize that “Make America Great Again” doesn’t apply to them. And that it never did. That’s the day their votes will tip towards reason, and our country can start moving in the right direction.
So if cruelty really is the point, let’s just get on with it already. The rest of us are waiting.