Grassroots/Hank Kalet

A Pattern of Cruelty

The cruelty is the point. It is the unifying theme of so much of what we have been witnessing in recent years, so much of what has animated our politics, especially from the Republican side.

We treat it otherwise, trapped inside a repeating news cycle that lurches from disaster to disaster, portraying each as independent of the other. COVID bleeding into police abuses into a presidential election, a coup attempt, homelessness, an ongoing and all-out assault on migrants from the South fleeing economic, political, and environmental collapse, the end of Roe, mass shootings, more police abuse, and the not-so-random, everyday violence we allow to take place on the streets of our cities.

These are not unrelated, but part of a pastiche of cruelty created by an economic system that devalues human potential, and that we have allowed to infect our political system. We are living in a moment of cruelty, driven by Rightwing Republicans and White Supremacists toward a national armageddon. The Dobbs decision, which overturned nearly 50 years of Supreme Court doctrine and stripped women in most states of control over their bodies, is not an isolated moment in the court’s history.

It is part of a continuum of cruelty that predates the Dobbs ruling, predates the Jan. 6 insurrection, even pre-dates Donald Trump. It is part of a campaign that goes back to the right-wing conspiracies festering in dark spaces in the late 1950s and that slowly grew into a movement strong enough to elect Ronald Reagan and to neuter what was left of the New Deal Democrats, transforming them from economic populists into Bill Clinton corporatists.

The ruling in June was only one of a half dozen that are connected in their abject cruelty, and designed to narrow the citizenship of out groups. The ending of Roe is the most spectacular, of course, and the most egregious. A woman’s right to choose is integral to her being a full and equal citizen, a participant in both the economic and political spheres. The ruling essentially tells women that they are vessels for birth, and that her rights are secondary to the unborn fetus.

These rights, as Associate Justice Clarence Thomas reminds us, are built on the same foundations that has prevented government from interfering in other decisions that should be the purview of the individual — whether to take birth control and who the individual can marry. While Associate Justice Samuel Alito says the Dobbs ruling should not be read as a threat to these rights, Thomas makes it clear what is on deck.

The court during the same week also made it more difficult for states and localities to regulate guns and the Environmental Protection Agency to check emissions, while religion has been granted further berth in the public sphere and particularly in public schools.

But it is not just the courts. States — mostly across the South, but also throughout the Midwest — are passing laws that limit who can vote and they are drawing heavily political congressional and state legislative districts designed to limit the value of votes cast.

All of this is happening against the backdrop of the Jan. 6 Special Committee hearings and the special kind of cruelty they underscore. Jan. 6, 2021, shocked many, and is seen as an aberration, a perfect storm in which angry white men were egged on by a singularly despicable human being to overturn a legal election. Sadly, as I think the hearings show, Jan. 6 was less an aberration than culmination nearly 70 years in the making as the extreme elements of the right gained ground at the local level — on school boards and party committees and some municipal governments — and the hate and violence was normalized.

Goldwater. Nixon. Reagan. Each used the language of racial resentment, each engaged in rhetoric that portrayed fellow countrymen as enemies. Goldwater. Nixon. Reagan. Gingrich. The Bushes. These are the antecedents to today’s Trumpist revolt. Each talked of freedom, but the freedom they extolled was narrow, limited, not for all.

Still, we pretend that all is OK, that the cruelty and divisiveness is somehow not representative of what we are as a nation, that our ailments are not systemic in nature, that we can still come together and celebrate who we are as neighbors and friends.

That train has left the station, as they say. Cruelty and violence have become the norm. I don’t mean street crime, which has ticked up, but remains at relative historic lows. I mean the kind of cruelty and anger that leads a man to shoot up a supermarket, a school, a July 4 parade. Cruelty that denies women their agency, that paints poor migrants as existential threats, and won’t even allow samaritans to provide basic aid.

The cruelty is the point, the animating principle, the finger on the trigger and driving force of the Trumpian zeitgeist.

Hank Kalet is a poet, essayist, and journalist. He teaches at Rutgers University. Email, hankkalet@gmail.com; Twitter, @newspoet41; Instagram, @kaletwrites; Substack: hankkalet.Substack.com

From The Progressive Populist, August 1, 2022

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