A few years ago I wrote an essay titled "The Cruelty Is The Point" on Trump's approach to politics and policy. On Tuesday, my book sharing that title is being published. Today in the @nytimes, I explain why Trumpist politics didn't end with his defeat. nytimes.com/2021/06/26/opi…
Cruelty is a part of human nature; we're all capable of it. But in American history, its elevation to a virtue in politics is strongly associated with attempts to deny people their fundamental rights, from the Founding, to Reconstruction, to the Civil Rights Movement to now.
The greatest threat to American democracy has always been the drive by some of its leaders to deny human beings the basic rights outlined in the Declaration of Independence, because people want to be free.
Today, the parties are highly polarized along racial lines. And once again the largely white party fears true democracy as a perversion of the nation's true heritage, seeing the rival party not merely as competition but as an existential threat to the nation as it must be.
As in the past, the ability to exploit countermajoritarian levers in the system, and appeals to white identity by casting multiracial democracy as a threat, fuels a politics of cruelty, exclusion and dehumanization.
To justify extreme measures like disenfranchisement after all, you have to convince your base that the rival party's constituencies want to "replace" you, that they are "citizen-aliens" and not "Real Americans," like you are. That the apocalypse they represent is imminent.
This is why the cruelty remains the point, even with Trump defeated. It was never just him. It was the ideological course of the GOP, and a political system that made that course a viable one. To change this, you have to change the system.
I wrote the book to offer a record of the ideological, historical, and structural factors that led to this, one that shows why they continue to shape our politics even without Trump. You can read more about this in the book, which I hope you'll pick up. penguinrandomhouse.com/books/665171/t…
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