Book: The Cruelty Is The Point

Saw Adam Serwer on Rachel's show and his brand new book, subtitled "The Past, Present and Future of Trump's America" sounded intriguing.

It's about how "trumpism" has been around for 150 years but it took this long for a narcissistic white supremacist to take it mainstream.  

The backlash against teaching an accurate history of race.

The visceral revulsion against the Obama presidency, despite the fact that he pulled Bush's legacy out of the ditch.

The gleeful rush to treat immigrants and refugees and trans people and LGBT people and people of color not just with disdain but with as much cruelty as can be mustered.  

Oh yes, time for some more righteous liberal angst.

And these same people are the ones on Quora asking "Aren't Europeans jealous of our freedom and lifestyle?".

No, they're not.

The author asks how a nation that elected the first black president could elect an avowed white supremacist as his successor?

Not discussed is the possibility -- I still think it's a probability -- that the 2016 election results were manipulated by outside forces.

Serwer is a columnist for The Atlantic, and this book consists of a bunch of essays, opinion pieces, he wrote for The Atlantic during the Trump administration.

Plus a couple new pieces composed for the book.

In his columns, going back to November 10, 2016, he was REMARKABLY prescient.  Of course DJT is not hard to read, he telegraphs his intentions in neon, but most commentators of the time were either blind to his true nature or, to put it charitably, trying to give him the benefit of doubt.

Not Serwer.  He had Trump's measure from the get-go.

Ironically, early voting laws in this country were designed so that only QUALIFIED voters could vote: free, white and 21. And landowners.

Blacks and poor whites were excluded -- and continued to be excluded until 1964 -- on the assumption that their low education levels would cause them to vote for the wrong kind of candidates.

Ironic, because the "preferred" voters elected exactly the "wrong kind of candidate" in 2016.

Serwer's sense of moral outrage at the Trump Administration is palpable, but occasionally his prose is less than pellucid.

Adam Serwer wrote:

Netanyahu, Israel's longest-serving prime minister, has made a tactical decision to ally with illiberal, even anti-Semitic parties and governments in Europe, betting that right-wing ethno-nationalist governments will be less likely to object to Israel's decades-long occupation of Palestinian territory.  That has extended to the United States, where much to the horror of liberal Zionists--those who have an ideological commitment to a Jewish state but also want an end to the occupation--Netanyahu has made a strategic bet that the Republican Party's Evangelical base will be a stronger source of uncritical support for Israel than American Jews are.

When COVID first hit, it struck major urban areas first, where lots of people congregated and shared germs.  These also, coincidentally, happen to be hotspots of Democratic voters.

Therefore Trump and his advisors decided not to intervene to try to stop or slow the spread of the pandemic.  His advisors (Jared and Sean and Tucker) told him that red states would not show the same pandemic outbreaks.

They were of course wrong.  600,000 Americans died because of this unconscionable policy.  And now, the lion's share of infections and deaths are occurring among rural Trump-supporting vaccine-resistant science-denying Americans.

Then there was the resistance to widespread testing, or letting passengers off cruise ships, because Trump thought a rise in case numbers would make him look bad.

On top of that, the resistance to "closing the economy" unnecessarily lengthened the pandemic.  If we had been allowed to close everything for two weeks, and then test everybody and isolate the positives, the pandemic would have been nipped in the bud.

I don't know if there's anything the legal system could do here -- War Crimes Act perhaps? -- but there really needs to be some accountability. It was not just stupidity, not just inaction, not just bad decision-making.  There was a real element of intentional genocide here.

Serwer remarks on the exceeding strangeness of the January 6 insurrectionists beating cops with Blue Lives Matter flags, and American flags. One rioter said, “They’re shooting at us. They’re supposed to be shooting at Black Lives Matter protestors, not at patriots.”

The insurrectionists truly believed they were fighting to preserve democracy. They thought the election had been stolen.

Therefore, fighting anyone, everyone who got in their way of overturning the election was fully justified, in their minds.

Prosecuting the insurrectionists to the fullest extent of the law is necessary, but it won’t be enough unless the originator of The Big Lie is brought to justice too.

Adam Serwer wrote:

After the Civil War, Representative Thaddeus Stevens, a Radical Republican, urged the federal government to seize the estates of wealthy former Confederates and use them in part to provide freedmen with some small compensation for centuries of forced labor.

What a different world this would be today if Andrew Johnson had treated the Confederacy as the losers of the war over slavery, instead of the winners. If reparations had been enacted back when it would've been those directly responsible paying them, and those directly affected receiving them.  Forty acres and a mule indeed.

The parallels between Johnson and DJT are illustrative.

Adam Sewer wrote:

From November [2020] to January [2021], Donald Trump executed one scheme after another in an attempt to overturn the election, blaming "massive voter fraud" for his loss. His attorneys made no secret of the source of this "fraud," demanding the courts toss out votes from mostly black jurisdictions. Trump argued that Biden's reliance on black voters for his victory rendered the victory illicit.

Trump, who was sued for refusing to rent to black tenants, does not see black voters as legitimate members of democracy. His democracy is one of white rule. Anything else is by definition "fraud."

Last nite I watched a movie "#Unfit: The Psychology of Donald Trump" on Netflix. It was about what you'd expect. It was released in 2020, before the election, and has a lot of warnings about how we can't allow him to be re-elected. The conclusions in the movie have since become common knowledge, and amplified by the January 6 insurrection.

Yeah, he's a bad guy.

The official "psychology of Donald Trump" (according to several psychologists and psychiatrists interviewed) is that he's a malignant narcissist, which is a sociopath who is also paranoid. There were a number of such figures in the 1930s: Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Michinomiya Hirohito. They gained a lot of followers, as megalomaniacs tend to do, but things did not turn out well for them. The filmmakers were at pains to point out the parallels, and the lessons we SHOULD have learned.

I've already forgotten much of the horror of 2016-2020.

I guess that's mankind's nature, to make the same mistakes every new generation.