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hatred
The Far-Right's Romance With Cruelty
To the far right, cruelty is more than a means to achieving a policy goal—it is often the goal itself. Cruelty for cruelty's sake—directed against "the other," a variable collection of liberals, immigrants, and minority groups.
Dec 28, 2022
Politics has always been cruel. Political candidates can be brutal in trying to discredit, or even destroy, their political opponents. Congressional leaders will at times act harshly when trying to whip party members into line. And as is true in any profession, there will always be politicians who mistreat subordinates simply because they are jerks.
But the cruelty of the far right is something different. This is cruelty as the defining characteristic of a movement. To the far right, cruelty is more than a means to achieving a policy goal—it is often the goal itself. Cruelty for cruelty's sake—directed against "the other," a variable collection of liberals, immigrants, and minority groups. It has become the substance, even the soul, of today's far right. And it is becoming increasingly difficult to differentiate the far right from the rest of the political right on this score.
It would be wrong to suggest that everyone in the far right should be diagnosed as a sociopath. It is striking, however, how closely these characteristics describe far-right groups and politicians.
Just look at how much pure cruelty by GOP leaders has been in evidence lately. Ron DeSantis spends public money to transport a handful of undocumented immigrants to politically liberal northern areas of the country. Substantively this accomplishes nothing. The tiny number of people involved doesn't amount to a scratch on a Boeing 747-8, when compared to the number of undocumented immigrants in Florida. But even that understates the absurdity of the stunt. The coup de grâce is the fact the immigrants in question were taken from Texas, not Florida.
This wasn't about seeking a policy success. It was a calculated demonstration of raw cruelty. By all accounts, many of these immigrants were misled. No effort was made to be sure they would have a place to stay, or something to eat, once they arrived at their destination.
It would be naïve to believe these transfers happened in the cruel way they did by accident. This wasn't sloppiness. The cruelty was the point.
For DeSantis this was, of course, a political stunt. But he carried it out in a particularly cruel fashion because that is what his right-wing base would respond to. Political gain was the motive, but cruelty was, nevertheless, the point of the exercise. And then, far from recoiling from this in disgust, Texas Governor Greg Abbott started doing the same thing himself.
If you think this assessment of the right wing is unfair, spend a little time in right-wing cyberspace. The level of abject cruelty on display is shocking. You don't even have to visit a right-wing website, just jump onto Twitter and look for the army of right-wing trolls. And don't worry if you don't find them right away because they will find you.
But cruel political stunts are just one example of right-wing cruelty. There is also the cruel way the right attacks transgender students. Unwilling to offer any accommodation, right-wing leaders work to bar them from participating in sports in their affirmed gender and require them to use bathrooms designated for the sex they don't identify with. They go so far as to ban books that touch on transgender issues from school libraries, and prohibit any mention of the subject in class. The view from the right is clearly that no compassion is required. Who cares if they are 7.6 times more likely than other young people to commit suicide?
Then there is the troubling tendency of the political right in general to respond to political violence against liberals with cruel humor. This was recently on view in the right-wing response to the brutal attack against Nancy Pelosi's husband, Paul.
There is no shortage of examples of right-wing cruelty. There is the perennial Republican effort to cut funding for Medicaid, a program providing healthcare for millions of Americans who otherwise would be unable to afford it. Then there was the successful effort to end the expanded Child Tax Credit, despite it having reduced childhood poverty by almost 50 percent.
And it's too bad, the right would likely agree, about that 12-year-old girl becoming pregnant after being raped, but they still oppose making rape an exception to abortion bans. And for that matter, they would no doubt agree that it is unfortunate some women are being forced to continue a pregnancy even though the fetus has no chance of surviving, and even when this puts the mother's life in jeopardy. But none of this seems sufficient to cause them to jump to fix the situation.
We might as well say it aloud. There's something almost pathological about this. To try to use the DSM to diagnose a group, as opposed to an individual, would be ridiculous. That's not what it's designed for. Still, looking at what traits are indicative of sociopathy is enlightening. An article on Healthline characterizes a sociopath as follows:
Per Healthline, sociopaths often:
Break rules or laws
Behave aggressively or impulsively
Feel little guilt for harm they cause others
Use manipulation, deceit, and controlling behavior
Remind you of anyone? More to the point, does it remind you of any political movement?
Obviously, it would be wrong to suggest that everyone in the far right should be diagnosed as a sociopath. It is striking, however, how closely these characteristics describe far-right groups and politicians.
- Breaking rules or laws: The most obvious example, of course, is the January 6 insurrection. But there's also the plot to kidnap Governor Whitmer of Michigan, attacks against liberal protestors, and numerous other acts of violence.
- Behaving aggressively or impulsively: Again, January 6 anyone? But even leaving the insurrection aside, far-right organizations are awash with the toxic masculinity that celebrates aggression and violence.
- Feeling little guilt for harm they cause others: Far-right groups often relish violence and cruelty, especially when directed against immigrants, liberals, and others they dislike. It is often a source of pride, not guilt. Just look at the right-wing's celebratory response to Kyle Rittenhouse shooting three people, two of whom died.
- Manipulation, deceit, and controlling behavior: Looking again at the January 9 insurrection, Donald trump and militia leaders, whether they were working together or separately, were able to manipulate hundreds of people, with previously clean records, into committing felonies by attacking the capital. Militia leaders and other extreme-right wing actors are often charismatic.
There is no reason to think any of this will change. On an individual basis, some members of far-right organizations will likely be able to evolve over time—to back away from the darkness. But the far-right movement itself won't. Cruelty, hatred for "the other," and a love of violence are all now central to the movement's essence, burned into its DNA.
It won't change. It can only be defeated.
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We Need a Systematic Analysis of the Racism in this Country
Jun 21, 2015
Dylann Roof, a young white man armed with a virulent, toxic hatred and a 45 caliber pistol, walked into a historic black church and was welcomed with open arms as a stranger into a Bible study. Taking advantage of the well-known hospitality of this sanctuary, he sat for an hour with a group of 10 people, none of whom had any idea that nine of them would be dead within an hour.
The massacre in Charleston is not just an isolated hate crime carried out by a mentally ill racist in South Carolina. It is simultaneously representative and starkly indicative of the rampant racism structurally embedded in America, the responsibility for which, it might be argued, bears no exemption for any American, especially white Americans, north or south, republican or democrat. As Richard Wright wrote in his 1945 non-fiction memoir, Black Boy, America "insists upon seeing the world in terms of good and bad, the holy and the evil, the high and the low, the white and the black; our America is frightened of fact, of history, of processes, of necessity. It hugs the easy way of damning those whom it cannot understand, of excluding those who look different, and it salves its conscience with a self-draped cloak of righteousness."
That cloak of righteousness shields white America from having to face their contemporary prejudices and the historical biases from which they are a result. This cloak of invisibility also inhibits their moral and psychological capacity to acknowledge and understand the magnitude of those historical and contemporary prejudices and their effects on our society. The Charleston shooting was not an anomaly but a manifestation of the violence cultivated in America toward black communities. The shooter, Dylann Roof, is a product of a system that has been breeding hatred and bigotry in America since the first Africans were kidnapped and forcibly transported here in the 15th century as slaves under deplorable, maliciously inhumane conditions.
Prophetic voices in African American literature and the arts have long challenged these deadly views, calling all Americans to "stand in the gap" and risk lifting the cloak of invisibility that surrounds racial violence to see what lies beneath. In an August 9, 2012 interview, Dr. Maya Angelou argued that transatlantic slaving, as an inherently violent institution, connected with colonial conquests, put an imprint of violence on American culture that needs to be addressed on a systematic and systemic level. Today her voice rises from among the dead: "It is imperative that Americans, all Americans, recognize the imprint of the first Africans brought here and the first white women brought here in bondage. I'm trying to say that the word slavery and the term enslavement has lost so much of its weight until people mouth the words without realizing what they're saying, what they're calling up. We have not moved on. We have made some steps toward fair play, but we have not really moved on. It is ignorant, not wise, to think that we can get on without remembering what happened, who did what to whom, to what success, and for what reasons."
Today, this systematic analysis is needed perhaps more than at any other time in our history. As Rev. Clyde Grubbs of Tuckerman Creative Ministries for Justice and Healing noted on Facebook: "The son tells everyone he knew that Black people were taking over the country, and he wore racist decals on his clothing. He told everyone he knew that something must be done to save the white race. He was public in his attitudes, attitudes that were dangerous. He was able to live at home and access the propaganda of racist hate groups (organized terrorists.) His father gifted the gun to his son. The state doesn't require registration of gun, nor notice of selling gun, or gifting gun. Son kills people with gun in an act of racist terrorism. But somehow the killer is a disturbed INDIVIDUAL. So? Are Racism and Psychopathology completely unrelated phenomena? Are Racism and Patriarchy and Privatism and Violence and Destruction of God's Creation really all separate, discrete, separate realities that need to be taken up in isolation from each other?"
Racism kills. In fact, the prevalence of racial epithets in Google searches has been linked to rates of black mortality by Daniel Chae, University of Maryland professor of epidemiology and biostatistics whose research has shown that "African-Americans living in areas where many people are Google-searching for a racial epithet are 8.2 percent more likely than whites to die of any cause." Racism, says Chae, is an environmental hazard. Quoted in the Huffington Post, "I view racism as being a social toxin that over time leads to premature mortality," he said. "Racism kills people," Chae said. "That's not breaking news at all." Meanwhile, in South Carolina the Confederate battle flag flies high as highways throughout the state tout the names of Confederate soldiers that fought to the death to preserve racist institutions while some excuse Dylan Roof's actions as being the result of an alleged mental illness or try to fit it into some other neatly packaged narrative that defers from having to face the real issue at hand; racism.
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