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sadopopulism: the cruelty is the point
2020-Jun-27, Saturday 01:06 pmA Yale historian specializing in totalitarianism calls it: sadopopulism. What bubble have I been living in? I didn't realize that things were already so bad in 2017 December that historians had to invent a new word for it. The explanation is only 12 minutes long, so I'll embed the whole thing here for easy viewing. It's definitely one for the history books, as the saying goes.
"You teach people that this is the normal state of affairs, that government can't help you, life is full of pain... The government makes you hurt, and then you want somebody else to hurt more. And that's a completely new dynamic in politics because it does away with the future, and it also does away with society, because instead of thinking about how we all might be doing a little bit better together in the near future, we're thinking about how we're different groups and some of us are going to hurt others... If, in the long run, the way that you govern is by hurting people who don't mind being hurt, because they think other people are hurting worse. What you will tend to do is take the vote away from people who expect more from government. What you will tend to do is try to suppress the vote and keep the vote down to the people who accept that government can do nothing except for administer pain. And then that moves you away slowly from democracy."
That term predates the excellent article from 2018 October in The Atlantic, "The Cruelty Is The Point".
In the last few days alone:
"You teach people that this is the normal state of affairs, that government can't help you, life is full of pain... The government makes you hurt, and then you want somebody else to hurt more. And that's a completely new dynamic in politics because it does away with the future, and it also does away with society, because instead of thinking about how we all might be doing a little bit better together in the near future, we're thinking about how we're different groups and some of us are going to hurt others... If, in the long run, the way that you govern is by hurting people who don't mind being hurt, because they think other people are hurting worse. What you will tend to do is take the vote away from people who expect more from government. What you will tend to do is try to suppress the vote and keep the vote down to the people who accept that government can do nothing except for administer pain. And then that moves you away slowly from democracy."
That term predates the excellent article from 2018 October in The Atlantic, "The Cruelty Is The Point".
"We can hear the spectacle of cruel laughter throughout the Trump era. There were the border-patrol agents cracking up at the crying immigrant children separated from their families, and the Trump adviser who delighted white supremacists when he mocked a child with Down syndrome who was separated from her mother. There were the police who laughed uproariously when the president encouraged them to abuse suspects, and the Fox News hosts mocking a survivor of the Pulse Nightclub massacre (and in the process inundating him with threats), the survivors of sexual assault protesting to Senator Jeff Flake, the women who said the president had sexually assaulted them, and the teen survivors of the Parkland school shooting. There was the president mocking Puerto Rican accents shortly after thousands were killed and tens of thousands displaced by Hurricane Maria, the black athletes protesting unjustified killings by the police, the women of the #MeToo movement who have come forward with stories of sexual abuse, and the disabled reporter whose crime was reporting on Trump truthfully...This isn’t incoherent. It reflects a clear principle: Only the president and his allies, his supporters, and their anointed are entitled to the rights and protections of the law, and if necessary, immunity from it. The rest of us are entitled only to cruelty, by their whim."
In the last few days alone:
- June 12: Trump decided to hold the first big political rally since Covid-19 on June 19th (a holiday important to black Americans that commemorates the end of slavery) in Tulsa (where some of the worst racist violence in American history happened). He then "magnanimously" moved it to June 20th after claiming he himself made that holiday "very famous".
- June 13: During GLBT Pride month, on the anniversary of the Pulse gay nightclub massacre (2nd worst mass shooting in modern USA history), Trump announces elimination of transgender healthcare protections.
- June 25: The USA saw 37,077 new Covid-19 cases in one day, and simultaneously the Trump administration filed this SCOTUS brief to end the Affordable Care Act.
- June 26: We finally learn that Trump was briefed in March that Russia was paying bounties to murder USA troops in Afghanistan. In the intervening time, Trump:
- kept this annual threat assessment hidden for the first time since 2006,
- failed to make even a diplomatic complaint to Moscow,
- fired the director of the NCTC (National Counterterrorism Center),
- forced cadets to return to school during pandemic solely for him to get a photo op with them (knowing that Russia had bounties on their heads), and
- invited Putin to the G7 summit over the objections of all the other countries. He literally gave aid and comfort to the enemy who is paying to kill USA troops. That's pretty much the definition of traitor.