Uncruel

There is a video on The Atlantic, titled: Trump and His Supporters Thrive on Cruelty. The quick description says that: “The president and his backers revel in the suffering of those they hate and fear.” The video itself is a quick accounting of supposed cruelties by the President and the reactions of his ardent followers to them, with hints that they may come to repent their support in the future. But I feel that it does the topic a disservice in that it takes an overly partisan tone towards its subject.

While The Atlantic writer Adam Serwer notes that an enjoyment of cruelty is not unique to supporters of the President, he casts it as an outgrowth of a childish impulse to delineate in-group versus out-group by bullying. But I would submit that it is part of a much broader human impulse and one often seen as laudable. If I hate you because you've engaged in what I understand to be deliberate wrongdoing, and/or I fear you because I expect you do so in the future, why should I see your suffering as anything less that something you've earned for being a bad person? In other words, why shouldn't I see whatever pain that may befall you as justice? We understand that locking a person into a cell for long stretches of time is damaging to them. But when that person had committed some or another crime, incarceration is often seen as just. And many times, whether or not something is cruel depends on or interpretation of the crime for which it is a consequence. Life in prison is considered cruel for a first-time shoplifter, while many people consider it appropriate, if an undeserved mercy, for a multiple murderer. And three-strikes laws often dictated that even non-violent criminals could spend the rest of their lives in prison for what may have otherwise been considered minor crimes. Their "refusal" to be rehabilitated, however, allowed people to see send them to prison for life as appropriate.

Likewise, it is commonplace for people to see the doing of justice as an occasion worth celebrating. And this is not simply because they actively find enjoyment in the idea that another human being is going to suffer, but because they find validation in the idea that they are correct in their understanding that a wrong has been done to them and they are worthy of recompense. But yes, people do take satisfaction in the idea that the pain and suffering that has been unfairly visited upon the innocent (themselves or others) will also be visited upon the perpetrators. And eye for an eye is also an occasion worth celebrating.

And so the problem here is not that President Trump and his supporters are being unnecessarily cruel, or invested in cruelty, in a way that other people are not. It's that people who don't support the President are unlikely to see the President's targets as having earned the fates that have befallen them. If the guilt of a criminal is under dispute, it should be expected that there will be disagreement about the appropriateness of the punishment.

And so, when Mr. Serwer notes in the video: “Trump’s fiercest backers enjoy his cruelty towards people they have decided deserve it. For them, the cruelty is the point,” he is putting them, incorrectly, I suspect, into a position similar to his own. One where the targets of the President's ire are known innocents, rather than people who are deserving of having some measure of justice meted out to them by virtue of their willful ignorance, gullibility or criminality. The emphasis on "perceived enemies" hints at the idea that it's all in the President's head, but as this is preaching to the choir of a left-leaning audience, there is no follow up or evidence given for that insinuation. But then again, all wrongs are perceived. If I believe that an item has been stolen, I could be expected to lobby for the finding and punishing of a thief, even if, in fact, the item had simply been carelessly mislaid. My belief that a crime had been committed would engage a push for justice, which my find a mark, even though objectively, it should lack a target.

I would submit that Trump's America would find themselves as repulsed by open cruelty as anyone else. But "cruelty" is not an objective term, and one person's tragedy is another person's just deserts; the wrongs of those they perceive as enemies make what they are doing right in their eyes. Understanding their sense of justice, even if we find it warped, is more useful than simply labeling them as cruel.