Cruelty has been vindicated

They saw what he was. They saw what he did. And they voted for him anyway.

Photo by Max Letek on Unsplash

It's the cruelty that gets you. The policy proposals are obviously insane, but it's the cruelty that ultimately shatters you. 

Cruelty is baked into every part of this project. Donald Trump's plans for mass deportations, for instance, are not just a practical proposition but an emotional one. They thrill supporters specifically because they are cruel. They conjure up images of scared men hiding in flats before the police kick down their door, of families huddled behind wire fencing. These images are not a fantasy. They're the sort of thing we saw when Trump separated children from their parents in detention centres in his first term. They are real. And now they will happen again.

The thing that hurts is that people like it. They enjoy that imagery. They wallow in it. Perhaps it makes them feel strong. Perhaps emphasising the low status of others works to elevate their own.

Trump's cruelty is core to his public persona and presumably his private one. You can see it in his comically absurd handshake, which seeks to mandhandle and force the submission of the other party. You can see it in the dismissive manner in which he comments on his allies, the dreams of violent retribution he conjures against his enemies, the mockery of the physically disabled. He represents cruelty and people voted for it. And god help me that is a hard fact to take on board.

Cruelty seeps down. It is pumped from the leader down through the ranks. From the US, it spreads across the world: a validation of a particular kind of behaviour, a vindication for a particular kind of instinct.

Look at the coverage on the right in the UK. "Trump has just handed smug global elites their worst defeat," the Telegraph sneered. As the analyst Tim Bale said, we have serious problems we need to face up to because of Trump - problems over issues the Telegraph purports to care about. What kind of support are we going to have to offer Ukraine? What will we do about tariffs? But there’s nothing about that. Just this wallowing in the brief moment of dominance and in the emotional anxiety of their political enemies.

On Talk TV, a channel so successful it is sometimes watched by more than five people at a time, Julia Hartley-Brewer read out an emotional message from a Green MP and then said: "I've got a box of tissues here. I'm going to send these over to you and you just wipe your little tears away." Needless to say, social media is full of similar sentiments. The worst people, authorised to behave in the worst way, with the sense that millions of others might be just as bad as they are. 

Most of the commentary attempting to work out what went wrong has focused on the Democrats, for obvious reasons. Did Joe Biden stay on too long? Did Kamala Harris lack a retail proposition to improve people's lives? These are all totally legitimate questions. But they sidestep the bigger one. Regardless of its deficiencies, the Democrat offer was not grounded in hatred of democracy, love of cruelty and wanton idiocy. The correct choice was obvious, on the level of governance or morality. 

The reason this analysis cannot be said out loud is because it blames voters and that has become taboo. The first rule in politics is that voters are never wrong. 

That makes total sense for a party strategist. It's how they need to think. But we are not all party strategists. Some strange process has taken place where everyone is expected to act like they work for a political organisation. But we don't. They're not paying our salary. They're not sending us out on the doorstep. We are not limited by the restrictions they place on their volunteers. 

This cultural change is particularly grievous when it comes to journalism. Reporters and columnists have ingested the taboo on criticising voters and now sound more and more like a party communication department. 

This twists the morality of the situation until it goes into reverse. The voter behaviour must be blameless so the party they voted for must therefore be blameless too. Cruelty is validated by voters which means it is validated by the press, which means that our moral standards go into terminal decline. 

So just to be clear: the voters were wrong to select Trump. They were wrong on the basis of morality, because he exhibits pathologically sadistic behaviour. They were wrong on the basis of policy, because his plans will not work and are not even intended to work. They were wrong on the basis of governance, because he is demonstrably incapable of discharging his responsibilities. And they were wrong on the basis of the constitution, because they made a mockery of the things their country stands for and the reasons one might sensibly celebrate it.

Obviously they were wrong. This is a man who garbles nonsense about people eating cats and dogs. He cannot really complete full sentences. He celebrates the manner in which he has assaulted women. He gets lost in dreamlike fugue states in which he imagines his political enemies being shot. He is obviously unfit to hold any kind of office and we do not have to pretend otherwise simply because people voted for him. There is no vote on earth with the power to negate moral fact. Things are right and wrong regardless of how many people think they are. 

Is it helpful to the Democratic cause to speak this way? Probably not, but then why on earth would that be of any pertinence to me? I don't work for them. I'm not even American. If I thought this newsletter on British politics had the slightest impact on American elections I would be a much happier person than I am.

This approach does not exempt the Democrat party from blame and it does not remove the need for lessons on how you appeal to voters in future. Obviously you will be looking for ways to peel voters off and earn a hearing, to see if you can ramp up your own vote with a more compelling offer - all the normal elements of political life. But we must urgently rid ourselves of this sacrosanct view of voters, this omerta over the ethical status of their actions. It leaves us with no language to support our values. If you cannot say that something is wrong, you cannot defend that which it attacks.

Even with that in place, I'm struggling to maintain my faith in humanity a bit. I find myself looking at people in the street - men and women alike - and wondering about the jagged edges of their personality. Seeing cruelty unleashed can do that to you. Seeing the joy that people take in it can degrade your assumptions about the world around you.

For reassurance I kept on going back to Dorian's final chapter in his book on the end of the world. When we imagine the apocalypse - nuclear war, pandemic, zombies, whatever - we tend to think that people will degenerate to a primal state, attacking passers-by, forming gangs, looting shops. The same basic suspicion I now have in my mind about people after the Trump vote, unleashed by the freedoms of a lawless society.

But it's just not true. Or at least, it’s not entirely true. When people really think they are facing the apocalypse, they behave entirely differently. At 8:07am on January 13th 2018, a bomb warning system accidentally went off in Hawaii. "Ballistic missile threat inbound to Hawaii," it screamed. "Seek immediate shelter. This is not a drill." A significant number of people believed they were about to die. 

What did they do then? When researchers later interviewed 418 of them, they found that the most common response was a "desire to reach loved ones". People broke the law, yes, but they did so by speeding to reach the people they loved. The messages they sent, the last ones they thought they would ever write, had nothing to do with hate, or cruelty or dominance.

"I'm sorry, Mom." "I love you, baby." "I'm so sorry about the fight. It was so stupid." "You were a great dad. I love you, Daddy."

Even today, even now, we have to cling to this. We are humans. We are obviously capable of terrible things. But when we reach the moment of truth, it is not hate that we turn to, but love. Only love does not decay.

We need to bear that in mind. It does not negate what happened this week. But what happened this week does not negate it either.

Small blessings. But small blessings are all that we can aspire to, on a week like this one.