Serwer, of course, takes that concept and applies it to one of the two primary political parties in the United States -- something he does with expert precision in the one essay in this book that actually shares this title.
The artifacts [in the Museum of African American History and Culture] that persist in my memory, the way a bright flash does when you close your eyes, are the photographs of lynchings. But it’s not the burned, mutilated bodies that stick with me. It’s the faces of the white men in the crowd. There’s the photo of the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Indiana in 1930, in which a white man can be seen grinning at the camera as he tenderly holds the hand of his wife or girlfriend. There’s the undated photo from Duluth, Minnesota, in which grinning white men stand next to the mutilated, half-naked bodies of two men lashed to a post in the street -- one of the white men is straining to get into the picture, his smile cutting from ear to ear. There’s the photo of a crowd of white men huddled behind the smoldering corpse of a man burned to death; one of them is wearing a smart suit, a fedora hat, and a bright smile.
Their names have mostly been lost to time. But these grinning men were someone’s brother, son, husband, father. They were human beings, people who took immense pleasure in the utter cruelty of torturing others to death -- and were so proud of doing so that they posed for photographs with their handiwork, jostling to ensure they caught the eye of the lens, so that the world would know they’d been there. Their cruelty made them feel good, it made them feel proud, it made them feel happy. And it made them feel closer to one another.
That might be the larger point: that bullies feel an otherwise absent sense of solidarity and closeness to others in their cruel acts. And that may be the point of the cruelty.
But the fact that this book is a collection of essays, and not a single book supporting this single thesis, is where most of my disappointment comes from. Serwer tries to connect them through connected replacement titles on the different essays he had written at different times for different purposes -- The Cruelty of the Backlash, The Cruelty of the Lost Cause, and The Cruelty of the Lies We Tell Ourselves, for example -- but that’s a gimmick that didn’t really cohere -- at least for this reader.
The different essays did provoke some thoughts, however, that I think are worth retaining. Here’s a few.
In The Nationalist’s Delusion, we get some data points on how white Trump’s support was in 2016, and how that, and not a more general sentiment among the lower economic class, is what catapulted him into the White House.
Clinton defeated Trump handily among Americans making less than $50,000 a year. Among voters making more than that, the two candidates ran roughly even. The electorate, however, skews wealthier than the general population. Voters making less than $50,000, whom Clinton won by a proportion of 53 to 41, accounted for only 36 percent of the votes cast, while those making more than $50,000 -- whom Trump won by a single point -- made up 64 percent. The most economically vulnerable Americans voted for Clinton overwhelmingly; the usual presumption is the opposite.
If you look at white voters alone, a different picture emerges. Trump defeated Clinton among white voters in every income category, winning my a margin of 57 to 34 among whites making less than $30,000; 56 to 37 among those making between $30,000 and $50,000; 61 to 33 for those making $50,000 to $100,000; 56 to 39 among those making $100,000 to $200,000; 50 to 45 among those making $200,000 to $250,000; and 48 to 43 among those making more than $250,000. In other words, Trump won white voters at every level of class and income. He won the workers, he won managers, he won owners, he won robber barons. This is not a working-class coalition; it is a nationalist one.
And these data points help Serwer reach these conclusions:
Overall, poor and working-class Americans did not support Trump; it was white Americans on all levels of the income spectrum who secured his victory. Clinton was only competitive with Trump among white people making more than $100,000, but the fact that their shares of the vote was nearly identical drives the point home: Economic suffering alone does not explain the rise of Trump. Nor does the Calamity Thesis explain why comparably situated black Americans, who are considerably more vulnerable than their white counterparts, remained so immune to Trump’s appeal. The answer cannot be that black Americans were suffering less than the white working class or the poor; rather, Trump’s solutions did not appeal to people of color because they were premised on a national vision that excluded them as full citizens.
When you look at Trump’s strength among white Americans of all income categories but his weakness among Americans struggling with poverty, the story of Trump looks less like a story of working-class revolt than a story of white backlash. And the stories of struggling white Trump supporters look less like the whole truth than a convenient narrative -- one that obscures the racist nature of that backlash, instead casting it as a rebellion against an unfeeling establishment that somehow includes working-class and poor people who happen not to be white.
In Civility Is Overrated, he reminds us of the history of political violence the United States has already suffered.
Civil war is not an imminent prospect. The impulse to conjure its specter overlooks how bitter and fierce American politics has often been. In the early days of the republic, as Richard Hofstadter and Michael Wallace wrote in their 1970 book, ‘American Violence,’ the country witnessed Election Day riots, in which “one faction often tried violently to prevent another from voting.” In the 1850s, the nativist Know-Nothings fielded gangs to intimidate immigrant voters. Abolitionists urged defiance of the Fugitive Slave Act and lived by their words, running slave catchers out of town and breaking captured black people out of custody. Frederick Douglass said that the best way to make the act a “dead letter” was “to make half a dozen or more dead kidnappers.”
During the Gilded Age, state militias turned gas on striking workers. From 1882 to 1968, nearly five thousand people, mostly black Americans, were lynched nationwide. From January 1969 to April 1970, more than four thousand bombings occurred across the country, according to a Senate investigation. As Hofstadter wrote, “Violence has been used repeatedly in our past, often quite purposefully, and a full reckoning with the fact is a necessary ingredient in any realistic self-image.”
It is unfortunately a history worth understanding, as there are signs that it is continuing to this day. One consistent theme has been violence stemming from a backlash against the expansion of the franchise to previously excluded groups and citizens. In this regard, the current day seems eerily similar.
Trumpists lamenting civility’s decline do not fear fractiousness; on the contrary, they happily practice it to their own ends. What they really fear are the cultural, political, and economic shifts that occur when historically marginalized groups begin to exert power in a system that was once defined by their exclusion. Social mores that had been acceptable become offensive; attitudes that had been widely held are condemned.
It’s a sentence worth repeating: “What they really fear are the cultural, political, and economic shifts that occur when historically marginalized groups begin to exert power in a system that was once defined by their exclusion.” To conserve a system that is undemocratic means opposing the extension of democracy to those previously excluded. When those excluded individuals are minorities, the mission takes on a racist cast, but the impulse itself may not necessarily be so.
In Not The Right Way, he reminds us that the apparatus of political cruelty has been built over multiple administrations, both Republican and Democratic.
Another irony of American immigration policy is that Barack Obama, a living symbol of American multiculturalism, presided over a much more active removal apparatus than did Donald Trump.
The Obama administration erroneously believed that harsh immigration enforcement would bring Republicans to the table on immigration.
Under continuous pressure from immigrants’ rights activists, the administration adopted a more lenient approach toward the conclusion of his first term in 2012. Nevertheless, year by year, Obama deported hundreds of thousands more undocumented immigrants in his first four years as president than Trump did, despite Trump’s open contempt for non-white immigrants. It is a reminder that politicians wearing the smiling face of liberalism can provide a more effective facade for cruelty than those who make cruelty their public purpose. Trump did not invent the American deportation machine; he simply took advantage of its powers in ways recent presidents had not contemplated.
In The Cruelty of Exclusion, he reminds us that modern day Republicans failed to learn one of the lessons of the Tea Party -- that the party and the base are two different things, and that you can’t control the base by controlling the party, but you can control the party by controlling the base.
But what was the Tea Party movement? To most conservative writers, it was the revival of small-government constitutionalism. Others discerned something more complex. In ‘The Weekly Standard,’ a conservative outlet whose demise was a direct consequence of its criticism of Trump, Matthew Continetti wrote that the Tea Party had two faces. “One looks to the future. The other looks to the past. One wants to repair deformities in the American political structure and move on. The other is ready to scrap the whole thing and restore a lost Eden.”
Conservative intellectuals misunderstood that Eden and what it looked like. They projected their low-tax, federalist, small-government beliefs onto a Republican rank and file whose views were far more complex and far more motivated by identity than conservative commentators wanted to admit. So when an authoritarian reality-show star who insincerely vowed not to touch Medicare or Medicaid and to raise his own taxes appeared, promising to “Make America Great Again,” they believed the conservative base would reject him, because the version of the electorate that conservative intellectuals imagined was a fantasy.
“Not a single grassroots Tea Party supporter we encountered argued for privatization of Social Security or Medicare along the lines being pushed by ultra-free-market politicians like Representative Paul Ryan (R-WI) and advocacy groups like FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity,” wrote the political scientists Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson in their comprehensive 2013 study of the Tea Party, ‘The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism.’ The Tea Party “worries about racial and ethnic minorities and overly entitled young people signal a larger fear about generational social change in America. … When Tea Partiers talk about ‘their rights,’ they are asserting a desire to live again in the country they think they recall from childhood or young adulthood.” A country that never would have elected someone like Obama.
This is how Trump was able to steal the Republican party away from the objectivist wonks like Paul Ryan. He spoke to the base, not the party, and the base, like in the days of the Tea Party, became the party.
In The Cruelty of the COVID Contract, he reminds us of a moment that should never be forgotten.
Then, in September, the president himself simply blurted out that “if you take the blue states out, we’re at a level that I don’t think anybody in the world would be at. We’re really at a very low level, but some of the states -- they were blue states, and blue-managed.” The sentiment was grotesque but illuminating. Trump did not imagine himself as much more than, as my ‘Atlantic’ colleague Ron Brownstein put it, “a wartime president, with blue states, rather than any foreign nation, as the enemy.” For Trump, holding him responsible for protecting the lives of Americans who did not vote for him -- or who merely lived in states where a majority of voters preferred the other candidate -- was nonsensical.
Oh, it was far more than nonsensical. It was a violation of his oath to protect the constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. The president of the United States, dismissing half the country in times of national emergency because they live in “blue” states. It should have been criminal.
In Abolish Police Unions, we have the best argument I’ve heard for why police should not be allowed to collectively bargain.
There is a simpler argument. Police should not have unions because armed agents of the state empowered with the authority to use lethal force should not have the capacity to use that authority to advance their own political purposes. It is a fundamental principle of democracy that those who wield state force be accountable to the people, lest that force be turned against the public. That principle applies to the military. It should also apply to the police.
And in The New Reconstruction, he reminds us of another time that should never be forgotten, this one during the nationwide protests following the death of George Floyd, and this one with eerie echoes of another time.
A majority of Americans have accepted the diagnosis of Black Lives Matter activists, even if they have yet to embrace their more radical remedies, such as defunding the police. For the moment, the surge in public support for Black Lives Matter appears to be an expression of approval for the movement’s most basic demand: that the police stop killing black people. This request is so reasonable that only those committed to white supremacy regard it as outrageous. Large majorities of Americans support reforms such as requiring the use of body cameras, banning choke holds, mandating a national police-misconduct database, and curtailing qualified immunity, which shields officers from liability for violating people’s constitutional rights.
The urgency of addressing this crisis has been underscored by the ongoing behavior of police departments, whose officers have reacted much as the white South did after Appomattox: by brutalizing the people demanding change.
In New York City, officers drove two SUVs into a crowd of protesters. In Philadelphia, cops beat demonstrators with batons. In Louisville, police shot pepper balls at reporters. In Austin, Texas, police left a protester with a fractured skull and brain damage after firing beanbag rounds unprovoked. In Buffalo, New York, an elderly protester was shoved to the ground by police in full riot gear, sustained brain damage, and had to be hospitalized. The entire riot team resigned from the unit in protest -- not because of their colleagues’ behavior but because they faced sanction for it.
Yet the more the police sought to violently repress the protesters, the more people spilled into the streets in defiance, risking a solitary death in a hospital bed in order to assert their right to exist, to not have their lives stolen by armed agents of the state. “As the uprising went on, we saw the police really responding in ways that were retaliatory and vicious,” Noor told me. “Kind of like, ‘How dare you question me and my intentions and my power?’”
Even now, much of this seems forgotten. These things happened, didn’t they? People protested in mass, and the police responded with excessive force. When and where have we seen that before?
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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
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