Cruelty as a part of American politics

Greg Dworkin, in his pundit roundup for Daily Kos, quoted Adam Serwer in the New York Times. Serwer wrote that the Republican politics of cruelty and exclusion started long before the nasty guy and will continue long after. There has always been a drive for some leaders to restrict blessings to a select few. What the nasty guy accomplished was to show Republicans how much they could get away with. Serwer names quite a few cases where he and they got away with a lot and still do. And the voter suppression laws they push are to make sure they can keep getting away with it. The word “cruelty” above was intentional. Sarah McCammon of NPR spoke to Adam Serwer about his new book The Cruelty is the Point: The Past, Present, and Future of Trump’s America. I’ve heard that phrase many times over the last few years and didn’t know it came from an essay Serwer wrote in 2018. This is some of what Serwer said in that interview:

Most people think of cruelty as an individual problem. And it is that, but what I'm focused on in the book is cruelty as a part of American politics, specifically the way that it is used to demonize certain groups so you can justify denying people their basic rights under the Constitution and exclude them from the political process.

Alexander Stephens, the vice president of the Confederacy, gave a speech in office declaring the black man is not equal to the white man and deserves to be a slave. But after the Civil War he wrote in his journal that slavery had nothing to do with the war. The most racist people tell themselves that their views aren’t racist. People still do that.

What I mean by cruelty is specifically the demonization of particular groups in order to deny them rights or exclude them from the polity. It's one thing to say that we're not going to allow in people on the basis of religion. It's another thing entirely to say that we are going to shatter families deliberately because we want to dissuade people from trying to come to the United States for a better life. We're always going to have disagreements in a democracy. That's what democracy is for. It's for reconciling disagreements. But what is not necessary is a politics where one side is trying to disenfranchise or exclude the other party's voters in order to maintain a grip on power. And that's what I mean when I talk about cruelty on a political level. ... The politics of cruelty that Trump's employed are a product of a system that encourages a minority of the country to engineer the government so that they are no longer accountable to the public. And Trump's real innovation was showing how much of that the Republican Party can get away with.

Jeff Singer of Kos Elections reviewed the results of the November election through the legislative districts in Michigan. My state is currently highly gerrymandered. Singer showed the GOP advantage by rating all the state House districts by the ratio of the vote for Biden and the nasty guy in the district and comparing that to their ratio in the state overall. Then he looked at the district in the middle. Biden won the state 51% to 48%, yet this middle district went to Biden 47-51. In the much smaller Senate Biden took the median district 44-54. That’s 13 points to the right from the statewide vote. Thankfully, a citizen’s redistricting commission is hard at work to keep this from happening again. I mentioned this next Michigan news briefly in a previous post. Kerry Eleveld of Kos reported the Senate Oversight Committee, led by Republicans, issued a report on the 2020 election. Every Republican on the committee supported the report. The key sentence:

There is no evidence presented at this time to prove either significant acts of fraud or that an organized, wide-scale effort to commit fraudulent activity was perpetrated in order to subvert the will of Michigan voters.

Eleveld wrote:

No mass contingent of dead voters, no suspicious 100% precinct turnouts, no supposed ballot dump in Detroit that propelled Joe Biden to victory in the state, which he won by some 150,000 votes or three percentage points. In a separate statement, Oversight Committee Chair state Sen. Ed McBroom said, "We must all remember: 'extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof' and 'claiming to find something extraordinary requires first eliminating the ordinary.'" McBroom also called Trump's claims "ludicrous" in an interview with Bridge Michigan and said there's "good reason" to believe the conspiracy pushers were "purposely defrauding people."

Some party member are still pushing for a fraudit in Michigan. Others are concerned that obsessing over the 2020 election will alienate suburban voters in 2022 and 2024. Even with this report – supported by Republicans – the party is still pushing for new voter suppression laws. There are photos defining the character of Mrs. Nasty Guy. I don’t need to share them. SemDem of the Kos community believes a photo from a tweet by Kate Bennett defines the character of the current First Lady Dr. Jill Biden. A middle school student is nervous about getting a vaccination and Dr. Biden is there to hold his hands and shield his eyes from the jab. I’ve missed having a compassionate First Lady. A few weeks ago I heard on Canadian radio about a piece of music titled Considering Matthew Shepard. Yeah, this is about the young man, back in 1998, who was badly beaten and tied to a fence in Laramie, Wyoming. His murder caught national and world wide attention. The latest issue of Between the Lines, Michigan’s LGBTQ newspaper, had a list of five queer things one can do. The University Musical Society in Ann Arbor would stream their Pride offerings into July. This piece of music was one of them. Today I got onto the UMS site and saw this work would only be streamed through tomorrow. Glad I checked. I guess I’m watching this evening. Considering Matthew Shepard was written by Craig Hella Johnson for his thirty member vocal ensemble Conspirare. He played the piano and there were another eight or so instruments. The piece was first performed in 2018. It is about 90 minutes. Through the piece we hear from Matt (excerpts from his journal) and his parents, from the fence that held him up, from the killers, from Fred Phelps (remember him?) and his Westboro Baptist Church, and from the community. The performance included images projected behind the singers. What I saw this evening was, alas, not the whole piece. This video is an hour. In addition to the performance there were scenes of early rehearsals and performances, discussions by the composer, Judy Shepard, and others, and news clips of the events of the time and of related events since then, such as Obama signing the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Act, and the Pulse massacre in Orlando. I now wonder if I can see a video of the whole piece without the commentary. I would like to see and hear more than what was a part of this documentary. I hope I don’t have to wait for a local choir to take it on.