Four years ago, Adam Serwer wrote an article for The Atlantic entitled, “The Cruelty Is the Point.” It made the disturbing claim that Trump and his supporters find community by rejoicing in the suffering of those they hate and fear. In the fall of 2018, the administration began what Serwer called the ethnic cleansing of more than 193,000 American children of immigrants whose temporary protected status had been revoked, while the administration lied about creating a database that would make it possible to reunite children ripped away from their parents and stored in cages. Some of those children will never find their parents again. This from the so-called “family values” crowd.
There was an outcry about how cruel and un-American it was, but as Serwer made clear, cruelty was and still is the point. Trump even said it aloud, “You’ve got to separate the children . . . If they feel there will be separation, they don’t come.” He even claimed that the children were being used by immigrants who “grabbed them” to try to make it easier to cross the border into America—a nation of immigrants. Except for Native Americans, we’re all from someplace else.
Throughout his presidency, Trump reveled in mocking his enemies, calling them names and provoking violence against them at rallies. Shocked at his behavior, many tried to explain it as the channeling of deep frustrations, especially on behalf of white working-class men who were falling behind, and resented the attention given to LGBTQ rights, Black Lives Matter and feminist movements that left them feeling emasculated. Trump understood this rage and threw gasoline on it by saying what so many aggrieved people had always wanted to say.
What we could not imagine, however, was that cruelty had become a deliberate political strategy. It can turn disparate rage into a unified mob. Look at photographs of lynchings in the American south, Serwer noted. The burned and mutilated bodies were horrible enough, but it was the images of white men grinning at the camera while holding the hand of a wife or girlfriend that speaks to something dark and demonic about human nature. When we truly and deeply hate and fear other human beings, we rejoice in their suffering. We will also pledge fanatical allegiance to any strongman who objectifies and humiliates them. There is intimacy in contempt.
Witness the cruelty of the recent immigrant dump at Martha’s Vineyard. Fifty immigrants in San Antonio — frightened, exhausted, and desperate — were offered fast food vouchers and promises of non-existent jobs in Boston, only to be taken to the land of Cape Cod houses and wine-sipping liberals. If this makes those liberals furious then the stunt is a success. Gov. Ron DeSantis must have assumed that Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas wouldn’t mind offering up a few Texas immigrants so long as it made Democrats look like hypocrites. Apparently, however, the two have now had a falling out—trying to see who can out-cruel the other.
Is there hypocrisy in sanctuary cities who don’t have to face an onslaught of immigrants? Yes. Are liberals prone to making pronouncements but often unwilling to make sacrifices? Yes. Are Democrats in favor of open borders? No. Would white people have ever been used as pawns in this way? No. This was an overtly racist stunt to dump brown and Black people into the backyards of rich white people.
But they did not call the police. They called churches together to welcome the immigrants, feed them, provide legal counsel, and find places for them to stay. This would be, dare I say it, something like real Christianity, not a photo op with a Bible. Given how much Republicans love Jesus, they should be reminded that welcoming the stranger and providing for the needs of the foreigner is not some fringe idea in scripture. It runs through the middle of the Bible like a six-lane expressway. Nothing matters more than how we treat the other, which is inseparable from how we treat God.
Philosopher Immanuel Kant proposed a ground-breaking moral principle in the 18th century. He said that persons should never be used as tools, never as merely a means to an end. Rather, the moral imperative is that humans are always to be treated as an end unto themselves. They have intrinsic, not merely instrumental, value. Enlisting asylum seekers as unwitting propaganda dupes is exactly what moral philosophers, including Jesus, would call the objectification of the neighbor.
The stunt was funded by Florida taxpayers, but many of them rejoiced. Cruelty is addictive, and dehumanization is a downward spiral. If you doubt this, watch all three episodes of Ken Burns new documentary, The U.S. and the Holocaust, on PBS. But don’t watch it too late, because you may have trouble sleeping. The signs are all there, and history can repeat itself. A struggling economy in Germany, the need for a strongman to find scapegoats and the systematic dehumanization of European Jews. “Germany first!” was the rally cry, and the equivalent of “Make Germany Great Again!” People were swept up into this fascist cruelty until the Holocaust became inevitable. Once you have turned your own citizens into refugees who are welcome nowhere else in the world (including America), you must either put them all on the island of Madagascar to starve, which was Adolf Eichmann’s original Final Solution, or you must kill them—all of them.
DeSantis, be not proud. Systematic cruelty is a slippery slope, and nations die by increments, unable to see what they are becoming, and made monstrous by the banality of evil.
The Rev. Dr. Robin Meyers is pastor of First Congregational Church UCC in Norman and retired senior minister of Mayflower Congregational UCC in Oklahoma City. He is currently Professor of Public Speaking, and Distinguished Professor of Social Justice Emeritus in the Philosophy Department at Oklahoma City University, and the author of eight books on religion and American culture, the most recent of which is, Saving God from Religion: A Minister’s Search for Faith in a Skeptical Age.
Visit robinmeyers.com
This article appears in Selling Scents.