 Popsugar Reading Challenge category: A book whose title is a complete sentence.
The Cruelty Is the Point: The Past, Present, and Future of Trump's America, by Adam Serwer. This is a collection of Serwer's essays from The Atlantic during the Trump years, with a post-Trump introduction for each piece. Serwer pulls apart comforting myths, like the "kindly General Lee," the better class of immigrants who came "the right way," or the Civil War being about anything other than slavery. He repeatedly shows the parallels between the backlash against Reconstruction, and the place our country is now. It's always tempting to say cruelty isn't "who we are as a country," but it would be more accurate to say it isn't all of who we are. None of what we're seeing today is new. In many cases, cruel policies are actually counterproductive. It costs less to house homeless people than to install "hostile architecture" like spikes under bridges and have police push them from one block to the next. It costs less to treat addicts than to incarcerate them. And the anti-immigrant fervor has left the farming industry scrambling for labor, to the point where they're trying to roll back child labor laws. And, with many of the essays written around the time of the George Floyd killing and protests, Serwer notes the incalculable cost of having no checks or accountability for the people who are nominally supposed to protect the public. In the title essay, Serwer describes seeing lynching photos at the Museum of African-American History and Culture. What drew his eye was not the victims but the killers, proudly grinning for the camera. Cruelty - even to the point of murder - is a bonding experience for bullies. Think of the Steubenville rapists showing off photos, or the laughter, "indelible in the hippocampus," that Christine Blasey Ford described hearing from her assailants. Trump is instinctively good at making bullies feel good, making them feel like they belong, which is why he breezed through gaffes that would have been career-ending for most people, like mocking a disabled reporter. His following was never really about him; it's about a side of America that we don't like to acknowledge exists. It's an uncomfortable read, but with a lot of aha moments.
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