“This is the culture you’re raising your kids in. Don’t be surprised if it blows up in your face.”
—Marilyn Manson
For the last forty years, the United States has pursued policies that have stripped economic activity from ethical considerations and social costs. One consequence has been the emergence of a culture of cruelty in which the financial elite and big corporations favor policies of intolerance that treat the economically disadvantaged with contempt. Under the Trump regime, the repressive state and market apparatuses that exercised cruel power in the nineteenth century have returned with a vengeance, producing in American society new levels of harsh aggression and daily violence. A culture of cruelty and a politics of disposability have shaped the mood of our times—a specter of insensitivity and lack of kindness hovering over the ruins of a disappearing democracy.
While there is much talk about the influence of Trumpism, there are few analyses that examine its culture of cruelty and politics of disposability, or the role that culture plays in legitimating intolerance and suffering. The mechanisms of cruelty and disposability reach back to the founding of the United States as a settler-colonial society. How else does one explain a long line of state-sanctioned atrocities—the genocide waged against Native Americans in order to take their land, enslavement and breeding of Black people for profit and labor, forced sterilizations of the mentally ill for much of the first half of the twentieth century, and the passage of the Second Amendment to arm and enforce white supremacy over subordinated populations? The legacies of those roots of U.S. history spike the Kool-Aid of Trumpist propaganda about “Law and Order,” “Making America Great Again,” and “America First.”
More recent instances indicative of the rising culture of bigoted cruelty and mechanisms of erasure in U.S. politics include the racially motivated drug wars, policies that shifted people from welfare to workfare without offering training programs or child care, and morally indefensible tax reforms that will “require huge budget cuts in safety net programs for vulnerable children and adults.”1 As Marian Wright Edelman points out, such actions are particularly alarming and cruel at a time when “Millions of America’s children today are suffering from hunger, homelessness and hopelessness. Nearly 13.2 million children are poor—almost one in five. About 70 percent of them are children of color who will be a majority of our children by 2020. More than 1.2 million are homeless. About 14.8 million children struggle against hunger in food insecure households.”2
In some instances, the culture of cruelty emerges in comments and calls for legislation that pathologically revel in the degradation of others. For instance, in 2015, the Oklahoma Republican party made a “case against food stamps” by comparing the poor to animals who will grow lazy from handouts. It shamefully posted its critique of food stamp programs on its Facebook page in which it appropriated a message from the National Park Service that stated “Please Do Not Feed the Animals” because “the animals will grow dependent on handouts and will not learn to take care of themselves.”3 The “don’t feed the animals” meme is common, it seems, among Republican Party politicians. Tara Culp-Ressler reports that “Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich once said that the current welfare system is ‘turning children into young animals and they are killing each other.’ A Republican congressional candidate in Texas, meanwhile, compared welfare beneficiaries to donkeys.”4 More recently, the Trump administration announced it would rescind protections for hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans now living in the United States, give states the power to force work requirements on Medicare recipients, and put legislation into place that would restrict health care to the most vulnerable. These are savage policies. With the election of Trump and the control of all levers of the government by the Republican Party, impoverishing the poor and developing a punishing state has been accelerated to the point that a culture of cruelty has become a dominant feature of American society. Paul Krugman is on target when he states that “Republicans simply want to hurt people . . . specifically those from poor families.”5
Some theorists have argued that neoliberalism is dead. Actually, under Trump it is on steroids. Not only has Trump pushed its central organizing principles of deregulation, privatization, anti-intellectualism, and economic benefits for the rich to their limits, he has instituted policies that combine a range of anti-democratic forces with policies that will promote massive suffering and undercut the quality of life for millions of Americans.6 Millions will lose their health care, and environmental injuries and deaths will increase because regulatory agencies such as the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine have been “ordered to stop studying how pollutants produced by mountaintop-removal mining may lead to increased rates of cancer, birth defects, and respiratory disease.”7 As Ariel Dorfman observes, Trump’s policies are about more than a “felonious stupidity.”8 They are death-dealing policies that will have lethal consequences for the elderly, the poor, and vulnerable children. Under such circumstances, a culture of cruelty is the result of a systemic form of domestic terrorism.
Trump’s Culture of Cruelty
What is new since the 1980s—and especially evident under Trumpism—is that the culture of cruelty has become more venomous as it has moved to the center of political power. As Jean Franco explains in a different context, “Neither cruelty nor the exploitation of cruelty is new, but the lifting of the taboo, the acceptance and justification of cruelty and the rationale for cruel acts, have become a feature of modernity.”9
Further examples of the emboldened culture of cruelty, racism, and violence sweeping over American society can be found in the growing incidents of swastikas being painted on school walls, hate-fueled attacks subjecting people to racial taunts, right-wing attacks on immigrants, and legislation against transgender people. In a blow to civil liberties, the Republicans in eighteen states are introducing laws to curb protesting. Christopher Ingraham reports in the New York Times:
From Virginia to Washington state, legislators have introduced bills that would increase punishments for blocking highways, ban the use of masks during protests, indemnify drivers who strike protesters with their cars and, in at least once case, seize the assets of people involved in protests that later turn violent. The proposals come after a string of mass protest movements in the past few years, covering everything from police shootings of unarmed black men to the Dakota Access Pipeline to the inauguration of Trump.10
Emboldened by Trump’s attacks on the critical media and his incendiary criticism of immigrants and people of color, Poor Boys and similar groups are “recruiting battalions of mainly young white men for one-off confrontations with “those who stand up to Trump’s bigoted policies. What these movements have in common is their defense of Trump’s anti-immigration policies, their hatred of what Trump calls political correctness (code for being disallowed to spew racist language), their willingness to battle the so-called “commies,” and the embrace of a form of hyper-masculinity with its celebration of confrontation and combat, which has in some cases fueled modes of hatred resulting in murderous acts of violence.11
On display here is a culture of cruelty and violence that openly gloats about bullying and intolerance. States of social and literal death have become normalized.12 How else to explain White House budget chief Mick Mulvaney’s defense for drastic budget cuts for the most needy, including the Meals on Wheels program which provides food for the elderly, by arguing “it’s probably one of the most compassionate things we can do.”13 What Mulvaney does not mention is that the Trump administration’s budget “is shuffling $54 billion from an assortment of spending programs to defense [and] is ‘saving’ by spending it on Navy ships, F-35 fighter jets, and a border wall with Mexico, while cutting programs that help the old pay for heat during the winter or send low-income kids to after-school programs.”14
Cruelty is not only hardwired into the U.S. financial system, it is also a fundamental part of the criminal justice system, and with Jeff Sessions as Trump’s compromised attorney general, it has become exacerbated. For example, early in his appointment Sessions rescinded a 2013 policy that sought to limit, if not avoid, mandatory sentences. Claiming it was the “moral and just” policy to follow, Sessions “instructed the nation’s 2,300 federal prosecutors to pursue the most serious charges in all but exceptional cases.”15 Such sentencing is cruel, unforgiving, and racist. As Nancy Gertner and Chiraag Bains, a federal prosecutor and judge argue:
Mandatory minimums have swelled the federal prison population and led to scandalous racial disparities. They have caused untold misery at great expense. And they have not made us safer. . . . [Moreover,] they waste human potential. They harm the 5 million children who have or have had a parent in prison—including one in nine black children. And they wreak economic devastation on poor communities.16
Focusing on a culture of cruelty as one register of authoritarianism allows us to understand more deeply the conditions under which people are violated and destroyed. Violence is not an abstraction, it is the experience of coercive threat, terror, and suffering. As Brad Evans observes, violence “should never be studied in an objective and unimpassioned way. It points to a politics of the visceral that cannot be divorced from our ethical and political concerns.”17 Acknowledging its pervasive effects on people’s lives means understanding how Trump’s proposed policies and budget cuts would, for example, reduce funding for programs that provide education, legal assistance, and training for thousands of workers in high-hazard industries. As Judy Conti, a federal advocacy coordinator, notes, this “will mean more illness, injury and death on the job.”18
The ideological and emotional brutality that fuels such policies will deprive millions of Americans of their health insurance and increase expenses for those who are hurting or suffering the most, as I point out in more detail below. These “savage cuts in benefits for the poor and working class” will be relentlessly pursued when, according to Paul Krugman, they serve “to offset large tax cuts for the rich.”19 Of course, justifying tax cuts for the rich is coded into all right-wing narratives about increasing national economic prosperity. As Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute argues, it also does not make much sense to believe that “cutting corporate taxes is central to tax policy when corporate profits are near historic highs.”20
What we do know is that gutting federal spending for programs that help the economically disadvantaged in order to finance a mammoth military buildup and support huge tax breaks for the rich and corporations is part of a political project designed to wage a frontal attack on the welfare state and allow the rich to take over the commanding political, cultural, and economic institutions of American society. What makes the current historical moment unique is that narratives that reinforce such policies are at the heart of the ascendant far-right movement and come bundled with populist authoritarianism, intolerance, and nationalism. Breitbart News delivers such bundles daily and supports characters such as Roy Moore in its attempts to further crystallize such views into policy and law.
This type of political approach is strongly supported by the ultra-rich, including Robert Mercer, billionaire co-CEO of the $50 billion Renaissance Technologies hedge fund group, and former owner of a piece of the Breitbart News operation. Mercer, Goldman Sachs executives, and other members of the financial elite are precisely the kind of people that Donald Trump surrounds himself with most. In fact, the New York Times reported that as of May 28, 2017, Trump had met with at least 307 highly paid executives. I am sure their views on militarism, income inequality, privatization, and the common good have little in common with those working-class and lower-middle-class individuals who propelled Trump into office. Trump has not only turned the White House into a private business to expand his own and his family’s wealth, he has also morphed into “living proof that the long dreamed of Pax Republicana is just another form of war without end on the domestic front.”21 Cruelty now animates the center stage of American political and economic power.
Rather than respond only with a display of moral outrage (however well intended), interrogating a culture of cruelty suggests developing a political and moral lens for thinking through the present convergence of power, politics, and everyday life. It offers the promise of unveiling the way in which a nation demoralizes itself by adopting the position that it has no duty to provide safety nets for its citizens or to care for their well-being, even in a time of misfortune. Politically, it highlights the way structures of domination bear down on American communities and families, and how such constraints function to keep people in a state of existential crisis, if not outright despair.
Democracy withers when people spend most of their time trying to survive and no longer have access to the time, resources, and power that enable them to participate in shaping the conditions and institutions affecting their lives. A culture of cruelty does more than inflict pain and misery, it also undercuts people’s sense of agency. However, identifying the concept ethically makes visible how unjust a society has become. It helps us think through how life and death now converge in ways that fundamentally transform how we understand and imagine the act of living—if not simply surviving—in a society that has lost its moral bearings and sense of social responsibility. Within the last forty years, a harsh market fundamentalism has deregulated financial capital, imposed misery and humiliation on the poor through welfare cuts, and ushered in a new style of authoritarianism that preys upon and punishes the most vulnerable Americans.
The culture of cruelty threatens to reach new heights under the Trump regime. What I am arguing here is that we must view this predatory political climate as a central force that has pushed us toward a new form of fascism. Cruelty has become a primary register of the loss of democracy in the United States. The disintegration of democratic commitments offers a perverse index of degradation in a country governed by the rich, big corporations, and rapacious banks through the consolidation of a regime of punishment. This is a country that also reinforces the workings of a corporate-driven media culture whose commercial broadcasts sell audiences to advertisers via entertainment, violence, and intolerance.
Under the Bush-Cheney regime, state-sanctioned torture emerged as a legitimate practice of power during a time of war, and once again torture has been endorsed by a sitting president. It appears that the United States has become a country that celebrates what it should be ashamed of. For instance, under the Trump regime, vast numbers of individuals and communities are relegated to zones of social and economic abandonment, if not terminal exclusion. American capitalism has created a society not just of throwaway goods but also of throwaway populations in which people lose not only their material possessions but also their dignity, self-worth, and bodies. Such unethical grammars of violence find expression in modes of extreme cruelty. For instance, there are repeated reports of hospitals engaging in “patient dumping.” That is, hospitals putting people who are sick, mentally ill, and deathly vulnerable out into the street, often wearing nothing but their hospital gowns. Most recently, CBS and 60 Minutes have aired instances of hospitals in Baltimore and Los Angeles that removed patients from their facilities and left them stranded at bus stops and in sections of the downtown area.22 Such practices have a frightening resonance with policies followed by the Nazis through their secret “OperationT4” program designed to imprison and eventually kill patients considered mentally ill, disabled, or unworthy of life because they “weakened the race . . . and were obstacles to Germany’s renewal.”23 Another forgotten and terrifying similarity, one that is often overlooked in the established media, is that Trump like Hitler “mocked disabled people.”24
Under Trump, the machineries of death have gathered speed so as to accelerate the suffering, exclusion, incarceration, and death of those deemed redundant. In the current climate, state-sanctioned violence seeps into everyday life, while entirely engulfing a U.S. carceral system that embraces the death penalty and produces conditions of incarceration that house many prisoners in solitary confinement—a practice medical professionals consider one of the worst forms of torture. As Jonathan Schell has pointed out:
Our criminal justice system reeks of cruelty. The death penalty defies standards of decency accepted by all civilized countries. The incarceration of more than 2 million Americans—the highest proportion per capita in the world—is a frightening reflection on a country that seems to know of no remedy for social ills but punishment. The conditions of incarceration are fearful. . . . Prisoners can be held in solitary confinement for years in small, windowless cells in which they are kept for twenty-three hours of every day. Many prisoners—as well as Senator John McCain, who was a prisoner of war in North Vietnam—have reported that such isolation is more agonizing and destructive than physical torture.25
Demolition Budgets of Cruelty
State-inflicted abuse takes many forms. Budget cuts become a matter of life and death. This is particularly true when the vulnerable populations who are sick, homeless, and in dire poverty, including young children, are denied crucial public services. What is distinctive about this historical moment is that the most vital safety nets, social provisions, welfare policies, and health-care reforms are being undermined or are under threat of elimination by right-wing ideologues in the Trump administration. They pursue this course in order to further shore up the power and wealth of the financial elite, and to provide resources for militarism and other repressive state apparatuses that serve as a means of social control and the mode of choice for addressing social problems. For instance, Trump’s 2018 budget proposal, much of which was drafted by the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation, will create a degree of imposed hardship and misery that defies any sense of human decency and moral responsibility.26 Public policy analyst Robert Reich argues that “the theme that unites all of Trump’s [budget] initiatives so far is their unnecessary cruelty.”27 Reich writes:
His new budget comes down especially hard on the poor—imposing unprecedented cuts in low-income housing, job training, food assistance, legal services, help to distressed rural communities, nutrition for new mothers and their infants, funds to keep poor families warm, even “meals on wheels.” These cuts come at a time when more American families are in poverty than ever before, including 1 in 5 children. Why is Trump doing this? To pay for the biggest hike in military spending since the 1980s. Yet the U.S. already spends more on its military than the next 7 biggest military budgets put together. His plan to repeal and “replace” the Affordable Care Act will cause 14 million Americans to lose their health insurance next year, and 24 million by 2026. Why is Trump doing this? To bestow $600 billion in tax breaks over the decade to wealthy Americans. This windfall comes at a time when the rich have accumulated more wealth than at any time in the nation’s history.28
This is a demolition budget that cuts deeply into programs for the poor and would inflict unprecedented cruelty, misery, and hardship on millions of citizens and residents. This is a budget that punishes the most vulnerable and rewards those “wealthiest individuals and corporations who neither need nor deserve massive government support.”29 Julie Hirschfield, a writer for the New York Times, rightly observes that this budget, with its massive cuts in entitlement programs, attacks the very people who supported Trump, revealing the hypocrisy underlying his populist rhetoric. Considering the burden of his $4.1 trillion 2018 budget, she writes:
[This] would hit hardest many of the economically strained voters who propelled the president into office. Over the next decade, it calls for slashing more than $800 billion from Medicaid, the federal health program for the poor, while slicing $192 billion from nutritional assistance and $272 billion overall from welfare programs. And domestic programs outside of military and homeland security whose budgets are determined annually by Congress would also take a hit, their funding falling by $57 billion, or 10.6 percent.30
Trump’s 2018 federal budget would make life even worse for the rural poor, who would see $2.6 billion cut from infrastructure investments largely used for water and sewage improvements as well as cuts to federal funds used to provide energy assistance so the poor can heat their homes. Roughly $6 billion would be cut from a housing budget that benefits 4.5 million low-income households. Other programs on the chopping block include funds to support Habitat for Humanity, the homeless, legal aid, and a number of anti-poverty programs. Dan Rather argues that this is a budget that is “heartless and cruel” because it punishes the sick, those who need nutritional assistance, and people who rely on Medicaid.31 One striking example is evident in a budget that proposes to cut more than $72 billion in disability benefits that millions of Americans depend on. Trump’s budget appears to be motivated by a desire to annihilate the public good while driving an orgy of excessive investment in weapons of death and destruction.
If Congress accepts Trump’s proposal, poor students would be budgeted out of access to higher education as a result of a $3.9 billion cut from the federal Pell grant program, which provides tuition assistance for low-income students entering college. Federal funds for public schools would be redistributed to privately run charter schools, and vouchers would be available for religious schools. Trump’s budget cuts $9.2 billion from federal education spending for 2018 alone. Medical research would suffer, thanks to the proposed $6 billion cut to the National Institutes of Health. The curbing of environmental regulations, biomedical research, and other vital public investments will result in the spread of diseases, failure to develop cures for many illnesses, and the specter of major health and environmental disasters that will take an egregious toll on human life, especially for those who are the most vulnerable. What is further abhorrent morally and politically is that the cuts to discretionary programs actually constitute an appallingly small amount of costs in the federal budget.
Trump has also called for the elimination of the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services, making clear that his contempt for education, science, and the arts is part of an aggressive project to eliminate the institutions and public spheres that extend the capacity of people to be imaginative, think critically, and be well informed.32 Yet, simultaneously, Trump does nothing to lessen or eliminate the corporate control of mainstream media, ensuring instead that it functions largely as a propaganda machine for the financial elite and major corporations.
Trump seeks to impose deep and drastic cuts on the budgets of nineteen agencies designed to help the poor, students, public education, academic research, and the arts. Whatever savings result from these cuts will be used to expand the machineries of war, militarization, and detention. The culture of cruelty is on full display here, as millions would suffer from the lack of loans, federal aid, and basic resources. The winners would be the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security, the private prison industry, and the institutions and personnel needed to expand the police state. What Trump has provided in his 2018 federal budget proposal is a blueprint for eliminating the remnants of the welfare state, while transforming American society into a “war-obsessed, survival-of-the fittest dystopia.”33 Trump’s neoliberal austerity policies and priorities are crystal clear not only in the draconian $4.1 trillion cuts he makes to so many vital social programs that benefit the poor, particularly children, but also in the $5 trillion tax benefits for the ultra-rich and big corporations.34
War is a central category for understanding Trump’s budget proposals in two related ways. First, war functions as an organizing principle for waging an assault against vulnerable populations while expanding the power of the police and punishing state. Second, the ongoing production of the machinery of destruction and death provides enormous profits for the wealthiest individuals and corporations driving the arms, defense, and border security industries. In the first instance, war as an organizing principle of society is particularly evident in the Trump administration’s savage cuts to programs that give hope and a small measure of security to the 14.5 million children who live in poverty, lack health care, endure homelessness, and live with disabilities. And these are in addition to the cuts that will come from Trump’s obscene cuts as a result of his tax reform policies. Marian Wright Edelman makes this point clear in arguing that Trump’s “immoral budget declares war on America’s children, our most vulnerable group” and describes some of the more egregious policy cuts in the 2018 budget, which, she says:
Slashes billions over ten years from Medicaid which nearly 37 million children rely on for a healthy start in life and which pays for nearly half of all births and ensures coverage for 40 percent of our children with special health care needs. . . . Rips $5.7 billion from CHIP (Children’s Health Insurance Program), which covers nearly 9 million children in working families ineligible for Medicaid. . . . Snatches food out of the mouths and stomachs of hungry children by slicing $193 billion over ten years from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which some still call food stamps. SNAP feeds nearly 46 million people including nearly 20 million children. . . . Whacks $72 billion over ten years from the Supplemental Security Income Program (SSI), which more than 8 million children and adults with the most severe disabilities depend on to keep going.35
In the second instance, war as a revenue-producing program is a high priority for the Trump administration, as evident in Trump’s proposed budget, which allocates initially $2.6 billion to work on the wall planned for the Mexican border while also increasing the military budget by $54 billion.36 As Edelman observes:
President Trump’s 2018 Budget includes an estimated $5 trillion tax package for the wealthiest individuals and corporations [and] increases base defense spending $54 billion in 2018 alone (and $489 billion over ten years). That’s $147,945,205 a day, $6,164,384 an hour and $102,739 a minute. The U.S. military budget is already the largest military budget in the world. We spend more on the military than the next eight countries combined (China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, India, France, United Kingdom, Japan, and Germany). [The 2018 budget] spends $2.6 billion new dollars on border security including $1.6 billion for a down payment on the President’s proposed obscene wall at the Mexican border estimated to cost $10 to $20 billion before completion and after false campaign promises that the Mexican government would pay.37
Under Trump, it has also become clear that an increasingly militarized United States is now on a war footing internationally. It is no longer overstating the case— given the nuclear escalations with North Korea—to say that Trump poses a growing threat to the planet itself. On the home front, the war on youth of color is being expanded. For example, under Trump, Americans have witnessed the rapid mobilization of a domestic war against undocumented immigrants, Muslims, people of color, young people, the elderly, public education, science, and democracy. The moral obscenity and reactionary politics that inform Trump’s budget were summed up by Bernie Sanders:
At a time of massive income and wealth inequality, when 43 million Americans are living in poverty and half of older Americans have no retirement savings, we should not slash programs that senior citizens, children, and working people rely on in order to provide a massive increase in spending to the military industrial complex. Trump’s priorities are exactly the opposite of where we should be heading as a nation.38
As more and more people find themselves living in a society tilted toward waging war and serving the rich, it becomes difficult for the public to acknowledge or even to understand the everyday hardship and misery that an increasing number of American families and communities will have to endure in the age of Trump. The celebration of human suffering and policies that produce it were on full display in Republicans’ relentless campaign to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act.
Attacks on Health Care Are a Threat to National Security
The health-care reform bills proposed by Republicans in the House and Senate have generated heated discussions across a vast ideological and political spectrum. On the right, senators such as Rand Paul and Ted Cruz have endorsed a new level of cruelty—one that has a long history among the radical right—by arguing that the current Senate bill does not cut enough social services and provisions for the poor, children, the elderly, and other vulnerable groups and needs to be even more friendly to corporate interests by providing massive tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.
The same message is hammered home constantly in right-wing media. For instance, Fox News commentator Lisa Kennedy Montgomery, in a discussion about the Senate bill, stated without apparent irony that rising public concerns over the suffering, misery, and death that would result from this policy bordered on “hysteria,” since “we are all going to die anyway.”39 The lack of substance in Montgomery’s remarks speaks for itself.
On the other side of the ideological and political divide, liberals such as Robert Reich have described right-wing efforts to destroy the Affordable Care Act as attempts to further enrich the wealthiest at the expense of millions of Americans whose medical security would collapse as a result.40 In the latest Senate version, tax reductions for the rich have been modified, but that seems inconsequential given the political and economic benefits the rich gain from the bill. Other commentators, such as Laila Lalami of The Nation, have reasoned that what we are witnessing with such policies is another example of political contempt for the poorest and most vulnerable on the part of right-wing politicians and pundits.41 These arguments are only partly right and do not go far enough in their criticisms of the new political dynamics and mode of authoritarianism that have overtaken the United States. Put more bluntly, they suffer from limited political horizons.
What we do know about the proposed Republican Party tax reform, federal budget, and health care policies, in whatever form, is that they will gold-plate the golf carts of the rich before securing affordable health care, college education, or tax relief for average American families. The notion that the government has a responsibility to care for its citizens and that society should be organized around the principles of mutual respect, care, and compassion has been under attack since the 1970s with the advent of the current form of capitalism—neoliberalism. The latest measure of such an attack is evident in various versions of failed Senate bills that would have led to massive reductions in Medicare spending. Medicare covers 20 percent of all Americans, or 15 million people, 49 percent of all births, 60 percent of all children with disabilities, and 64 percent of all nursing home residents, many of whom will be left homeless without this support.
Under the current version of the Senate attempts at gutting Obamacare and proposing a new policy, it has been estimated that a possible 18 to 22 million people will lose their health insurance coverage, accompanied by massive cuts proposed to food-stamp programs that benefit at least 43 million people. Republican health care proposals allow insurance companies to charge more money from the most vulnerable. Such proposals would have cut maternity care and phased out coverage for emergency services. Moreover, as Lalami points out, the first U.S. Senate proposal included “nearly $1 trillion in tax cuts, about half of which will flow to those who make more than $1 million per year.”42 The latter figure is significant when measured against the fact that Medicaid would see a nearly $800 billion cut in the next ten years. This onslaught upon the health of the American people and the savage limits placed on their access to decent health care is compounded by fact that the United States is the wealthiest country in the world and yet, according to the World Health Organization, ranks “37th in overall health care amongst the world’s countries.”43
Under Trump, the culture of cruelty is being pushed to its limits. For instance, not only is he threatening to expel 200,000 Salvadorans and 800,000 Dreamers from the United States, he has allowed states to impose work requirements on Medicaid recipients. Such savagery boggles the mind when one thinks about the harshness of this requirement and the misery and increased suffering it will impose on populations that are already barely able to survive. Writing for the Center for American Progress, Katherine Gallagher Robbins and Rachel West sum up the dire nature of this law well. They write:
This week, the Trump administration issued policy guidance that effectively ends Medicaid as we know it, allowing states to place punitive work requirements on certain Medicaid recipients—more than 7 in 10 of whom are caregivers or in school. Although these so-called work requirement policies may seem reasonable at first glance, in practice, they’re a way to strip away health insurance from struggling unemployed and underemployed workers.44
It gets worse. The most recent Senate bill will drastically decrease social services and health care in rural America, and one clear consequence will be rising mortality rates.45 In addition, Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, co-author of a recent article in the Annals of Internal Medicine, has estimated that if health insurance is taken away from 18 to 22 million people, “it raises . . . death rates by between 3 and 29 percent. And the math on that is that if you take health insurance away from 22 million people, about 29,000 of them will die every year, annually, as a result.”46 An earlier study by the American Journal of Public Health was more ominous, estimating that “nearly 45,000 annual deaths are associated with lack of health insurance.”47 Given that fact, Republicans’ plot to kill the Affordable Care Act can and should be seen as a premeditated right-wing attack with far more destructive power than Timothy McVeigh’s Oklahoma attack.
Progressives need new ways to understand and resist the rise of authoritarianism in the United States. Single-issue strategies, whether aimed at regressive tax cuts, police violence, or environmental destruction, are not enough. Nor is the focus on struggles for personal emancipation and minority rights adequate as the basis for a comprehensive politics. Nor is the traditional Marxist discourse of exploitation and accumulation by dispossession adequate for understanding the current historical conjuncture. The problem is not merely one of exploitation but one of exclusion. This politics of exclusion, Slavoj Žižek argues, “is no longer about the old class division between workers and capitalists, but . . . about not allowing some people to participate in public life.”48 Dr. Stephen Grosz calls our collective predicament a “catastrophe of indifference.” The disaster of gangster capitalism is that it preys relentlessly upon society looking for wealth to extract and easy targets to extract it from. As it does, increasing social injustice, environmental collapse, and economic despair are normalized, and protest squelched. It is this combination of conditions that has turned everyday life for countless families and communities into an American nightmare.
What does health care, or justice itself, mean in a country dominated by corporations, the military, and the ruling 1 percent? Open attacks on affordable health care make clear that the current problem of corporate capitalism is not only about stealing resources or an intensification of the exploitation of labor, but also about a politics of exclusion, cruelty, and the propagation of forms of social and literal death, through what Zygmunt Bauman described as “the most conspicuous cases of social polarization, of deepening inequality, and of rising volumes of human poverty, misery, and humiliation.”49
A culture of myopia now propels single-issue analyses detached from broader issues. The current state of progressive politics has collapsed into ideological silos, and feeds “a deeper terror—of helplessness, to which uncertainty is but a contributing factor,”50 as Bauman put it, which all too often is transformed into a depoliticizing cynicism or a misdirected anger. The fear of disposability has created a new ecology of insecurity and despair that murders dreams, squelches any sense of an alternative future, and cripples the capacity for critical thought and informed agency. Under such circumstances, the habits of oligarchy and authoritarianism saturate everyday life.
Traditional liberal and progressive discourses about our current quagmire are not wrong. They are simply incomplete, and they do not grasp a major shift that has taken place in the United States since the late 1970s. That shift is organized around what Bauman, Stanley Aronowitz, Saskia Sassen, and Brad Evans have called a new kind of politics, one in which entire populations are considered excess and consigned to fend for themselves.
Such expulsions and social homelessness, whether of poor African Americans, Mexican immigrants, Muslims, or Syrian refugees, constitute a new and accelerated level of oppression. Moreover, buttressed by a market-driven appeal to a commercialized individualism, a distrust of all social bonds, a survival-of-the-fittest ethic, and a willingness to view economic activity as separate from social costs, neoliberal policies are now enacted in which public services are underfunded, bad schools become the norm, health care as a social provision is abandoned, child care is seen as an individual responsibility, and social assistance is looked on with disdain. Evil now appears not merely in the overt oppression of the state but as a widespread refusal on the part of many Americans to react to the suffering of others, which is all too often viewed as self-inflicted.
Under this new regime of massive cruelty and disappearance, the social state is gradually defunded and replaced with a carceral one. Resources once used for community development, education, and family social services are used instead for increased surveillance and militarization. Donald Trump’s influence further skews the system toward centralized authority and away from egalitarian social justice. The limits of his own authority and power over the U.S. justice and law enforcement systems openly frustrate Trump’s desire to dominate adversaries and thwart criminal investigations into him and his staff. “Just this week,” reported the New York Times on November 3, 2017:
. . . he denounced the criminal justice system as “a joke” and “a laughingstock.” He demanded that the suspect in the New York terrorist attack be executed. He spent Friday berating the Justice Department and FBI for not investigating his political opponents. He then turned to the military justice system and called a court-martial decision “a complete and total disgrace.”51
Trump’s authoritarianism ignores how, in many communities of color, behaviors such as jaywalking, panhandling, and walking or driving while Black, are increasingly targeted, fined, and criminalized. Schools have become feeders into the criminal prison-industrial complex for many young people, especially youth of color. State terrorism bears down with greater intensity on immigrants, minorities of color or religion, and members of the lowest economic class. The official state message is to catch, punish, and imprison excess populations treated as criminals rather than save lives.
The carceral state and a culture of fear have become the foundational elements that drive the new politics of disposability.52 Trumpism’s relentless attacks on the Affordable Care Act openly expose—and even celebrate—a politics of disposability. American families who benefit from Obamacare are disparaged as parasites by the alt-right. Republican efforts seek to take federal resources used for health care subsidies and gift them to the wealthiest Americans at tax time instead. The New York Times has reported that more than 59,000 Americans died of drug overdoses in 2016, the largest year-over-year increase ever recorded.53 Despite the crisis, Republican health care proposals attempt to cut funds earmarked for programs that serve Americans who urgently need medical treatment and care.
A politics of disposability and cruelty thrives on distractions—the game show commercialization of U.S. politics—as well as what might be called a politics of disappearance. That is, a politics enforced daily in the mainstream media, which functions as a “disimagination machine” and renders invisible deindustrialized communities, decaying schools, neighborhoods that resemble slums in the developing world, millions of incarcerated people of color, and elderly people locked in understaffed nursing homes.
We live in an age that Brad Evans and I have called an age of multiple expulsions, suggesting that once something is expelled it becomes invisible. In the current age of disposability, the systemic edges of authoritarianism have moved to the center of politics, just as politics is now an extension of state violence. Moreover, in the age of disposability, what was once considered extreme and unfortunate has now become a matter of common sense, whether we are talking about policies that actually kill people or those that strip away the humanity and dignity of millions.
Disposability and cruelty are not new in U.S. history, but their more predatory formations are back in new and more expansive forms. Moreover, what is unique about the contemporary politics of disposability is how it has become official policy, normalized through narratives of national security, economic security, and “Making America Great Again.” The moral and social sanctions for greed and avarice that emerged through Reaganism flourish once again under Trumpism.
With the rise of the new authoritarianism coded into slogans of national greatness and law and order, financial elites intensify political pressure for state redirection of resources used for social benefits intended to decrease human suffering, hardship, and early death.
In such a climate, notions of freedom are divorced from social and economic rights and are increasingly redefined to mean decreased government regulation of corporate power, and freedom for the rich to pay less taxes. Freedom from injustice, corruption, and corporate crime simply does not factor in. As Zygmunt Bauman and Leonidas Donskis have observed: “our freedom today becomes localized in the sphere of consumption and self-renewal, but it has lost any connection with the most important thing: believing that you can change something in the world.”54 Countering these trends and winning the battle over resources, institutions, and power requires nothing less than the creation of a new political and economic social order.
Manifestations of domestic terrorism have expanded, and this more expansive level of repression and intensification of state violence negates and exposes the compromising discourse of neoliberalism, while reproducing new levels of systemic violence. Effective struggle against such repression would combine a democratically energized cultural politics of resistance and hope with a politics aimed at offering all workers a living wage and all citizens a guaranteed standard of living, a politics dedicated to providing decent education, housing, and health care to all residents of the United States. Such struggle also involves refusing to equate capitalism with democracy, and struggling to create a mass movement that embraces a radical democratic future.