The Descent Into Barbarism

It's been there all along, really. The equation of dissent with treason in the oughts. The demonization of every opponent in the 1990s. The vicious misogyny toward "libbers" in the '70s. The beatings of hippies and flower children in the '60s. The hatred of the New Deal in the '30s.

Call it a legacy of slavery. A culture that did not just condone but defended, celebrated and killed hundreds of thousands of their fellow Americans to maintain the ultimate cruelty of slavery does not abandon its bloodthirsty soul in ten years, or a hundred, or 150.

Jonathan Schell at The Nation:

Presidential campaign debates are designed to give the candidates an opportunity to express themselves to voters. But the audiences, too, sometimes make their views known. That happened in the Republican debates on September 7 and 12, in two episodes that have been much noticed. On the 7th, NBC’s Brian Williams asked Texas Governor Rick Perry whether at any time while presiding over the executions of the 234 people who had suffered the death penalty under his governorship (it has now risen to 235) he had “struggled to sleep at night with the idea that any one of those might have been innocent.”

Perry had slept fine. Texas, he said, has a very “thoughtful” judicial system. Then he went on to issue a kind of threat. He said, “If you come into our state…and you kill…one of our citizens…you will be executed.” The crowd applauded enthusiastically.

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At the GOP debate on the 12th, there was another public expression of enthusiasm for loss of life in Texas. CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked Texas Congressman Ron Paul, who favors repeal of President Obama’s health plan, what medical response he would recommend if a young man who had decided not to buy health insurance were to go into a coma.

Paul answered, “That’s what freedom is all about: taking your own risks.” He seemed to be saying that if the young man died, that was his problem.

There were cheers from the crowd.

Blitzer pressed on: “But Congressman, are you saying that society should just let him die?” Someone in the audience shouted, “Yeah!” And the crowd roared in approval.

A characteristic that these exchanges have in common is cruelty. Cruelty is a close cousin to injustice, yet it is different. Injustice and its opposite, justice—perhaps the most commonly used standards for judging the health of the body politic—are political criteria par excellence, and apply above all to systems and their institutions. Cruelty and its opposites, kindness, compassion and decency, are more personal. They are apolitical qualities that nevertheless have political consequences. A country’s sense of decency stands outside and above its politics, checking and setting limits on abuses. An unjust society must reform its laws and institutions. A cruel society must reform itself.

There have been many signs recently that the United States has been traveling down a steepening path of cruelty. It’s hard to say why such a thing is occurring, but it seems to have to do with a steadily growing faith in force as the solution to almost any problem, whether at home or abroad. Enthusiasm for killing is an unmistakable symptom of cruelty. It also appeared after the killing of Osama bin Laden, which touched off raucous celebrations around the country. It is one thing to believe in the unfortunate necessity of killing someone, another to revel in it. This is especially disturbing when it is not only government officials but ordinary people who engage in the effusions.

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We might also draw a connection between these abuses and the current direction of budgetary decisions, in which, as in the readiness to deny healthcare to the dying, a pitiless will to deprive suffering people of whatever aid they may be receiving is evident. The list of cuts, achieved or proposed, on the right-wing agenda is too long to recite, but recent examples include the astonishing obstruction of assistance to recent victims of Hurricane Irene and Tropical Storm Lee unless other programs are cut; opposition to extending unemployment benefits; defeat of the Dream Act, which would give immigrant children a path to citizenship; opposition to spending for the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (S-CHIP) as well as Head Start, and so on. It appears that no one is so unfortunate that he or she is exempt from spending cuts, while at the same time no one is so fortunate as to be ineligible for a tax cut. Budget decisions do not involve the death penalty, yet for many they are matters of life and death.

The cruelty of a society cannot be quantified any more than its reserves of decency can. Nor can either be legislated, though both can be manifested in legislation. For all that, there can be no doubt that basic decisions are silently made in the hearts and minds of millions that are prior to any laws, and probably more important. If they go one way, a movement of hundreds of thousands suddenly arises, seemingly out of nowhere, to protest a wrongful execution. When they go the other way, you wake up one day to hear, with a chill running down your spine, a room full of people cheering because several hundred of their fellow citizens have been killed.

Read the whole thing.