IT’S NOT JUST THE CRUELTY, IT’S THE STRUGGLE

Reprinted from my Substack (subscribe for free):

In 2018, The Atlantic published, “The Cruelty Is the Point,” where Adam Serwer explored the sadism animating Trump supporters. It went a long way to explain what was unique about that historical moment. I’m not sure cruelty alone could have sustained what we are witnessing now. We might have to drill deeper.

If you’re getting your news within an echo chamber these days, you might be under the impression President Trump’s reckless and destructive leadership is costing him public support. There are anecdotal accounts of regretful MAGA voters turning against him, but the numbers tell a different story. With Trump’s favorables continuing to outpace disapproval, we are prompted to ask if, when, or how this will end.

Visit just about any social media thread on the topic, and you will find some voices prophesying a course correction through conventional means: judicial rulings against the administration, special elections tipping the scale in the House, and the midterms in ’26 returning Democrats to a majority in Congress.

Others, who no longer have faith in checks and balances or the prospects of an electoral remedy, think it will take a tragedy or trauma of enormous scale for all the President’s men and women to turn on him.

I try to remain hopeful, but I’m mostly skeptical of either outcome. First, we may not possess the strength to rewind what’s happened. There are already signs of Constitutional crisis, as Trump, Musk, and Vance have all publicly declared the courts as illegitimate authorities. With open disdain for democracy, attempts to make the Federal Election Commission a partisan agency, and a demonstrated willingness to illegally take control of government computer systems, it’s reasonable to doubt that free and fair elections will create change in Washington.

Second, we assume the public has a shared awareness of what’s happening. Try asking, “Can you believe what Trump is doing to this country?” of your MAGA acquaintances, and they’ll likely look at you as if you just asked them to burn a flag in a police station.

Since most of our information comes from tightly curated media silos, it’s doubtful we’re even considering the same realities. Our weapons of mass distraction and propaganda, sans meaningful fact-checking, can make suffering a virtue, and blame can be placed just about anywhere. Remember, we have a president who is on recordlying or making misleading statements 30,573 times in his first term, and he was reelected. Dishonesty and believing dishonesty is kind of our national pastime.

Third, our capacity for rationalization is more powerful than ever. After Festinger published his theory of cognitive dissonance in the 1950s, Robert A. Heinlein argued that we are not rational, but rationalizing, animals (or “coherence-seeking, fiction-making animals”); and research in the social sciences has confirmed it. We will go to extraordinary lengths to restore cognitive balance, which is how facism happens.  But, it’s more than a simple self-defense mechanism designed to protect our psychological well-being. It runs deeper than that. 

In his 1940 review of Mein Kampf, George Orwell described the peculiar genius of Nazism when he wrote, “Hitler …  knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades. … Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people ‘I offer you a good time,’ Hitler has said to them ‘I offer you struggle, danger and death,’ and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet.”

Stanford political scientist, Francis Fukuyama, hinted at this problem when he declared “The End of History” in 1989. The U.S. had won the Cold War, and democratic capitalism appeared to have triumphed over its rivals. Fukuyama wasn’t arguing events wouldn’t continue to happen, he just thought that – if history is the chronicle of one governing idea being replaced by a stronger idea – the government and economy of the U.S. would continue to reign as the victor. He foresaw potential trouble in this, though: “The end of history will be a very sad time. The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one’s life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands … Perhaps this very prospect of centuries of boredom at the end of history will serve to get history started once again.”

After having to recant and revise his end of history theory over the decades, he returned to this idea of struggle last year in an interview with The Atlantic. He says, “[I]f people can’t struggle on behalf of peace and democracy, then they’re going to want to struggle againstpeace and democracy, because what they want to do is struggle, and they can’t recognize themselves as full human beings unless they’re engaged in the struggle.”

The struggle is evidence of the virtue for which we fight. Let me say that again: The struggle is evidence of the virtue for which we fight. For many of our fellow citizens, especially those influenced by evangelical Christianity, suffering is redemptive. It is a signal of righteous effort. And their persecution complex, the martyrdom act, hasn’t been for nothing. Trump gives them something to believe in. 

When your epistemology and cognition have been altered to assume a particular reality, it’s not hard to understand why American citizens who’ve lost their jobs, their health, their families, and their futures can rally in support of the man who made it all happen. I mean, generations of U.S. voters have proven to have turbocharged their rationalization machines by voting directly against their own interests year after year. 

So, even catastrophe might not be enough to change their minds. Persuasion may be dead. We may have to resort to other measures. I don’t pretend to know what they are yet, but I’m not comforted in our current solutions.

Boosting people’s spirits with empty optimism is to have faith in things unseen, untrustworthy, and potentially unheard of. We must contend with the struggle. It’s real.