The Seduction of Cruelty

Trump remains popular because people can take pleasure from other people's suffering

Could a Diet Coke addiction lead to a form of demonic possession?

I am in Lisbon now. Out of the United States, I feel my nervous system relaxing slightly. I am fighting ADD from my ongoing efforts to track the daily horrors of Trumpocalypse. I am getting overwhelmed by Substack too. Substack has turned into the most exciting place on the Internet for deep reflection and commentary. Since Andreessen Horowitz — a VC firm run by Trump supporters — are its main investor, I feel a degree of concern about its independence and its future, and, also, its hidden purpose. On Substack, I receive a daily barrage of news and outcries from many authors. We are all isolated behind our little paywalls. Without some cohesive structure, we may add to the noise without creating a unified new signal.

My concern is that, for the core members of Trump/Musk’s coup against democracy and the rule of law, there may be no limit on how far they will go at this point. Musk is now sporting an atrocious Hitler/Himmler haircut, calling more attention to his Nazi fixation. It is unbelievably sad that somebody with so much power wants to link himself with the most destructive ideology of the Twentieth Century. On the acerbic MindWar: The Psychological War on Democracy, Jim Stewart writes: “He is a mentally ill, emotionally broken teenage boy committing mass violence in order to make the world safe for white people.” Stewart continues:

Elon Musk wants to destroy the social safety net in America so he can disempower and identify the ethnic groups he wants to imprison, enslave, and ultimately eliminate. He wants to incentivize white births because he’s terrified of being replaced himself, a condition he was born into as a son of apartheid South Africa. He’s fine with dismantling the health care system because the only people who will die from measles, in his mind, deserve it. It’s not just being a memelord, and it’s not just greed, it’s enacting national eugenics as policy.

I wish I found this farfetched instead of a compelling analysis.

Trump is now ignoring court orders. This, according to historians, tips us over into “Constitutional crisis” (Read “Black Saturday: The Day the United States Ceased to Be a Constitutional Democracy”). Since US Marshalls won’t intervene to stop them, the regime can do whatever they want without fearing legal reprisals. This means there is no longer a functional rule of law in the United States.

Many people in the U.S. I know and respect — people with resources, running companies, with massive social media reach and influence — still don’t grasp the severity of the situation. Some people still buy into the marketing hype around Elon Musk, which is now obsolete. Or, if they understand what’s going on, they choose to stay silent, detached. This is a short-term self-preservation strategy. It may backfire on them — see history for details.

For those of us who try to preserve some faith in human nature, the underlying — hard to accept — reality is that many millions of people are followers of Trump because of his cruelty and vindictiveness, not despite it. In “The ( Righteous) Cruelty Is the Point”, Noah Berlatsky writes: “Fascism and Trump are essentially religions of sadism. People embrace MAGA because they want to be cruel; They want to hurt people, and that cruelty… creates a sense of belonging and togetherness. Evil feels good because it feels like community.”

I think this is an important insight, irrefutable at this point. I explored the secret “pleasure of doing evil” a few years back, in this essay:

I have many younger friends whose parents have become Fox News addicts and Trump fanatics. They watch the nation unravel from their living room couch, thrilled by his vindictiveness and the intensifying brutality of the regime. Trump’s people are playing this up. This ASMR video — published on the official White House website — shows a Venezuelan man being bound by excessive amounts of chains, deported to Panama or wherever:

The only reason to post such a video is to give Trump’s MAGA base a dark frisson of sadistic pleasure.

When you realize that many of Trump’s followers actually exult in his cruelty, it becomes harder to imagine a sane or reasonable way for us to get out of this catastrophe, without a severe bottoming out (and a lot of suffering). Berlatsky notes:

One reason people don’t really want to see fascism in these terms is that there isn’t an obvious way to combat it. If fascism builds on economic anxiety, you can, in theory, introduce better, economic policies, and then people will stop enjoying cruelty… If fascism is powered by people‘s desire for exciting narratives that allow them to hurt others – well. That’s bleak.

Berlatsky offers some hope, however: “People find stories of violence, virtue, and cruelty satisfying. But that’s not the only thing they find satisfying. If people are offered concrete policies that will help them, they will sometimes choose those, even if they also find fascist narratives appealing.” Also, fascist narrative become harder to maintain over time: “Cruelty needs to be constantly justified through elaborate fanciful narratives about the iniquity of marginalized people. Calling out those lies can be effective… Antifascist victories can pave the way for more antifascist victories. And framing the fight against fascism as brace and heroic (which it is!) can help provide a counter to fascist fantasies of heroism and violence.” So that is a small smidgen of hope.

Beyond the enjoyment of cruelty and sadism, I believe many Trump followers feel a strong death wish: A pull toward what Freud named Thanatos¹. For many people across the U.S., life has been stultifying, boring, and vacuous for decades. As Ralph Waldo Emerson realized 200 years ago: “The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself.” To go back and forth from office, school, or mall to a home where you sink into solipsistic virtual entertainments in a lifeless suburb or second-rate American city designed for cars, not people: This is a terrible way to live.

It isn’t surprising that many people, consciously or not, want to destroy the whole construct.