Race, Cruelty and the Death of Shame
Before I left for my trip through the American “hinterland” on April 12th I had sat with Ron and Nick in their living room in Washington, D.C. to discuss the issues of cruelty and race. Ron is a Professor of Psychology and Divinity. And Nick, who is British, has had a long career in international development having seen the world. We talked about the connection between Christianity and the American psyche and about the different American and European experiences on a whole range of cultural issues. Our conversation touched on many phenomena about which I would later hear from the people I met on my journey, issues that also related to what I saw zapping through the TV channels in my hotel room late at night. It might therefore be worthwhile to compare how the more academic analysis of Trump’s America by my Washington friends tallied with the personal encounters on my five-week-long road trip of 2750 miles.
At the beginning of the American experience stood cruelty and racism. “In Europe,” Nick says, “we could export both through our approach to colonialism – we knew what was happening, but we didn’t have to see it. But here in the US they had to live with it. It’s given us Europeans a legacy of piety and hypocrisy, it’s given the Americans an astonishing tolerance for, maybe enthusiasm for, cruelty.” Cruelty remained endemic in a frontier society, it became a means to expand the nation. Racism was America’s “national sin”, as Abraham Lincoln put it, “deeply rooted in the psyche and traditions of our nation” to quote Martin Luther King. And today, Nick thinks, “race is the glue to all factors that brought on Donald Trump”.
As a black psychologist Ron can list the key political messages which marked the conservative realignment over more than half a century. There was Richard Nixon’s law and order campaign in 1968 as an antidote to the anti-war protests and the protests and riots stemming from the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. And, spurred on by the political rhetoric of the Republican party, conservatives increasingly viewed Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Great Society” as entitlements to black people. But it really began with Ronald Reagan starting his election campaign of 1982 in Philadelphia, Mississippi where only 18 years earlier three civil rights workers were murdered, and later using the issue of race by referring to black “welfare queens”. The older President Bush followed 1988 with his notorious and decisive “Willy Horton Ad” playing on white fears of black crime. In 1992 the Democratic candidate Bill Clinton copied this winning racial electioneering with his “Sister Souljah” remark, branding himself as a centrist by distancing himself from the controversial comments of a black rapper.
To Ron this “normalization of racialization” just showed how tenuous the achievements of the Civil Rights Movement had been, “only indemnifying the conscience of white Americans and functioning as a denial mechanism, pretending that we’ve achieved equality.” The resistance to Civil Rights legislation grew with the emergence of the Tea Party in 2008. There was more scapegoating to cover up “the grotesque inequalities after the financial crisis”. With his “permission to be brutal again”, Ron sees Donald Trump not as an aberration but as the symbol for the advancing “desensitization of our culture”.
And as a minister in a liberal church Ron has watched the parallel rightward shift of white churches from the fundamentalism of Jerry Fallwell in the 80s to now 89% of Evangelicals voting for Trump. His judgement of those voters is harsh and clear: “They are bigots first and Christians second. To them white supremacy is more important than Christian faith.” In those churches the trained psychologist detects “moral injury”, “conscience crippled”, “a lack of empathy”, and “degradation by their commitment to denial, obfuscation and scapegoating.” In this right-wing version of Christianity, he adds, “the social Other has become the sinner who deserves punishment”.
For both friends, the political effects of the accelerating political-religious turn to the extreme right are clearly visible, and they find the resulting damage deeply worrying. In the world of alternative media “Europe appears as a woke mess.” In Nick’s view, the old continent is threatening to America “because it undercuts the clear God-given binaries of good & bad, male & female, black & white.” With the exception Russia, of course, as that is the one country that has done it right – it has emerged as a white Christian empire that has kept black people out of the nation and its church. While the citizens of “woke Europe” still view social benefits as an achievement of their post-war welfare states, today’s conservative America “sees health care and social benefits as white tax money going to undeserving black people”.
Social media has harnessed the ability to turn cruelty into a spectator sport, says Nick. “People are being given a constant diet of cruelty, of racism weaponized, of other people’s misery provided for your enjoyment. It is an addiction that always needs to be fed.” So, inflicting misery on immigrants can be a good ploy for months. “But where does it end?” he asks. “Can they do enough cruelty to compensate for cuts to Medicaid?” Five weeks after our conversation Donald Trump’s ‘Big and Beautiful Budget Bill’ with its envisaged cuts in Medicaid suggests that they can.
On my journey through America’s back country, I have encountered the lack of empathy for certain groups in jokes and innuendos and listened to racist stereotypes if expressed in indirect ways. When the host of the late-night “Gutfeld Show” on Fox TV and his guests “refreshingly” discuss the day’s events the lack of empathy and cruelty towards weak, disabled, migrant or black citizens is palpable in an often mocking or scornful discourse. When the people I met referred to contested social or demographic dynamics it was never themselves but always their neighbours who acted upon their racial prejudices. “They left town because they felt black people had taken over.” And the parroting of Fox TV lingo by the Donald Trump voters behind counters, at bar tables or in the streets, inevitably ended with the racially loaded sentence that they could not vote for the Democratic Party because “they were giving all our money away.”
When my two friends in 96-Percent pro-democratic Washington were drawing a picture of America where a psychopath and narcistic leader in the White House knows no rules and offers his followers cruelty instead of quality of life and gives them permission to let loose their own cruelty and racism, it initially sounded quite harsh to me. But after my – always friendly - meetings and chats with voters of Donald Trump in small cities and rural America, I can’t really refute their analysis.
What are the challenges to overcome racism and white supremacy which lie at the roots of the rise and reign of Donald Trump? Ron has extensively written about this from the perspective of a teaching and practising psychologist. For any progress, he suggests, Americans must address the “denial of racism/white supremacy”, restore the “impaired empathy” and learn “how to deal with shame.” These, he is the first to admit, are not easy tasks for a society which has been regressing in all these fields. The denial of white supremacy is still prevalent; Vice-President JD Vance has recently distanced himself from traditional concepts of compassion and empathy, and Donald Trump has amply shown that he knows no decency or shame.
At a congressional hearing in 1954, Ron recalls a historic challenge to untrammelled power, the anti-communist and racist Senator Joseph McCarthy had clearly overstepped his brief by incriminating an innocent person. But when he was asked by the courageous chief council of the US army “have you left no sense of decency”, this question, broadcast live on national television, finished the powerful Senator’s political career. Whereas Donald Trump, Ron says, “has built his whole career on the death of shame.”