We become depraved by degrees. Germans did not become Jew killers in a day. It took years of conditioning, via propaganda, and then steady practice, via party and state brutality, to shed their humanity and become a nation of functional sociopaths. The Hamas terrorists who murdered babies in their cribs last week weren’t stamped with pathological hatred at birth. It was an acquired habit, the result of a process of moral dulling and rage sharpening. No doubt some foes of Hamas will now rejoice at the sight of Palestinian babies blown to smithereens in retaliation. It’s not a terribly long distance from eye for an eye to baby for a baby.
If you look around American politics, you can see the early stages — and in select cases not so early — of the kind of moral, social and intellectual deterioration that first imagines, and later gleefully invites, atrocity. At New York magazine, Eric Levitz has an excellent survey of moral idiocy on the left. The terrorist attack on Israel was an opportunity for those averse to moral complexity to let their freak flags fly. Many didn’t wait for the facts to filter in before seizing it. Levitz wrote:
"It is not hyperbole to say that many left-wing supporters of Palestine celebrated Hamas’s atrocities. The national leadership of Students for Justice in Palestine declared the weekend’s events a “historic win for the Palestinian resistance,” touting Hamas’s success in “catching the enemy completely by surprise.” The Connecticut chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America applauded the Palestinian resistance’s “unprecedented anti-colonial struggle,” pledged its solidarity to that struggle, and vowed, “No peace on stolen land!” At a rally co-sponsored by socialist organisations in New York City, one speaker spoke approvingly of the mass murder of Israeli teenagers, saying, “There was some sort of rave or desert party where they were having a great time, until the resistance came in electrified hang gliders and took at least several dozen hipsters.”
Such comments are reminiscent of the low point of the American left, when self-styled radicals circa 1970 rationalised mindless political violence, leaving a trail of dead and injured, from police officers to physics researchers, in their deluded, self-righteous and utterly self-defeating wake.
The threat of violence, and depravity, in the US now largely resides on the right. Proud Boys, Nazis, Oath Keepers, Christian supremacists and other very fine people have found a home in the Republican Party to a degree the New Left never did in the Democratic Party. The GOP has rallied around the n’er-do-well heir to a crooked real estate fortune with a long history of sexual assaults and swindles as its leader. With his frequent encouragement, the rhetoric of political violence and thuggery is increasing.
Donald Trump has promoted summary executions of suspected shoplifters. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has championed summary executions of people illegally crossing the US border with Mexico, saying “of course you use deadly force.” Both comments evince outright contempt for American law and basic human rights. Did their demagogy initiate a firestorm of condemnation from Republican leaders? It did not. Instead, some Republicans, increasingly comfortable with the politics of tribal hatred, cheered.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott is a national leader in implementing sadistic policies to inflict harm on targeted populations. When I first saw a photograph of the buoys he had placed in the Rio Grande River, interspersed with circular saw blades to wound any migrant clinging to the contraption in an effort to avoid drowning, I assumed the picture was fake. It wasn’t. Neither is the abject depravity required to dream up — and implement — such a Bond-villain exercise in mindless cruelty. Like Trump, Abbott, the governor of the largest Republican state, is an engine of moral degeneracy. Like Trump, he is also a Republican in good standing. That constitutes a dire political emergency.
The horror of Hamas’ terrorist attack will reverberate in the weeks ahead. Israel, in the course of retaliating, as any viable nation must, may compound the horror through overreaction. Calibration of force is never easy. It’s especially difficult when the desire for vengeance accompanies a powerful need for deterrence.
But as most of us recoil from the depravity of Hamas’ attack, and from the further death and destruction that will ensue from Israel’s response, we should pause to consider the unsteady landscape of American politics. Depravity has an increasingly solid foothold here. We can’t pretend we don’t know where it leads.
Francis Wilkinson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. Views do not represent the stand of this publication.
Credit: Bloomberg
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