The Politics of Cruelty

Reflections on an American De-evolution

"The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil." — Hannah Arendt

We build shelters from stories, inhabitable spaces where we might endure the uninhabitable. Sometimes these stories become our armor against uncomfortable truths. This has always been the American way—narratives of exceptionalism shielding us from our own reflection. But what happens when cruelty itself becomes the story we tell? What happens when the infliction of suffering transforms from regrettable necessity into political spectacle?

I have been thinking about this transformation for some time now. The question presents itself with increasing urgency: How did we arrive at a place where demonstrable cruelty operates not as political liability but as credential?

The Theater of Suffering

In Texas, the summer I was ten, my father took me to watch a public execution. This is not true.

What is true: across America, we now gather—physically or virtually—to witness varieties of public punishment, humiliation, and exclusion as entertainment, as reassurance, as confirmation of our place in the correct moral universe.

The spectators at the guillotine during the Reign of Terror did not consider themselves monsters. They were citizens participating in necessary civic ritual, bearing witness to justice as defined by those in power. The crowd's presence legitimized the spectacle; the spectacle reinforced the righteousness of the regime.

Today's spectacles occur across different stages: border facilities where children sleep under mylar blankets, congressional hearings that dissolve into performative cruelty, campaign rallies where mockery of the vulnerable draws reliable applause. We have developed a theatrical grammar of cruelty, complete with its own rhythms, punchlines, and expected audience responses.

"That's politics," people say, as though the statement itself provides both explanation and absolution.

The Normalization Through Language

Words have always preceded atrocities. Before you can inflict extraordinary suffering, you must first create the linguistic architecture that makes such suffering appear ordinary, even necessary. I have witnessed the aftermath of genocide. I studied the playbook. We are there.

Lay the body of a Palestinian next to a Jew, a Serbian next to a Bosnian, a Tutsi next to a Hutu—how do we tell them apart? Only through the stories that were told. Stories that transformed neighbors into enemies, citizens into aliens, humans into abstractions. The narratives that precede the mass graves.

In San Antonio last week, a Honduran family appeared for their scheduled immigration hearing. The mother carried medical records documenting her infant's chronic respiratory condition. They had followed every procedural requirement, believing in the promise of process. Within hours they were on a deportation flight.

This is the particular perversion of our current system: we punish those who follow the rules. The family that presents itself legally at a port of entry, documents in hand, faces more immediate deportation than those who cross undetected. The sick child with the paper trail becomes easier to remove than the healthy adult without one. We have created a system that incentivizes invisibility while claiming to value transparency.

The cruelty is not accidental but architectural—the system functioning precisely as designed. When asked about cases like these, officials speak of "sending messages" and "maintaining order," as though human suffering were merely an administrative communications strategy.

In 1942, government memoranda referred to Japanese Americans as "non-aliens" rather than the US citizens they were, a semantic shift that facilitated their internment. Today we speak of "illegal aliens," "welfare queens," "thugs," and "invaders"—language that transforms human beings into abstractions against whom any policy, however cruel, becomes justifiable.

I recently heard a government official explain that family separation at the border was designed as a "deterrent." The word itself is mechanical, sterile—something you might apply to pests rather than people seeking asylum. People fleeing sure death. The language creates distance. Distance facilitates cruelty.

What characterizes contemporary political discourse is not merely the presence of dehumanizing language—this has existed throughout history—but rather how quickly such language migrates from extremist fringe into mainstream conversation. Words once considered beyond acceptable discourse now appear in press briefings, judicial opinions, and breakfast television.

Historical Patterns and Modern Echoes

There is nothing new about cruelty as political strategy. What Joseph Stalin called the "engineering of human souls" relied on the public spectacle of suffering to produce compliance. What changed under Stalin was not the existence of political violence but its transformation into mass performance art.

During McCarthy's Red Scare, the question "Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?" was never truly an information-gathering tool. It was ritualized humiliation, a public flogging designed not to discover truth but to demonstrate power.

Today's congressional hearings often follow similar choreography. The questions asked are rarely genuine inquiries. They are performances of dominance, designed for video clips and social media, measured in shares and engagement rather than substantive oversight.

And yet there remains something distinctly American in our current politics of cruelty. It operates alongside—indeed, frequently wrapped within—the language of freedom, of protection, of necessary sacrifice for a greater good. Cruelty becomes redefined as clarity, as courage, as finally "telling it like it is."

We embrace the politics of cruelty while simultaneously denying its existence. This contradiction itself becomes exhausting, disorienting—perhaps its own form of control.

The Destination of Deliberate Cruelty

Tennessee Williams once wrote, "Deliberate cruelty is not forgivable. It is the one unforgivable thing." Yet we have arrived at a political moment where deliberate cruelty is not merely forgiven but rewarded, not merely tolerated but celebrated as virtue.

Americans were once defined by the color of their skin. We transcended that. Now we are surrendering that progress.

History provides uncomfortable answers about where such politics lead. The destination of deliberate cruelty is always the same: the erosion of democratic institutions, the silencing of dissent, the acceptance of increasingly extreme measures against increasingly broad categories of "others."

The cruelest policies rarely announce themselves as cruelty. They arrive disguised as necessity, as security, as common sense. By the time their true nature becomes undeniable, the capacity for moral outrage has often been exhausted, replaced by resignation or complicity.

The Personal Becomes Political

In my neighborhood in Boise, a woman walks her dog past a homeless encampment each morning. Some days she averts her eyes; some days she calls the police; some days she brings bottles of water. I do not know if any response feels adequate to her. I suspect none does. This is the microcosm of our larger political paralysis—the daily negotiation between compassion and fear, between responsibility and self-preservation.

Our politics has always been personal. What has changed is how cruelty itself has been elevated from regrettable byproduct to central feature.

I recently overheard a man at a café say of a proposed policy that would remove healthcare from vulnerable populations: "Sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind." The statement struck me not for its callousness but for its perfect encapsulation of how cruelty becomes rationalized—transformed from moral failure into moral imperative.

The Fraying Covenant

What we call civilization is, at its core, a covenant against certain forms of cruelty. It represents our collective agreement that some actions remain beyond acceptability, regardless of potential benefit or expediency.

When a society begins to normalize cruelty—when it begins to accept as routine what should inspire horror—that covenant frays. What follows is not merely political transformation but moral disintegration.

I think often of Hannah Arendt's observation about the "banality of evil"—how atrocity emerges not primarily from monstrous individuals but from systems that normalize and bureaucratize cruelty, that transform moral questions into administrative ones.

What makes our current moment particularly disorienting is the simultaneous bureaucratization and spectacularization of cruelty. Suffering becomes both administrative routine and public entertainment.

Where We Go From Here

I have no prescription to offer. That is not the writer's job. But I can observe that throughout American history, periods of political cruelty have eventually provoked their own antibodies—movements insisting on recognition of common humanity, on the expansion rather than contraction of compassion.

What distinguishes democratic resilience from democratic collapse is not the absence of cruelty in politics—cruelty exists in all political systems—but rather how a society responds when cruelty is elevated to governing philosophy.

Do we accommodate ourselves to it, finding increasingly elaborate justifications? Do we become numb, turning away from what we cannot bear to witness? Or do we insist, against considerable pressure, that cruelty remains beyond normalization, beyond acceptance?

These are not abstract questions. They are the questions that define our particular historical moment.

The stories we recite become our survival mechanisms, our means of processing the unbearable. But some stories serve life better than others. The stories we tell about necessary cruelty, about deserving and undeserving victims, about the expendability of certain lives—these are stories that diminish rather than enhance our collective existence.

Perhaps the most American story we could tell ourselves now is one in which cruelty is neither inevitable nor necessary—in which we recognize that the true measure of our politics is not how effectively we punish our enemies but how faithfully we honor our obligations to one another's humanity.

That would be a different story than the one we are currently telling.

But the capacity to tell different stories remains, for now, still within our power.

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Image ©2025 Gael MacLean