MAGA Is Trying To Reframe Cruelty As Kindness

'Compassionate conservatism' was a joke then and it's a joke now.

The Republican administration has been on a real rampage this week, killing diversity initiatives left and right, sending ICE officers to our cities to round up our friends and neighbors, rewriting the Constitution, and pardoning Proud Boys, Nazis, and other January 6 insurrectionists. So far, only one thing seems to have really shaken them — a plea for mercy from Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde.

There’s a reason for that.

If you’ll notice, a lot of the language they have adopted lately to push these vile policies has been cribbed directly from the Left. As plainly cruel as they are, and as much as they’re designed to scratch that itch in those who have it, there has also been an effort to reframe these initiatives as compassionate, as pro-worker, and even as anti-carceral. It’s this reframing that many who might not have otherwise been comfortable with the traditional MAGA Super Villain narrative have clearly gravitated towards (not to mention those who use those narratives to “own the libs”).

---

---

For decades, the Right has needled us by calling us bleeding hearts, by crying “facts don’t care about your feelings,” by suggesting that we are driven by emotion and compassion rather than logic and reason — or even by going as far as Ayn Rand and claiming that altruism is evil. Why have they done this? Because emotion and compassion are extremely effective. That is why they wanted us to stop having them.

And now they’re doing it themselves. Why? Because it works. I’d argue that the Right first learned this lesson back when they started cynically framing their anti-abortion shit as a civil rights movement for fetuses. It was an especially energizing cause, because it made them feel like they were doing something “good” — whereas it was hard to get the warm and fuzzies for segregation, tax cuts for the rich, low wages, endless wars, and segregation.

When killing DEI programs, they claim, ridiculously, that they cause “shameful discrimination” (against white men, natch).

Upon releasing the January 6 insurrectionists, Trump talked about excessive prison sentences and harsh prison conditions — something the Right generally tends to be in favor of for everyone else.

When talking about undocumented immigrants, they steadfastly ignore the fact that they are less likely to commit crimes than are American citizens to focus on the extreme few that do, in order to claim that they are trying to prevent what happened to Laken Riley from happening to anyone else. Which, you know, it won’t, because it’s hardly as though American citizens are incapable of murder. They also try to feign care for those who are killed or sexually assaulted while trying to cross the border, trying to pretend as though this is one of the reasons they want to shut it down.

They also try to frame this crackdown as something they are doing for American workers, which is especially strange given their refusal to do literally anything else for American workers. They support at-will employment and right-to-work-for-less laws, they oppose raising the minimum wage and public works programs that would improve our nation’s infrastructure while also providing necessary jobs for people, and they oppose programs like Medicare For All that would allow people to be able to leave their jobs for better ones or start their own businesses without worrying about losing health coverage for themselves and their families for at least some period of time. All of these things would have far more impact than rounding up immigrants and refugees and sending them back to their home countries to starve or die, and they don’t give a damn about any of them.

I’ve also heard some complain about “free stuff” that undocumented immigrants supposedly get that Americans don’t. You will note that no one ever says what this is or who gives it to them. That being said, let us just note that the reason Americans don’t get any “free stuff” isn’t because it’s going to undocumented immigrants, but because Americans keep voting to tear down our social safety net.

Personally, as a kooky bleeding heart liberal, I believe that American citizens deserve all the “free stuff” that people get in other countries. I believe that every one of us deserves healthcare, child care, elder care, education, food, and housing and that those things should be subsidized by taxes, particularly taxes from the very rich — who, by the way, would not be very rich if it weren’t for the rest of us. But we can’t have nice things, because people keep voting against politicians who might help us get there, in favor of politicians who help people find someone else to blame for why we don’t have them.

Immigrants are not taking their “free stuff” — Republicans are.

It is incumbent on us, however, to destroy these narratives and reveal the cruelty behind their policies. The difference between them and us is that we’re sincere. We support the policies we support because we actually care about people.

That sincerity, however, is not always helpful. People have a tendency to believe that others operate the way they do. Cheaters always believe their partners are going to cheat on them. Liars believe everyone else must be lying. People who are sincere assume that everyone else is also sincere.

Democrats have a tendency to be hypersensitive and hyperreactive to criticism — and, if they happen to be especially sincere, often unable to differentiate between sincere criticism and disingenuous criticism designed to kneecap them however they respond. It’s why many of our leaders and legislators frequently get stuck in neutral trying to figure out how to be the political equivalent of Least Objectionable Programming — not that compelling, but not bad enough to bother changing the channel.

I do think that years of this criticism of compassion has taken its toll, and politicians — especially those with higher aspirations often lean towards toughness and cruelty in hopes of proving that they are serious people. Sometimes it makes it hard to see what people actually gravitate towards. People made fun of Bill Clinton for saying “I feel your pain,” but that was a much bigger winner, in retrospect, than was his support for the 1994 Crime Bill or welfare reform. That’s the thing we need more of. That is part of what people are crying for when they say that they feel that Democrats have abandoned the working class. Yes, policy is important, but rhetoric matters as well.

People need to hear that they matter, that they are being listened to and respected. They need to be given causes to rally behind, that make them feel like they are doing something good for society.

---

---

At the same time, the Left needs to understand what its assets are and how to work them. We are compassionate, we care about a lot of things and people, we are way funnier than they are, we make better art, we aren’t snobs (no matter how they may try to paint us as “coastal elites”), we want people to be able to have nice lives without fear of the ground falling out beneath them, we hate torture, we hate war, we believe in justice, we oppose racism, sexism, homophobia, and any other form of discrimination, we stand up for the marginalized, we are welcoming and inclusive, we believe that no one is irredeemable, and, most of all, we have big, bleeding hearts and we are kind. We must always lead with kindness and not be tricked into trying to be the tough guys.

We will only ever make ourselves crazy by trying to respond to the disingenuous criticism of those who want us to lose.