The cruelty is the point

| 3:00 pm EDT April 12, 2021
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One current topic of febrile discussion regards the ideology of the Republican Party. This is usually led off by the question: ‘What does the GOP believe in?” The simple answer to that is: ‘cruelty’. The GOP have placed all of their political eggs in that single basket. That basket is marked ‘cruelty’ or, more rightly, ‘inhumanity.’

Children in cages might be the first thing to leap to mind in this regard. The woeful, ongoing situation was exacerbated by the cruel inhumanity of the Lord of Mar-A-Lago when, lamentably, he was in the Oval Office. He and his heinous henchmen only ever made moves to worsen the plight of those who sought a better life in the US than was available to them in their own home countries. The presiding thought, espoused by Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, was to make the experience of asylum seekers so hurtful, that immigrants would chose to face death, starvation, imprisonment and torture, rather than attempt entry into the USA. This was nothing short of sadism on a grand scale.

Similar adherence to a Malthusian form of dispassionate cruelty can be discerned in the GOP response to the COVID-19 pandemic; should people die, it’s of little concern to the oligarchs who live in walled communities with their own physicians on staff, surrounded by body-guards and insulated by vast wealth. Why should the Orange Arse care if Joe Blow sickens and dies when Walter Reed and its specialists are only a helicopter ride away?

In that light, any of the obstructionist efforts to thwart efforts by the BLM and #metoo movements to improve American society, or the pressing calls for universal health care, a revitalized infrastructure, and, indeed, the entire raft of progressive ‘New Deal’ policies, can be seen as the sociopathic cruelty which the GOP have embraced.