Moral Monsters v. Moral Strugglers

Watching the Democratic debates last week against the backdrop of rat-like racist chatter directed at the city of Baltimore by the President of the United States, the Great Grabber and Misogynist in Chief, the architect of an American gulag of child abuse and traumatic stress, watching Democrats struggle transparently with fumbling bumble, I couldn’t help but think about their solipsistic opposition and James Baldwin’s remark about racists being “moral monsters.”

We are seeing now that the election of 2020 will not be, as cynical purists like to say, a matter of supporting the lesser of two evils. It will rather be an election between a party that has gone to the dark side and one that, no matter how flawed it might be, has not.

The Republican Party has embraced horrendously cruel, traumatizing polices toward immigrant children, has welcomed into its fold racist supporters of a racist president, along with a grisly horde of homophobes and anti-Semites, and has supported and defended the profiteering polluters who are destroying a habitable world climate system. It has taken up the causes of sexism and misogyny and made them its own. It is a party that has, to anyone with open eyes, become an expanded version of Baldwin’s moral monster.

The Democratic Party has not gone to the dark side yet, though centrism is a very dark shade of gray. Infused with new blood and a renewed diversity, it is, like most of us, thank heavens, merely inadequate at times, sometimes fatally inconsequential, morally uncertain and, yes, incompetent, despite struggling responsibly to create viable humanitarian policies. Democrats are a group of moral strugglers opposed to a party that has debased itself in unconscionable ways.

This doesn’t mean that Democrats are sweating it out for sainthood, of course, nor does it mean that the last Democratic president didn’t pursue a policy of immigrant deportations that disgusted many Americans. It does mean, though, that this next election is between a party that has officially embraced what Americans have traditionally considered evil and a party struggling with its own flawed sense of the lesser good. And, of course, the obvious must be stated again – not all Republicans are racists and misogynists and institutional child abusers, as individuals, but that’s what their party has become.

Let’s take a look at the monstrosity of traumatizing thousands of immigrant children of all ages, including infants and toddlers, for months on end, separating them from their parents and detaining them in a gulag network of privately and publicly funded child dungeons spread out around the country, a network of filthy, brutalizing, malnourishing, fascist-like concentration camps, all for the sake of making some kind of incomprehensible political point, grinding the heel of racism, abandonment and malign indifference into the psyches of helpless kids.

I’ve always objected to comparing such sadistic operations in America to those of Hitler or Stalin, so I shouldn’t use terms like gulag and concentration champ, though a hell hole is a hell hole no matter what you call it. I see this more as an expression of American racist xenophobia, more akin to Jim Crow and to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, more Montgomery and Selma than Poland and Siberia, more Bull Conner and George Wallace than Stalin and Hitler. We are victimizing people, and their children, who have been driven to our country by our hemispheric policies of domination, our predatory economics and, far worse, our population’s uncontrolled demand for narcotics, which turns the American government and judicial systems into tacit, de facto co-conspirators of drug cartels, using the war on opioids and other illegal substances as lobbying tools to fund a growing American police state, with ICE as a homegrown incipient SS.

But it’s the terrified children that are the GOP’s indelible sin. Many thousands of kids are being traumatized by our government, and with taxpayer’s money, brutalized into mental and emotional conditions that will result in lifelong PTSD. This is what so-called conservative America has come to.

Imagine yourself at eight or nine years old, let’s say, or your own kids, grabbed and kidnapped by frightening uniformed border police pulling you away from your kin, officials you and your family have been taught by experience to dread. That’s trauma enough. But then to be dragged away, not knowing where your parents are, and locked up for weeks or months on end in filthy, Tower of London conditions, sleeping on concrete, cold, hungry, terrified pawns, with other kids howling around you, all in a political game you have no hope of understanding.

The GOP and the fear-mongering conservative mindset is doing their worst to ruin the lives of thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of children. The better angels of our nation are doing all they can, one by one, to help kids when they are allowed to. But this is an institutional and political horror that goes against the principles and moral backbone of our country – using powerless children as means to a political end, sacrificing their lives, their sanity, for an odious, petty advantage.

This is the slathering twin of pedophilia. It’s called misopedia, the hatred of children. A political party that can sanction doing this to immigrant children, forcing them to experience a degree of homesickness that is purposeful and sadistic, is a political party that can’t be trusted with the future of everyone’s children. And they should be shunned by all people of good conscience.

*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it