Reflections On Cruelty in America

America must be strong, but never cruel.

I hate cruelty. Some people take pleasure in causing suffering and find domination thrilling. They don’t only hurt others because they’re selfish, or even indifferent to the pain they cause, but because they enjoy it. Hurting or scaring people makes them feel strong, and crushing perceived enemies makes them feel powerful. It disgusts me.

As far as I’m concerned, the test of a person’s worth is what they do when another soul is at their mercy. My paramount belief, more important than any specific policy, has always been to reject cruelty. America shouldn’t accept cruelty or tolerate the cruel.

That doesn’t mean America shouldn’t be tough. If you want a safe and prosperous nation, you have to chase away the predators. I don’t believe in the Rousseauian blank slate, that people are inherently good and corrupted by society. Some people are simply selfish or evil, and if left unchecked will hurt and take advantage of others for selfish gain. A healthy society needs clear rules backed by force, and sometimes, regretfully, a degree of brutality. However, enforcing rules isn’t cruelty because it doesn’t impose suffering for its own sake. It’s about creating a place the good, meek, and law-abiding can flourish under the protection of a guardian.

There’s plenty of room for compassion, of course. A guardian finds no joy employing violence, doing so only when necessary. A guardian also establishes just rules and enforces them impartially under the rule of law. Once a predator is stopped from hurting others, there’s time to educate, rehabilitate, understand, and forgive. A guardian need not be a cold machine or a bloody vigilante like the Punisher or Judge Dredd.

Until recently, I took for granted that most Americans felt this way too. America is powerful, and has no qualms wielding its power when needed, but always balanced that against its fundamental decency. Sometimes America made mistakes or hurt people it shouldn’t have. Sometimes wicked people rose to power and used America for wicked ends. Ultimately, however, we all agreed America should strive to be strong but good, and never cruel.

I’ve been thinking about this while watching the battle over immigration enforcement.

RECENT CONTROVERSIES OVER IMMIGRATION

What I’m about to say has nothing to do with anyone’s individual views on immigration enforcement. It entirely concerns how those policies are carried out.

It made national news when the government recently deported 239 Venezuelan men to a Salvadoran prison designed to be a living nightmare. This prison exists to punish and humiliate gang members who previously overran El Salvador and terrified its people. When the Salvadorean government went to war with the gangs and won, it created this embodiment of hell on earth for the defeated criminals. Our government made a deal to send these Venezuelan non-citizens there as prisoners, in part because it was cheaper than housing them in American prisons, but also as a deterrent.

When I first heard about this, I presumed all of the deported men were known Tren de Aragua members convicted of crimes and serving sentences in the United States. Having them complete their sentences in a hellish Salvadoran prison sounded harsh, but I understood the intention and the symbolism. Non-citizens can be deported for any reason, and violent criminal gang-members are good candidates, and sending them to a horrific place seems fair treatment for foreign criminals seeking to spread a cartel into the United States.

However, the government refused to explain exactly how it determined these people were actually gang members and selected for a life in hell. Increasingly, it appears some of the deported were neither serving sentences, nor had they been convicted of any crime, nor did they have any proven gang affiliations. When ICE agents were asked to investigate, the only evidence they had that they were members of a gang was they had tattoos. If this is true, as it appears, (and the government so far isn’t saying), this obviously seems lazy and absurd in an age in which every other sixteen-year-old girl has tattoos. The government’s silence is telling since, if it could, I suspect it would have put out a statement to the contrary long ago.

I have no problem deporting violent non-citizen organized criminals, particularly if they might be coming to set up affiliates in our borders. I even accept sending them someplace outside the Constitutional standards of our prisons. However, I can’t help but imagine what it would be like to be an ordinary person with no violent criminal background and get whisked away to be beaten and abused for years in hell on earth.

Imagine you ended up in that prison, all because some ICE agent was careless or lazy in adding you to a list on which you didn’t belong. Perhaps they had a superior pressuring them to meet a quota. Perhaps they realized they made a mistake, but everyone involved wanted to move past it and protect their careers. Imagine an otherwise decent person who merely overstayed a visa and never intentionally harmed anyone being sent to such a place. Now imagine not caring about carelessly destroying someone’s life.

Other stories, too, give me pause. Maybe you read about the Canadian actress and businesswoman who made headlines when she was whisked away to a terrible ICE detention facility. Apparently, while working in America, her visa was revoked because her employer failed to use proper letterhead on a document. When she reported to an immigration office at the border station to clear the matter up, instead of sending her home to Canada she was put in chains. Then she spent weeks in a horrible facility with no information, where she slept in a freezing room with only a mylar blanket and no pillow. She was only released when another detainee helped her contact friends and family, who gave her story to the press.

There are also the non-citizens students whose visas were revoked. My problem isn’t the free speech issue—and I’m a lawyer extremely passionate about free speech. As I’ve written before, the purpose of free speech isn’t self-expression but for citizens to pressure and replace governments. It’s kind and decent to allow guests the privilege of speaking against our government too, but as a philosophical matter it isn’t necessary for free speech because non-citizens aren’t meant to influence our democracy. We routinely deny visas for all sorts of reasons, and America has always aggressively deported non-citizens advancing movements or spreading ideologies it didn’t like—communists, anarchists, foreign spies—and Hamas is a recognized terrorist organization. We’re also not naïve to the fact that foreign powers sometimes use their citizens to influence our democracy, which we have every right to shut down.

My worry is the tactics. Why are we apparently sending teams of armed agents with their faces obscured by masks to rendition students off the street, whisking them to detention facilities for merely writing spirited op-eds? Why exactly is the black bag treatment necessary?

None of this is necessary. The administration won a mandate on immigration, and there are people in America illegally with no inherent right to stay, so whatever you think about the policy the administration has the right to do it. Why then carry the policy out so cavalierly, sloppy and indifferent to not just the law but also its impact on the human souls at your mercy? It’s not just about enforcing the law. It’s not being tough. Why potentially send a gentle person to a foreign hellhole, scarring them and permanently ruining their life? That’s not acting like a guardian.

The arguments I hear don’t make this better. I dismiss those who say “why do you care what happens to those people,” since I care about what happens to all people. I also dismiss arguments that say, since they’re here illegally they broke the law—we don’t cut the hands off people who speed in traffic. The argument that concerns me most, however, is that cruelty is necessary to scare offenders into compliance. Destroying a few lives is worth it to teach others the hard lesson that they must obey and comply. Those are the same arguments I loathed about cancel culture.

My biggest problem with cancel culture was never the substance of whatever the cancellers were trying to promote. It was the cruelty. Cancel culture would isolate some poor soul—Justine Sacco, the women in the dog park labeled Karen, Aziz Ansari, or others—for some transgression of language or unproved accusation, and then methodically destroy their lives. Vicious mobs would hound them from their jobs so they couldn’t pay their mortgage or feed their kids. People would pile on to abuse and frighten them, telling them to kill themselves or threatening to sexually assault them. Victims were forced to humiliate themselves in ridiculous Maoist apologies, which wouldn’t be accepted. Years later, mobs would find someone getting work again and the pile on would resume. Nothing was ever good enough. The point was total destruction. It was cruel.

The people who engaged in this wicked sport justified it with the same poisoned thinking—hurting and scaring people would improve society. They didn’t care if they picked the wrong victim, because the victim always belonged to some disliked demographic—why do you care about them? If they didn’t deserve it, they would say sometimes you need to crack some eggs to make an omelet. The cruelty, they claimed, was in the service of creating a better world.

Personally, I thought most of them did it because they liked to hurt people. Cancel culture provided moral license to destroy people under the guise of moral goodness, thus attracting the same sorts of people who would have joined the Inquisition, the Gestapo, or become a Soviet Commissar. Wrecking lives gave them a high because it made them feel just and powerful.

As Aldous Huxley wrote: “The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior 'righteous indignation'—this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.”

I don’t care about your goals, or if you’re right about the policies, or if your cruelty helps reach some noble goal. I find it all revolting. I cannot respect cruelty.

AMERICA WAS POWERFUL, BUT NOT CRUEL

Great empires become wicked and abusive because it’s in their interest and they can. The people ruling them don’t need to care about the opinions of the weak, and so they pursue their interests crushing anyone in their way with steel-toed boots. Whether it’s through indifference, laziness, if not sociopathic evil, they feel justified becoming monsters.

America was special because it was powerful, but not cruel.

America prioritized getting the answer right over selling narratives, saving face, or creating the illusion of strength. America valued fairness, correcting errors, and holding itself accountable. This made America strong, tough, and relentless, pursing its interests with vigor. It was capable of great violence, but sought to restrain that force primarily to protect and shield. Americans sought to use their power to create a giant umbrella over the world under which the weak and good could flourish. Americans were guardians. To be a guardian isn’t to be naive. It isn’t compassion run amok, divorced from the world’s harsh realities. A guardian holds out its shield to make a too-often brutal world safer for those who can’t.

I’m concerned about the bipartisan degradation of our American character, one spanning left to right. So many Americans are now filled with so much anger and frustration that they’re eager to punish enemies. Because they feel weak, they want to hurt the people they think wronged them. Because they’re afraid, they want to make others feel fear. They want to humiliate “enemies” to restore a sense of control.

That isn’t who we Americans are. Americans are strong, but never cruel. We’re a nation of guardians.

What do you think about cruelty in policy? Join the conversation in the comments.