AN op-ed in this morning’s New York Times by Jamelle Bouie — The Four Freedoms, According to Republicans — got me thinking. Bouie summarizes his point by listing the four “freedoms” Republicans are demanding:
There is the freedom to control — to restrict the bodily autonomy of women and repress the existence of anyone who does not conform to traditional gender roles.
There is the freedom to exploit — to allow the owners of business and capital to weaken labor and take advantage of workers as they see fit.
There is the freedom to censor — to suppress ideas that challenge and threaten the ideologies of the ruling class.
And there is the freedom to menace — to carry weapons wherever you please, to brandish them in public, to turn the right of self-defense into a right to threaten other people.
Bouie is deliberating riffing off FDR’s four freedoms (freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear), which were the driving force behind his New Deal. Still, I suggest there is a fifth “freedom” Republicans are aiming for: the freedom to inflict pain.
We publish all kinds of stories about the pain the anti-abortion laws have caused. Trans kids and their parents testify to the pain that anti-trans legislation (passed and proposed) has already caused them. Democrat legislators make well-documented pleas about the pain of pushing poor people further into poverty by weakening or removing the safety nets. All this is supposed to make Republicans rethink their actions. But it isn’t working, for one simple reason:
The pain is the point.
This is about "owning the libs." It’s about making you sorry you’re not White, Male, Christian (their version), straight. It’s about penalizing you for expecting to be treated like them, for daring to think you are their equal, for demanding the respect accorded to a human being.
I wrote recently that the Dobbs decision amounts to a variation on that infamous line from Dred Scott: Women have “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” There’s a short step from there to saying no one (other than those who agree with me) has any rights that I am bound to respect. Their bodies do not matter, their thoughts do not matter. Their pain matters — but that’s because it is an affirmation of my right to control them.
If this all sounds like sadism, that’s because it is. Recall Trump’s deliberately sadistic separation of kids from their parents at the border. Or his mocking of a reporter’s disability. Or that new Florida law: Ron DeSantis Signs Law Allowing Trans Kids to Be Taken From Their Families.
it’s also the sadism of the Inquisition, that strain of Christianity which believes in torment on earth, and eternal torment afterwards, for daring to question their god, for daring to go against the commandments their god has given them. The attacks on gays and lesbians, on trans, all stem from the fear that acknowledging the reality of gender complexity contradicts the Biblical “male and female created he them.” The campaign against abortion has its roots in the Christian belief that God decides when a pregnancy occurs (among other reasons), that God can perform miracles, as well the Biblical viewpoint that puts men in control of women.
It is aided and abetted by the increasing power of White Christian Nationalism, which has its origins in the Puritan conviction (derived from Calvin) that the saved have the right and the duty to rule the unsaved, and that anyone who challenges them shall be put in the stocks and otherwise humiliated and tortured for the sin of wanting to be left alone.
The Daily Beast summed up the GOP playbook last September: The Performative Sadism of Ron DeSantis:
The GOP—under Donald Trump and perhaps soon under his would-be successor, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis—is rapidly becoming a party centered upon tormenting and humiliating the vulnerable.
In the sway of sadists, the Republicans are testing whether the celebration of cruelty can be the motivating force for a U.S. political party.
The Daily Beast writer thinks this may be a political error. We’ll see. Stories about the pain the GOP is inflicting on all of us may well move the voters to throw them out, gerrrymandered districts and voter suppression notwithstanding. But don’t expect them to move the current crop of Republican legislators; they are long past caring. For them, pain isn’t a tactic; it’s a goal.