The (Righteous) Cruelty Is the Point

Fascists frame hate and violence as necessary to destroy “evil.”

Adam Serwer’s essay “The Cruelty Is The Point” is a now-classic, and unfortunately again-relevant, analysis of the appeal of Trumpism.

Serwer’s thesis is that fascism (and Trumpism) are essentially religions of sadism. People embrace MAGA because they want to be cruel; they want to hurt people. And that cruelty, Serwer argues, creates a sense of belonging and togetherness. Evil feels good because it feels like community. Serwer talks about photos from the early 20^th century of white people grinning besides the bodies of Black people they have lynched, mutilated and burned.

… these grinning men were someone’s brother, son, husband, father. They were human beings, people who took immense pleasure in the utter cruelty of torturing others to death—and were so proud of doing so that they posed for photographs with their handiwork, jostling to ensure they caught the eye of the lens, so that the world would know they’d been there. Their cruelty made them feel good, it made them feel proud, it made them feel happy. And it made them feel closer to one another.

Serwer’s formulation has been widely praised. But there’s also been some resistance. Many people, for example, continue to argue that Trump voters are motivated, not by cruelty, but by real grievances which need to be taken seriously and in good faith. Others argue that trans people, or Black people, or the left, or whoever, has gone too far, and that this has led to understandable backlash.

The core of these criticisms is often, I think, a reluctance, or inability, to credit cruelty, in itself, as a motivation. We want to believe that people—everyday people, normal people—don’t just decide they want to commit evil. There has to be a more understandable, less vindictive, explanation for American fascism.

What Serwer understood though—and which I think sometimes gets lost in responses or summaries of his argument—is that cruelty is intimately connected to a sense of virtue, empathy, and community. Fascism creates a structure in which sadism feels righteous and cruelty feels like the natural complement to empathy and solidarity.

This sounds alien or counterintuitive. But in fact it’s a very common conflation. And if you want to recognize how common it is, just think about action movies.

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The cruelty is the point…of action movies

Action movies are not in general advocating for fascism. They do, though, often advocate for cruelty. You’re supposed to cheer when James Bond throws an opponent into a tank of piranhas and quips, “Bon appetit.” You’re supposed to giggle and pump your fist when John Wick plunges a knife in someone’s eye. The cruelty is the point of the knife.

Now, probably you’ve got a couple of objections. For example, you might say:

1. “Wait a minute! Those are just stories! It’s not real cruelty if it’s just a movie!”

2. “The people getting thrown into piranha tanks and stabbed in the eye are bad guys! They deserve it! It’s not cruelty if they deserve it!"

Kill those bad guys

Let’s take the second objection first. It’s true that in action films, you cheer for violence against “bad guys”—villains who rob, steal, murder, and commit acts of cruelty themselves. This creates a narrative and/or psychic permission structure. You see the bad guys throw people in the piranha tank, so it’s only fair that the bad guys themselves get thrown in the piranha tank. That’s justice. You can feel good about it.

The thing to understand, though, is that this permission structure, this narrative of righteous cruelty as punishment for unrighteous cruelty, is exactly how fascists justify their cruelty.

Fascists create conspiracy theories—that is, narratives—in which certain groups (Jews, trans people, Black people) are framed as “bad guys” who have committed atrocities, violence, and cruelty. They amp up horror at the violence, and cultivate empathy for the innocent victims. Once they’ve done that, cruelty directed at the “perpetrators” becomes righteous, satisfying, exciting, cathartic—just as in action movies.

There are any number of examples. In the Jim Crow south, for example, white supremacists lied that Black men were systematically raping pure, innocent white women. Lynching was framed as an act of righteous solidarity with victims, and as a just judgement on evil doers. The white men smiling and patting each other on the back in those photos Serwer was looking at were celebrating cruelty, because they felt the cruelty was justified. They saw themselves as a bunch of action heroes fighting for the weak and punishing the iniquitous. Their cruelty was the sign of their righteousness

You see the same dynamic in virtually all fascist organizing. J.K. Rowling claims (falsely) that trans women are sexually assaulting cis women, and therefore cruelty directed at trans women (including advocating for them to be thrown into male prisons where they will be raped) is just and cool and, hey, maybe even fun. Republicans (and asshole Democrats like John Fetterman) claim (falsely) that undocumented immigrants are especially violent and dangerous; therefore, stripping them of rights and deporting them or putting them in concentration camps is just and cool and, hey, maybe even fun.

Joseph Goebbels summed up the thinking in 1943 in his musing on the “final solution” in his diary.

[Himmler] advocates the most radical and toughest solution, namely to exterminate the Jews, the whole lot of them. That is certainly a consistent, albeit brutal solution. For we must take on the responsibility for ensuring that this issue is resolved in our time. Later generations will certainly not have the courage and obsession to tackle this problem in the way we can now.

For Goebbels, the willingness to commit genocide is “brutal”, but it is also a mark of “responsibility” and “courage.” He sounds rather like some steely Western screen hero explaining to the school marm why a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do.

And as with the Western screen hero, the pretense of reluctance, the gesture towards the unpleasantness of the task, is itself a part of the pleasure. You have to be tough and you have to be strong to join the ranks of the tough, strong heroes who do what needs to be done, whether that means throwing someone into a vat of piranhas or murdering six million Jews.

Narratives and narratives

Which brings us back around to our first objection. How can you compare a fictional, silly piranha murder to a literal genocide? One is a story; it’s fiction. The other is a horrible thing that the Nazis actually did. You’re not being cruel when you cheer on the death of a Bond villain; the Bond villain isn’t real. How can that possible explain people taking pictures at a lynching, or Goebbels smugly psyching himself up to murder millions?

It's true that action movies are fiction. But the thing about fascist lies is that they are also fictions. A lot of fascism, as propaganda chief Goebbels was well aware, is making up stories. Conspiracy theories are absolutely central to fascism for this very reason; it is a movement and an ideology which is built on convincing people that they are in an exciting narrative which requires them to commit acts of unspeakable cruelty—for good.

People don’t in general want to see themselves as cruel. At the same time, people do enjoy the thrill of righteous violence. They want to feel that they are part of a brave and hardy band, defending the innocent and smiting their enemies.

Fascism plays on these desires—for empathy, for community, for self-regard, and for justified cruelty. It tells the volk that they are under attack by evil, conniving, animalistic, marginalized people, and it urges them to strike back in the name of empathy (for the in-group) and violent justice. It tells people that they are in an action movie where they are the heroes. It tells them the more violence and cruelty they commit, the more righteous they are.

So, yes, cruelty—contextualized as part of a narrative of defense of the weak, revenge, righteousness, and justice—is a pleasure in itself. People enjoy it. They like to see themselves as the heroes of their own action movie, torturing and terrorizing those who they see as deserving of torture and terror.

If cruelty is in many respects its own reward—and why else do we watch those movies?—then it’s clear that you don’t need to find some other, alternative explanation for why people fasten onto fascism. There doesn’t need to be some underlying economic anxiety to explain why Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, gets off on thinking of himself as a victim punishing Jews, or trans people, or women, for their iniquity. The left doesn’t have to really be the bad guys, any more than the villains in a John Wick movie have to really be villains. Narratives have a logic of their own; self-aggrandizing cruelty is satisfying in itself.

This isn’t to say that fascism is a completely self-contained system with no links to self-interest. Fascism is appealing to many because it buttresses traditional hierarchies of race, gender, sexuality, class. But it buttresses those traditional hierarchies by framing outsiders as villains, and framing injustice as righteous cruelty inflicted on those who threaten our “way of life.” People want an excuse to be cruel to those weaker than them, because they do not want to give up power to those weaker than them. Fascism provides them with that excuse, by creating a fun narrative in which they get to pretend to be James Bond by actually being Goebbels.

How do you fight sadism?

One reason people don’t really want to see fascism in these terms is that there isn’t an obvious way to combat it. If fascism builds on economic anxiety, you can, in theory, introduce better economic policies, and then people will stop enjoying cruelty. If fascism is caused by marginalized people asking for too much equality, you can just push those pesky trans people back in the close, and the fascists will stop targeting them. But if fascism is powered by people’s desire for exciting narratives that allow them to hurt others—well. That’s bleak.

And I’m not saying it isn’t bleak. But it’s not hopeless either. People find stories of violence, virtue, and cruelty satisfying. But that’s not the only thing they find satisfying. If people are offered concrete policies that will help them, they will sometimes choose those, even if they also find fascist narratives appealing. In 2020, as just one example, a majority of the electorate decided that it was more important to elect someone who could deliver a vaccine and guide an economic recovery than it was to elect some dolt offering them hate.

Fascists are also sometimes hindered by the fact that their entire platform is built on bullshit. Fascists love cruelty—but, as we’ve discussed, that cruelty needs to be constantly justified through elaborate fanciful narratives about the iniquity of marginalized people. Calling out those lies can be effective.

Even more effective is disproving those lies—which is what happened when, for example, interracial marriage and gay marriage were legalized. Fascists claimed that these marriages were a threat to all things good and decent, and that therefore massive cruelty towards couples involved was justified to protect, etc. But as people started marrying, more and more people began to know those married couples, and to realize that the moral panic was all nonsense. Now even ghouls like J.D. Vance are afraid to come out in open opposition to marriage equality.

Antifascist victories can pave the way for more antifascist victories. And framing the fight against fascism as brave and heroic (which it is!) can help provide a counter to fascist fantasies of heroism and violence.

But to win, I think it’s important to understand why people become invested in fascism, and to understand that cruelty, revenge, and violence do in fact have a strong appeal for many people. Fascists, as fascists, don’t have a point. They don’t have genuine, good faith concerns that need to be addressed. What they have is lies and a narrative that allows people to murder their enemies and feel good about it.