“There must have been a reason,” Yossarian persisted, pounding his fist into his hand. “They couldn’t just barge in here and chase everyone out.”
“No reason,” wailed the old woman. “No reason.”
“What right did they have?”
“Catch-22.”
“What?” Yossarian froze in his tracks with fear and alarm and felt his whole body begin to tingle. “What did you say?”
“Catch-22” the old woman repeated, rocking her head up and down. “Catch-22. Catch-22 says they have a right to do anything we can’t stop them from doing.”
I dragged my feet on this post for several days -- weeks by now -- and then events upended some details, but the main point is unchanged.
I've found it difficult to write about US politics this year because
2024 shook so many of my beliefs and assumptions about politics. Much
of what I hear or read involves "what we can expect," what could or
might potentially
happen, and the predictions of experts of all backgrounds have proven
spectacularly wrong. Will Trump's economic adventuring and corruption
bring about a recession? Inflation? Experts are happy to weigh in for
the news media, but who in their right mind would trust them? Even
though our corporate overlords were proved hilariously wrong when they assured us that there would be a big-time recession in 2023, they still appear and are quoted breathlessly. After all, eventually they'll be right.
The excerpt above from Joseph Heller's 1961 novel Catch-22 has always haunted me. The thugs who invoked Catch-22 weren't Nazis but American military police. It should never be forgotten that the US not only has a long history of authoritarian violence, we wrote the book. There's a sizable portion of the American populace, not limited to MAGA, that approves of and indeed revels in police violence: shock raids, beatings, extra-judicial killings, disappearances. I wonder how many of Trump's critics today remember George W. Bush's illegal rendition of prisoners to black sites for "enhanced interrogation"? That's a euphemism that makes authoritarians across the political spectrum moan with sensual pleasure. But all these practices fit into a larger context that Vincent Bevins discussed in his book The Jakarta Method, showing how the vast 1965 massacres in Indonesia provided a blueprint for US-backed atrocities around the world ever since. I read it before the 2024 elections, and it troubled my sleep; still does. It's not only about suppression of the left; dictators usually turn on their own side as they consolidate power.
What disturbed me about Trump's campaign against foreigners in the US was the way he, his spokespeople, and his supporters all assumed not only that every immigrant (undocumented or not) is a criminal but that if someone is a criminal the government can do to them whatever it likes, without due process or any limits at all. It's Catch-22: they have a right to do whatever we can't stop them from doing. By "criminal" they mean any infringement of the law whatsoever, real or imaginary: parking tickets, speeding tickets, outstaying their visas, crossing the border without asking "Uncle Sam, may I?" Someone who let a parking meter run out is no different from a rapist or murderer, and is at Trump's nonexistent mercy. Never mind that Trump himself is a convicted felon, or that he has pardoned hundreds of violent convicted criminals. (Or that his predecessors are all war criminals - but that's even less important.)
While cruelty pleases MAGA especially, liberals aren't immune to its pleasures either: the idea of punching Republicans, beating up Nazis, putting capitalists to the guillotine, starving hillbillies, etc. also turns on many liberals. The political scientist Corey Robin recently wrote against the claim that "the cruelty is the point":
One of the claims you often heard during Trump 1.0, which I always thought was misleading, was that “the cruelty is the point.” If you know anything about the history of political intimidation and politically repressive fear, you know that the cruelty is not the point. Silence, obedience, and submission—subjugation for political ends—that’s the point. The goal of McCarthyism was to crush what was left of the New Deal left-liberal alliance, primarily in the labor movement, and it succeeded. The point wasn’t to be cruel.I see his point, and I think it should be borne in mind, but I also think it's a quibble that could be a distraction. I think that for many people, especially but not only Trump and MAGA, the political goal is inseparable from the frisson they get from seeing bad guys punished. If they could achieve their goal without making someone suffer, that would take away much of their pleasure in the achievement. As I've written in connection with religion, while many people are uncomfortable with the idea of eternal torment for (other) sinners, many others demand it. If they won't get to view the suffering of the damned from the bosom of Abraham, what's the point of salvation? It helps that the idea of Hell is built into New Testament Christianity and the teachings of Jesus. This is a useful idea, I believe, since unlike sending random brown people to brutal prisons in El Salvador, Hell in whatever religious tradition is a fantasy. It's not something people have to believe in, it's something they like to believe in. And making it so, on Earth as in Hades, is still one of the most popular parts of Trump's agenda.
Trump and some of his allies really are just sadists, psychopaths, and sociopaths. There is no doubt about that. But political intimidation and political repression does have a political goal beyond generic “cruelty.”
