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Jon Pavlovich asks if America is becoming a post empathy nation where we are losing our capacity to put ourselves into other people's shoes and where cruelty is celebrated by so many of our fellow human beings.
The second article describes the way Republicans plan to remove access to healthcare for the most vulnerable so they can give tax cuts to the already wealthy so the likes of Musk and Betsy DeVos can buy bigger yachts. Cruelly punishing the poor for their poverty seems to be the intention.
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  on UnsplashLately, I’ve been wondering if we’ve reached a critical mass of cruel people here? It’s hard not to look around and feel as though we are becoming a nation lacking a base-level of compassion for the welfare of other human beings; a place filled with people without a desire to see the world through the eyes of another or the imagination to attempt and emotionally walk a path that they have not personally travelled. The campaign run by Donald Trump and ultimately embraced by a slim-but-still-present majority of participating voters, was one built almost solely on exclusion: on the rollback of rights, the subtraction of opportunities, the erasure of entire people groups. There is now a strident trickle-down cruelty flowing from the top; an unapologetic callousness that revels in its contempt for people who are hurting or hungry or vulnerable—and it is changing us, individual by individual, relationship by relationship, conversation by conversation. And as someone raised in the Church, the most unsettling aspect of our steady slide into hard-heartedness is that it is being led by those who should be among compassion’s fiercest defenders. Though so many here still loudly claim to embrace both the Golden Rule and Jesus' command to love others as they love themselves, an increasingly-loud army of self-identified faith-filled Americans seem incapable of asking (or simply refuse to ask) a seemingly elemental question undergirding their faith tradition: "What is it like to be someone else?" What is it like to be a Mexican mother living in such fear and lack and urgency that you would brave arrest and dehydration and death to cross into a place offering the possibility of rest and refuge? What is it like to be a woman forced to carry the pregnancy birthed from an act of unthinkable violence; reminded every day of the trauma you have been visited by and to know that your body is not your own in the eyes of your assailant, and your neighbors, and of the government? What is it like to be an LGBTQ teenager, bullied from birth and told by your pastors and your politicians that you are less-than, that you are an abomination; that you should not be able to use the bathroom you feel safest in, or adopt children, or marry the person you love? What is it like to be a Muslim in America; to be openly vilified and verbally assaulted for your profession of faith, a faith as sacred and meaningful and life-giving to them as your own tradition is to you? What is it like to be a young black man pulled over on a traffic stop; having seen all the bodycam footage and cell phone video and knowing that the rules that keep most people safe in such situations don't always seem to apply to people who look like you? What is it like to have a child diagnosed with a quickly-spreading cancer that they cannot possibly combat without it financially crippling them; to feel helpless in the face of a priceless loss that is preventable but unaffordable? What is it like to have been born and lived outside borders offering the relative ease and mentally peace that you may have spent your life safely nestled in? These humanity-defending questions never seem to make it through the barricades of fear and prejudice and knee-jerk middle finger malice that seem so commonplace, and as a result, empathy is beginning to dissolve as a shared value here. And the irony of the fact that I myself find it easy to keep my heart soft toward marginalized people under duress—but nearly impossible to feel for those who don’t seem to care that they are under duress, isn’t lost on me. I struggle to retain a measure of compassion for those who seem to lack compassion, and the hypocrisy of that truth stings me with self-righteousness. I am trying to ask what it’s like to be someone who has bought into the snake oil Trump and Musk are selling, to not only abide but rejoice in the suffering of another. I want to understand what kind of head and heart yield such callousness but it’s near-impossible to find sufficient answers, yet I know we can’t give up. The crisis facing us is for the collective soul of our nation. It is not disagreement on policy that is doing the greatest damage to us as a people, it is a scarcity of gentleness and kindness in the face of pain and need and grief that is draining us perhaps beyond repair. It is the dehumanization of others that comes when you lose the desire to see their humanity because you need an adversary. When people openly deride other human beings while they are at their most vulnerable; when we not only kick people when they are down but do all we can to ensure they never rise, when our default response to suffering is ridicule and incendiary rhetoric—we've lost the best of ourselves and we are morally bankrupting our nation. I want to believe American can still recover its compassionate heart, but I’m not sure that enough people here still do to swing the pendulum. XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX Here's how Republicans are planning to throw millions off Medicaid and lie about itTrump is teaching his minions to say, "We didn't insure anyone"/"They deserved it."
A lot of the horror in Donald Trump’s sequel is new. Sure, he was terrible the first time James Comey and Vladimir Putin made him president. But his misery couldn’t measured in donated kidneys that had to be junked, cures for diseases that won’t be found, and intentional infant deaths due to HIV. That’s what Elon Musk has given us by singlehandedly electing Trump a second time. How Trump wants to decimate some of America’s poorest families to benefit the richestHowever, one aspect of this Trump administration is nearly identical to the last. He wants to give rich people sloppy, unnecessary tax cuts and then “pay” for those tax cuts by basically ending Medicaid as we know it. You’ll remember that he succeeded in the giveaways to the rich, but thanks to millions of activated Americans and John McCain’s thumb, he failed to gut Medicaid. Thankfully, because you may also remember that Trump bungled us into the worst response to COVID-19 in the rich world with a yearlong supercut of unforced errors that would have been infinitely worse if he’d succeeded in his dream of swiping insurance from masses of struggling workers and their families. This time around, Trump, MAGA, and the Nerd Reich are determined to punish us for the few weeks rich people had to take out Olive Garden rather than enjoying the lush dining room by destroying the best medical research system ever created and simultaneously gutting the worst health insurance system in the rich world. Why they need to lieTo be clear, we’re not sure how the details of this will look. Republicans only need 50 votes in the Senate, which they have for pretty much anything Trump wants. The House is a mess. Speaker Mike Johnson only has a few votes to lose. While there are no true moderate Republicans in Congress, there are Republicans in losable districts—more than enough of them to lose the House in 2026 if democracy continues somewhat usually. If things go wrong enough, the GOP could even conceivably lose the House in special elections before November 2026. One way they could go wrong is if Republicans touch a third rail and gut the largest provider of insurance in America. And that’s Trump’s plan. He has endorsed $880 billion in cuts for Medicaid, which is actually $44 billion MORE than House Republicans under his and Paul Ryan’s direction tried to cut Medicaid last time. Because they tried this before, we have a decent idea of what the result would be, according to the Congressional Budget Office:
That’s at least 8 million who’d be thrown off the program due to paperwork and ridiculous requirements that undermine the very nature of Medicaid, which exists to supplement Americans who can’t get insurance because they’re aged and not rich or taking care of a family member or trying to find a job or a kid. A model for Medicaid liesWe know that number of uninsured would swell under these new cuts for two reasons: ProPublica reports on the results:
Georgia governor Brian Kemp calls this experiment with “work requirements” a success, which makes sense if your goal is to keep poor people from getting health insurance. At every level, this system cruelly makes it almost impossible to get the basic health coverage that every other citizen of every other wealthy nation takes for granted. “Thousands of others never finished applying, according to the state’s data, as reports of technical glitches mounted,” ProPublica reported. “The state also never hired enough people to help residents sign up or to verify that participants are actually working, as Georgia required, federal officials and state workers said.” This program and lies that couch it will now be a model for uninsuring millions of Americans. Here’s how the lie worksNow, you may have heard Trump say Medicaid won’t be “touched,” and you should expect to listen to that lie again and again—even after, Universe forbid, millions lose their Medicaid. Huffington Post’s Jonathan Cohn—maybe the best reporter about healthcare politics in the nation—attempted to explicate how Trump is reconciling that promise, which Trump followed up by endorsing almost a trillion in Medicaid cuts despite the program's enormous popularity. It’s simple. Trump’s going to lie about it and use the same lies he’s letting Elon Musk use to gut everything good our federal government does, claiming he’s targeting “waste, fraud, and abuse.” Notably, he’s lining up a similar attack on Social Security. You can see why he thinks that lie may work, as he’s lost zero Republican support as he’s gone about lawlessly hollowing out the government in the name of this lazy dog whistle that has been regurgitated in right-wing media for generations. So, just as in 2017, they’re going to gut Medicaid by making it almost impossible to navigate: see the section on “eligibility redeterminations, the repeal of retroactive eligibility, and optional State work requirements for adults.” AND they will take the “optional” out of those State work requirements. Listen to Jim Jordan if you can stand it:  They’re going to lean into the idea of these “work requirements” while making these completely unnecessary, counterproductive roadblocks a parody of the ridiculous government regulations that they pretend to despise. Tell the people, Center for Budget and Policy Priorities:
It’s like voter ID and all forms of voter suppression. The idea sounds reasonable until you realize they only exist to solve good things that are happening that Republicans hate—like Black people voting or poor people getting health insurance. It’s bullshitIt’s critical to remember that this is all bullshit. “There’s not a pile of Medicaid dollars sitting in a corner labeled ‘waste, fraud, and abuse,’ “ Adrianna McIntyre, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, told the HuffPost’s Cohn. “Steep cuts to the program will ultimately mean some combination of fewer people insured, fewer benefits covered, and lower payments to doctors and hospitals.” But it’s bullshit that has been embedded into Republican brains for decades. And the motivation for going along with this BS is the reason the GOP exists: tax cuts for some of the richest people on earth.
And that’s why Cohn thinks it could work. And if Cohn believes that, we better worry. Only the truth can save usThe response is simple for Democrats. Don’t engage the lie. Speak the truth: For much of the Trump era, getting Democrats on the same page and repeating a simple moral message has proven impossible. Our Enlightenment brains can’t stand it. However, the party has held firm in defending people’s health care. The message matters. Avoiding spreading the lie matters. Don’t engage in Republican-owned frames like “waste, fraud, and abuse,” thereby increasing their power. Instead, let us repeat: Donald, Elon, and Republicans in Congress want to abuse their power by taking health care from millions of struggling Americans to fund massive tax cuts for billionaires like Donald and Elon. It’s immoral, and it must be stopped. |
