Adam Serwer > Quotes

“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…Their shared laughter at the suffering of others is an adhesive that binds them to one another, and to Trump.”
― Adam Serwer, The Cruelty Is the Point: The Past, Present, and Future of Trump's America

“History has a way of altering villains so that we can no longer see ourselves in them.”
― Adam Serwer

“Even today, American political conflicts are defined by the limits of American citizenship and who is allowed to claim it. In this sense, [Frederick] Douglass understood that until Black Americans could claim full citizenship, the nation he envisioned could not exist.

"Men talk of the Negro problem. There is no Negro problem," Douglass declared in 1894, as the shadow of Jim Crow fell across the nation. "The problem is whether the American people have honesty enough, loyalty enough, honor enough, patriotism enough to live up to their Constitution." More than a century later, that problem is still with us.”
― Adam Serwer, Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019

“Once malice is embraced as a virtue, it is impossible to contain.”
― Adam Serwer, The Cruelty Is the Point: The Past, Present, and Future of Trump's America

“It is not American Jews who have betrayed their Israeli cousins. It is the Netanyahu-led Israeli government that has betrayed Jews outside Israel, by aligning itself with nationalist parties in countries like Poland and Hungary, who are hostile to the ideals that make it possible for Jews in the diaspora to live free of persecution.”
― Adam Serwer, The Cruelty Is the Point: The Past, Present, and Future of Trump's America

“Yesterday's assault on the Capitol was an attack on multiracial American democracy, a fragile experiment younger than most US senators.

(1/7/2021)”
― Adam Serwer

“Blue Lives Matter' was always an expression of the belief that the role of police is to defend America's traditional racial order, not an actual statement about the value of human life

(1/7/2021 on Twitter)”
― Adam Serwer

“There are former Confederates who sought to redeem themselves—one thinks of James Longstreet, wrongly blamed by Lost Causers for Lee’s disastrous defeat at Gettysburg, who went from fighting the Union army to leading New Orleans’s integrated police force in battle against white-supremacist paramilitaries. But there are no statues of Longstreet in New Orleans. Lee was devoted to defending the principle of white supremacy; Longstreet was not. This, perhaps, is why Lee was placed atop the largest Confederate monument at Gettysburg in 1917, but the 6-foot-2-inch Longstreet had to wait until 1998 to receive a smaller-scale statue hidden in the woods that makes him look like a hobbit riding a donkey. It’s why Lee is remembered as a hero, and Longstreet is remembered as a disgrace.”
― Adam Serwer, The Cruelty Is the Point: The Past, Present, and Future of Trump's America

“The artifacts that persist in my memory are the photographs of lynchings. But it’s not the burned, mutilated bodies that stick with me. It’s the faces of the white men in the crowd. There’s the photo of the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Indiana in 1930, in which a white man can be seen grinning at the camera as he tenderly holds the hand of his wife or girlfriend.”
― Adam Serwer, The Cruelty Is the Point: The Past, Present, and Future of Trump's America

“Five years later, the legacy of Trump’s presidency and his promises can be addressed. There never was an infrastructure bill. Trump’s budgets consistently proposed cuts to the social programs he vowed not to touch. He did little to combat the opioid epidemic he promised to end, with deaths rising by the end of his tenure. The national debt Trump promised to erase has ballooned by almost $7.8 trillion. Trump’s failed effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act and replace it with nothing remains the nadir of his public approval, surpassing even the days following his incitement of an armed attack on the Capitol building in an effort to overturn his 2020 election loss. Trump has the worst jobs record of any president since 1939, with more than three million lost. He is, in fact, the worst jobs president “god ever created,” despite inheriting an economy that had finally begun to boom in the later years of the Obama administration. The promises of better healthcare didn’t materialize, and the job and wage growth from the economy he inherited were crushed by the pandemic he refused to address. Those were not the promises Trump kept.”
― Adam Serwer, The Cruelty Is the Point: The Past, Present, and Future of Trump's America

“Frederick Douglass’s admonition that “between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference.”
― Adam Serwer, The Cruelty Is the Point: The Past, Present, and Future of Trump's America

“Multiracial democracy is hard and messy and sometimes rude, but it is preferable to the alternatives”
― Adam Serwer, The Cruelty Is the Point: The Past, Present, and Future of Trump's America

“Trump didn’t need to read William F. Buckley, Edmund Burke, or Russell Kirk to understand how to appeal to American conservatives. He just had to watch Fox News and study its success at finding new sources of rage and fear to sustain its audience’s perpetual sense of being under siege.”
― Adam Serwer, The Cruelty Is the Point: The Past, Present, and Future of Trump's America

“American religious pluralism, however imperfectly practiced, is centuries older than the European commitment to purging anti-Semitism, which is younger than Israel itself.”
― Adam Serwer, The Cruelty Is the Point: The Past, Present, and Future of Trump's America

“People were upset about Trump's win in 2016 because he ran a campaign promising to implement policies that targeted racial and ethnic minorities with state violence (and he did) not simply because he was mean or rude. In no sense is Biden's campaign comparable. Sorry!

Biden won't be banning Christians, arbitrarily revoking the status of white immigrants here because of natural disasters, trying to sell off white populated parts of the country or encouraging police brutality against white people. Your disappointment is not oppression.

(11/9/2020 on Twitter)”
― Adam Serwer

“During this period, [Frederick] Douglass became more than just an orator or a journalist: he became a prophet of a United States who embodied the courage of its convictions, a country that, as Douglass put it, "shall not brand the Declaration of Independence as a lie." At the time, it was horror to the white South and a foolish dream to much of the white North. Today Douglass's vision of America is so pervasive that even its strongest opponents pretend to believe in it: an America that actually recognizes that all are created equal, where the rights of citizenship are not abridged on the basis of accidents of birth.”
― Adam Serwer, Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019

“The cruelty is the point”
― Adam Serwer, The Cruelty Is the Point: The Past, Present, and Future of Trump's America

“Since the Civil War, American Jews have built a place for themselves here much the way other minorities have-by holding the United States accountable to its own principles”
― Adam Serwer, The Cruelty Is the Point: The Past, Present, and Future of Trump's America

“This is not a system ruined by a few bad apples. This is a system that creates and protects bad apples by design. Most people who become police officers enter the profession because it is held in high esteem and because they wish to provide a public service. But individual good intentions cannot overcome a system carefully designed to render them meaningless. Trying to be a good cop can actually get you in trouble with your superiors, your fellow officers, and the union that represents you.”
― Adam Serwer, The Cruelty Is the Point: The Past, Present, and Future of Trump's America

“The subtext of a lot of the "how to be a good ally" stuff is that a lot of liberal white folks still have pretty segregated social circles and the truth is if they started tugging on that thread they'd find some questions that lead to the answers they're looking for.

(6/4/2020 on Twitter)”
― Adam Serwer

“Memorial Day has the tendency to conjure up old arguments about the Civil War. That’s understandable; it was created to mourn the dead of a war in which the Union was nearly destroyed, when half the country rose up in rebellion in defense of slavery.”
― Adam Serwer, The Cruelty Is the Point: The Past, Present, and Future of Trump's America

“Donald Trump, whose uncritical support for Israel and belief that America is fundamentally a nation for white Christians exacerbates a divide between the two largest Jewish populations in the world.”
― Adam Serwer, The Cruelty Is the Point: The Past, Present, and Future of Trump's America

“the anti-political correctness types are really just trying to enforce their own standards of acceptable discourse and are furious at their inability to do so

(6/5/2020 on Twitter)”
― Adam Serwer