The Party That Hates Children

A Crisis Dispatch

Donald Trump, who remains the President of the United States for reasons that are unclear to me, took a shit on a little girl’s dreams because of his malignant narcissism today. That happened.

I say it remains unclear to me that he’s still the President of the United States because it seems obvious to me that if we are a serious polity, we would not tolerate this state of affairs. But that’s not the point of this exercise in polemic today. It’s more the observation that this indifference to our posterity on display in the golden hellcave the Oval Office has become, I realize, is just the manifestation of what the GOP actually is and has been for a long time.

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A thirteen-year-old girl was in the Oval Office yesterday with a group of children invited to attend the signing of the Presidential Fitness Test Award. The President of the United States asked her what sports she played. She told him volleyball, and that she was hoping to take up soccer. She is, by the visible record of the room, a small girl. He asked if she could spike the ball. She said no. He asked if she could jump high. She said not very. He told her, in front of the cameras and the assembled adults, that soccer might be a better fit for her. The room laughed.

Earlier in the same event, the President asked another child whether the child thought he could take the President in a fight. He went on a tangent, in the middle of crowd work with elementary-school-age children, about a transgender powerlifter breaking a women’s record. He invoked the example to a boy who had said he was thinking about powerlifting. The President assured the boy he would never compete against women in powerlifters. The boy, who is perhaps ten, said yes sir.

So that is what happened. A small thirteen-year-old got told by the President of the United States that her body was wrong for the sport she loved. A ten-year-old boy got recruited, in real time, into the President’s culture-war obsessions. The room laughed. The cameras rolled. The girl absorbed it. The boy said yes sir. This is the Oval Office in 2026.

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Republicans seem to hate children, and I do not entirely know why. But I will spend the remainder of the essay examining the evidence that they do, and it’s pretty damning when you really look at it.

I do not mean every individual Republican. Most Republicans love their own children. Most Republicans love the children in their families, in their churches, in their neighborhoods. The hatred I am naming is not a personal disposition. It is a coalition’s structural orientation toward the future, and toward the children whose lives will bear the costs of what the coalition is doing right now.

The coalition has organized itself against the climate. Children alive today will inherit the warming the present is refusing to arrest. The party that protects the holders of fossil capital has fought every meaningful regulation, every international agreement, every state-level lawsuit. Suncor v. Boulder is on the Supreme Court’s October docket as the live test of whether any level of American government can hold the industry accountable. The captured Court I described in The Industry’s Court is going to deliver the immunity the industry paid for. The cost will be borne by children. They will inherit the bill.

The coalition has organized itself against housing. The asset-holding class lives off the appreciation of residential real estate. The appreciation depends on restricted supply. The restricted supply depends on the regulatory and zoning architecture the coalition has built across forty years. The result is that the children of working families cannot afford homes in the places where decent jobs exist. They will rent, in increasingly precarious arrangements, from landlords whose retirement depends on the asset they hold. The arithmetic is brutal. The brutality is not the point — the children of working families are simply not part of the calculation that produces it.

The coalition has organized itself against schools. Public education is being defunded, dismantled, converted to voucher schemes that channel public money to private schools whose curricula serve the donor class. Universities are being attacked as foreign-influence operations and stripped of accreditation by political appointees with no academic background. The civic infrastructure that allows children to learn what democracy is, how it works, and why it matters is being deliberately corroded by the people whose project depends on the next generation not understanding any of those things.

The coalition has organized itself against the basic biological conditions of human flourishing. Food assistance for low-income families is being gutted. Medicaid is being shredded. The childhood vaccination schedule is being undermined by a Health and Human Services Secretary who built his career on anti-vaccine activism. American children will die of preventable disease in the next decade as a direct result of these decisions. The number is knowable. The people making the decisions have the projections. They are making the decisions anyway.

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The structural reason for all of this is what my X-post tried to compress into one line. The coalition that controls the Republican Party is not, in the end, organized around any of the cultural commitments it claims. It is organized around the long-run appreciation of asset values held principally by people over the age of fifty.

The asset class lives off appreciation. Appreciation depends on restricted housing supply, sustained fossil extraction, low corporate taxation, weak labor power, financialized externalization of costs onto the rest of the society. Each of those conditions has the same temporal structure. Each of them works by deferring costs. The deferred costs land on children, because children are the future, and the future is where deferred costs go.

That is the whole structure. The hatred of children is what the structure delivers when it runs.

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They tell themselves libertarian stories. Stories about how lower taxes and deregulation will lead to a wonderdream of entrepreneurial self-sufficiency and pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps working ethics. The people funding the messaging that produces those stories are, in the meantime, consolidating giant corporate conglomerates. The libertarianism is a lie. It is a story constructed to be plausible to enough people for long enough until the consolidation is complete and democracy is suffocated. The story does not have to be true. It only has to last.

This is the cover under which the structural-economic operation runs. Without the libertarian story, the consolidation would meet political resistance at every step, because the consolidation is obviously bad for almost everyone in the country whose net worth is below some threshold the consolidating class has set for itself. With the libertarian story, the consolidation gets sold to the people it is consolidating against as an exercise of their freedom. The kid whose parents cannot afford the house, the kid whose school just lost its art program, the kid whose Medicaid clinic just closed — those kids’ parents are told that these outcomes are the cost of liberty, that the alternative is government tyranny, that the bootstrap-pulling will take care of any of it that genuinely matters. The story is doing the work the structure cannot do for itself. The structure cannot tell people, in plain language, that it is consolidating the country’s wealth into a small number of hands and accepting the suffocation of democracy as the cost of doing so. The story can.

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The anti-abortion movement is a psychological feint. It is the rhetorical move that has allowed the coalition to claim, in public, that it is the party that loves children, while the actual policy substrate has been the systematic dismantling of every institution that allows already-born children to flourish.

The feint works because babies-not-yet-born is an abstraction. The abstraction does not need food, housing, healthcare, education, or a stable climate. The abstraction can be loved at zero policy cost. Loving children who are already in the world — the children at the food pantry, the children in the Medicaid clinic, the children on the public-housing waitlist — costs money. The coalition has decided the money is too high. So the love goes to the abstraction, and the policy goes to the asset class, and the contradiction is dissolved by the rhetorical operation that lets one stand in for the other.

There are millions of Americans who hold genuine pro-life convictions. They arrive at those convictions through actual moral reflection. I respect those convictions even where I do not share them. I am not talking about those people. I am talking about the political coalition that has built its electoral apparatus on harvesting those convictions while doing the opposite of what the convictions, taken seriously, would require.

If the moral status of the unborn child generates a duty, then the moral status of the born child generates the same duty. To feed. To house. To educate. To vaccinate. The coalition that recognizes the first duty and abandons the second is not a coalition organized around the moral status of children. It is a coalition organized around the rhetorical use of children to obscure what it is actually organized around.

And then they want to send those children to war.

That one is the cleanest reductio. The same coalition that defunds the school lunch, defunds the Medicaid expansion, defunds the housing voucher, defunds the public school — that same coalition will tell those same kids, when they turn eighteen, that their highest civic duty is to volunteer to fight and die in a Middle Eastern war prosecuted on behalf of a foreign state and a domestic donor class whose interests have nothing to do with the welfare of the conscript. The conscript is the policy substrate too. The conscript is the eighteen-year-old version of the kid who got the under-funded school and the inadequate housing and the food-insecure childhood. And now the coalition that produced those conditions wants the kid’s body for the next foreign war. One arc. Same coalition at both ends of it.

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The party that hates children also thinks it is acceptable to install Donald Trump as the role model children grow up watching.

The man who told a small thirteen-year-old girl her body was wrong for volleyball, in the Oval Office, with adults laughing — this is the man the coalition has decided is the appropriate face of American political power for the next generation of children to encounter. This is the conduct the coalition has chosen to normalize. Children watch everything. Children are absorbing, right now, what the President of the United States considers acceptable behavior toward girls, toward immigrants, toward political opponents, toward anyone weaker than himself. The absorption is the inheritance.

I wrote about this pattern earlier this year, in The Ridiculous Object, through the figure of Greta Thunberg. A fifteen-year-old girl read the science on climate change and understood it. She was afraid. She made a sign. She sat outside the Swedish parliament. The coalition I am describing in this Dispatch decided she was the enemy. Not the fossil fuel companies. Not the political operatives. The fifteen-year-old with the sign.

The volleyball girl in the Oval Office is the same structure played at smaller scale. Greta named the trajectory. The volleyball girl was just available material for the riff. Both are children. Both were used. The mechanism is the same.

Only people who are ambivalent about children at best, or actively contemptuous of them at worst, would consider this acceptable. Anyone who actually loved children would have decided five years ago — ten years ago, in 2015 — that this man could not be permitted to occupy the symbolic position the presidency holds in the imagination of American childhood. The coalition that has put him there twice, defended him against impeachment twice, made him the central object of its political devotion — that coalition’s stated love of children does not survive contact with the question of what children will absorb from watching Donald Trump be the most powerful person in their country for eight of their formative years.

I am not talking about the millions of Americans who get conned into voting Republican by the apparatus that exists to con them. Most of those voters love their own children. I am talking about the operators at the top of the apparatus — the senators who know better, the consultants who know better, the donors who know better, the prime-time hosts who know better — who built the apparatus that produces the votes. Those are the people I am naming. Those are the people whose contempt for children, expressed through the policies they enact and the cruelty they license, is the fact this Dispatch is about.

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There is a conservative tradition that would have recognized all of this as catastrophic. It is not on my side of the contemporary partisan divide, and I am invoking it anyway, because the contemporary American left has not yet found the language for what I am trying to say.

Edmund Burke, writing in the 1790s, called the polity a partnership between the dead, the living, and the unborn. The partnership extends across time. The present is not entitled to consume the inheritance and pass only the costs to the future. The polity exists to maintain the partnership, and the moral seriousness of any politics is measured by how it treats the unborn end of it.

By that test, the coalition currently in control of the American Republican Party is the most morally unserious political formation in the history of the conservative tradition. It has cashed in the partnership. It has decided the present holders of capital are entitled to consume the inheritance and pass only the costs to the future. The unborn end has been written out of the calculation. The dead end has been preserved as costume — Founding Fathers invoked, originalist constitutional theory deployed, the cultural vocabulary of tradition repeated — while the actual content of the tradition has been abandoned.

The Republican Party is not conservative. Not in any tradition Burke or Disraeli or Eisenhower or even Reagan would have recognized. It is a coalition organized around the consumption of the partnership across generations, executed at a pace and at a cost that no actual conservative tradition would have countenanced.

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What does it look like when a coalition has organized itself against the future. It looks, among other things, like the President of the United States in the Oval Office, with cameras rolling, telling a small thirteen-year-old that her body is wrong for the sport she loves and laughing with the adults while she absorbs the message in real time.

The cruelty is not incidental. It is the politics, condensed into ninety seconds of crowd work. The adults laughed because the cruelty toward the child was the joke they had come to be in on. The President executed the cruelty because the cruelty is what the constituency demands of him. The girl absorbed the cruelty because she is thirteen years old and the most powerful man in the world had just publicly told her she was the wrong shape for the dream she was holding in her chest. The whole tableau was visible. Anyone with eyes and a heart could see what had just happened.

This kind of moment is more politically revealing than any policy paper. The contempt for children is not hidden. It is performed, in front of cameras, by the President of the United States, in the Oval Office. The contempt is the content. The policy substrate I have been describing — the climate, the housing, the schools, the food, the medicine — is the systemic expression of the contempt that, in ninety seconds of crowd work, gets made visible at the level of the body. The girl in the Oval Office is the policy substrate made flesh.

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The Republican Party, in its current configuration, is the party that hates children. The hatred is structural, not personal. The hatred is policy, not affect. The hatred is the consequence of a coalition organized around the protection of an economic interest that requires the deferral of costs into the lives of people who cannot yet vote.

Saying this plainly will be characterized as hyperbole, as partisan rhetoric, as the kind of unhinged contemporary discourse that decent people should refuse to participate in. The characterization is the apparatus protecting itself. The polite framing, the both-sides framing, the concerns about policy outcomes framing — these are the languages that have allowed the coalition to do what it has done for forty years without being named for what it is.

The Republican Party hates children. The party’s voters, who are not in the main bad people, have been trained by the apparatus to interpret the hatred as common sense, as fiscal responsibility, as cultural confidence, as anything other than what it actually is.

What it actually is, is what I have spent this Dispatch describing. A coalition organized around the consumption of the partnership across generations, executing the consumption with a cruelty that has now become its own justification, with the support of a media-and-donor infrastructure that depends on the consumption continuing, and with a President who has made the cruelty the central performance of his political identity.

The thirteen-year-old will remember what happened in the Oval Office for the rest of her life. The country should remember it too. The country should remember it as a portrait of what the political coalition currently in power thinks of the children it claims, in its rhetoric, to be protecting.

The protection is a costume. The cruelty is the substance. The girl in the Oval Office knows it. The country, if it is paying attention, knows it.

The GOP doesn’t care about our collective posterity at all. Of that, I’m sure.

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Go Deeper into the Circus

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