I’ve long disliked the term “culture war,” partly because it’s tossed around in a way that trivializes the issues and partly because “War on whatever” framing tends to confuse the issues.

But I keep thinking of a line in Cat Valente’s novel Space Opera about what war is. And when it comes down to it, what we’ve got now is a war: It’s about who gets to be treated as a person, and who doesn’t:

But in the end, all wars are more or less the same. If you dig down through the layers of caramel corn and peanuts and choking, burning death, you’ll find the prize at the bottom and the prize is a question and the question is this: Which of us are people and which of us are meat?

The part that kills me — and I hope that doesn’t turn out to be literal — is that Trump actually won the popular vote on a platform of hurting large segments of the population. It’s not hidden. It’s not some weird bogus claim made by the opposition. He’s been shouting it from the rooftops. And it’s not just Trump, it’s all the other Republicans riding his coattails as they push against civil rights and promise to punish people for the crime of being different.

That means large segments of the American population either:

• Want to hurt their neighbors (or at least the people in the next town over, or maybe that big city down the highway, maybe not you, you’re an exception, but everyone else there is a horrible person and needs to be punished).
• Are willing to inflict massive collateral damage for whatever they think they’ll get out of it.
• Really aren’t paying attention.

Ultimately it doesn’t matter because it amounts to the same thing: Trump and the people around him can credibly make excuses about having a mandate to hurt people. Lots of people.

I was really hoping that if nothing else, the Trumpist scapegoat-and-punish brand of politics would be discredited. Instead it’s been rewarded.

I hope the people who voted for him eventually realize: He will turn against you too, just as he turns against everyone the moment they stop being useful to him.

You handed power to someone who’s big on retribution and revenge and just got a court ruling granting him absolute immunity from prosecution. What do you think is going to happen?

And don’t count on anything less cruel from the people around him, because they’ve seen that bullying works and they’ll keep going, tearing down everything they can, blaming some group for the problems it causes, promising to punish them, lather rinse and repeat.

Related reading: Last year A.R. Moxon wrote an insightful piece about how Republicans’ own actions have convinced him that Republicans are fascist. And a “what now?” post from Ken White at Popehat.