Sadism as Policy

Greg Grandin's just published The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America up-dates Rudolofo Acuna's Occupied America brilliantly toward understanding what Trump's border policy really means. Grandin particularly describes the intentional cruelty of it, and how this cruelty has been well entrenched in U.S. policy, involving both political parties for many decades. He ends the book with the following sentence: "Coming generations will face a stark choice-- a choice long deferred by the emotive power of frontier universalism but set forth in vivid relief by recent events: the choice between barbarism and socialism, or at least social democracy."