The Moral Boundary of “Over There”

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis in his
favorite pose: angrily lecturing the crowd

U.S. military drone pilots aren’t eligible for America’s most prestigious combat awards, no matter how many state enemies they’ve successfully killed. As Eyal Press writes, top brass doesn’t consider kills delivered remotely to equal those delivered in-person. Though drone pilots often rack up higher totals, and also witness more of the carnage they leave behind, they’re only entitled to second-class commendations, and aren’t officially deemed “heroes.”

I thought of these unaccredited veterans this week while watching the unfolding folderol around Florida Governor Ron DeSantis dumping dozens of undocumented immigrants on Martha's Vineyard. Just as the kills delivered remotely aren’t regarded as officially “real,” similarly, the suffering DeSantis and his allies delivered upon both those migrants, and the permanent residents of Martha’s Vineyard are somehow less than real. Chain of causality somehow doesn’t matter.

Based upon the middle-class Christian morality I grew up with, DeSantis is morally culpable not only for the sufferings of those migrants, but the burden imposed upon Martha’s Vineyard residents. Information keeps spilling out about how DeSantis’ operatives outright lied to migrants who only wanted shelter and honest work. Then he stuck Florida taxpayers with the bill for his deception. All to score points with MAGA voters who vocally despise immigrants.

Conservatives apparently think DeSantis scored points against the Vineyard’s rich liberal denizens. (Both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama regularly vacationed on the Vineyard during their presidencies.) But those rich denizens only live there seasonally; the Vineyard’s year-round residents are mainly poor, working-class, and thanks to a fluke of history, disproportionately likely to be born deaf. The rich summer residents went home weeks ago.

Watching everything unfold, I realized: DeSantis doesn’t think what’s happening is his fault. And when I say “fault,” I don’t mean “responsibility”; I mean he sees the chaos caused by Vineyard residents scrambling to provide food and shelter with no advance warning as the Vineyard’s moral failing. Like an officer in the drone pilots’ corps, he thinks what happens thousands of miles away is somebody else’s doing, even when his own apparatchiks pulled the trigger.

This realization clarified something for me which has always been implicit in modern politics, but never quite so forthright: conservatives see proximity as a necessary component of morality. Concepts like the chain of causality don’t matter. You aren’t responsible for the knock-on effects of your choices; only the individual closest by actually holds culpability. Once those migrants were on DeSantis’ plane and away from him, he stopped bearing any responsibility for them.

President Theodore Roosevelt

These immigrants, coming to America mainly for honest work, didn’t just happen. America has contributed to Latin American poverty and violence at least since the days of the United Fruit Company and Teddy Roosevelt’s “Gunboat Diplomacy,” if not earlier. Mexico has trembled at notorious Norteamericano whims since, arguably, James K. Polk. America stripped Latin Americans of their land and labor; now they come here, looking for work.

But conservatives don’t believe this matters. President Trump’s notorious “shithole countries” comment represents a continuous pattern since at least Ronald Reagan’s disparagement of Salvadorans seeking asylum in America: that Latins, and only Latins, are responsible for continued Latin American poverty. Never mind that the partisans shooting up 1980s El Salvador were literally trained in Fort Benning, Georgia.

Nor is this pattern exclusively international. American poverty is so geographically concentrated that “urban” has become a dog whistle meaning “poor and Black.” Yet our national poverty policy, at least since Reagan, and definitely amplified by Clinton, has been to blame America’s poor for their continued neighborhood blight. From police crackdowns to enforcement of nickel-and-dime regulations on EBT recipients, our government attempts to punish people out of their poverty.

Again, this isn’t new. Even before “redlining” became common parlance, Jane Jacobs observed how banks and governments used neighborhoods’ poverty to justify refusing to do anything to fix the communities. Those in proximity bore fault for that poverty; generational efforts to create poverty stopped being anyone’s responsibility. Those whose laws or financial transactions created that poverty felt free to stick their hands in their pockets and whistle.

This has been the pattern, I now realize, throughout my lifetime. Conservatives like Reagan and Trump, and even centrists like Bill Clinton and Barack “The Drone Ranger” Obama, feel like nothing sticks to them if it simply happens far enough away. The DeSantis Martha’s Vineyard clown show is simply the latest manifestation of this: he made a choice, and took an action, but in his mind it stopped being his fault once it crossed state lines.