A Losing Strategy

OPINION PAGE

(c) 2024 Timothy Moody

 The Republican strategy to mock and judge others has passed into some form of insatiable, all-devouring nastiness.

It is so poisonous and contemptuous that it is now just evil. 

Republican Governor of Arkansas, Sara Huckabee Sanders, suggested to a crowd of Trump supporters Tuesday night that Kamala Harris can't be humble because she doesn't have any children of her own. 

When will Americans decide they don't want government leaders who are so arrogantly insensitive, as Sanders was, that they offend everyone? 

This crude, villainous rhetoric transcends political partisanship. It’s evil, dangerous, and insulting. 

The poet Ezra Pound’s brief lines are appropriate here,

“Pull down your vanity,

How mean your hates”

To suggest that someone cannot be humble because they don't have children is not just a cheap political comment. It's an attack on a person’s humanity and worth. 

And that is now, and has been for years, the bulk of Republican political strategy. Destroy the opponent's human attributes. Disdain them into negation. Obliterate who they are. Picture them as filth, rotten, and nothing worthy of consideration. 

It started before Trump, but he escalated it into preposterousness and made it appear to be the prevailing attitude of all Republicans. Some leaders are finally speaking out against this. Why are there not more?

I am not Ingrid’s biological father. But I have helped raise her since she was two years old. I took her in as my own daughter. I taught her to ride a bicycle, to swim, to play softball, to love books, and music, and to be compassionate with the homeless. I was there for her confirmation, her ballet classes, her drill team routines at football games, her heart breaks from boyfriends, her high school and college graduations. I rocked her as a child when she was sick with fever or couldn't breathe with asthma. I laughed at her jokes and cried with her when she was sad and helped her understand when her mom said no to discipline her. 

You think I can't be humble because Ingrid was not born to me and is not my biological child? The slap in the face that is, the cowardly crackpot insult of that is infuriating to me. Just as it is to Kamala Harris, to single women without children, to parents who are unable to have a child.

I don’t understand why Republicans tolerate this from Trump, Vance, and those who lead the party. How does this badgering of people, this ganging up on women, this gutless, whining indignity advance America? It does not. It cannot and never will. It is a losing strategy. It is the work of bullies and cowards and haters. Why would any thinking, caring, responsible voter want to be identified with these people?

You’re against abortion? Ok. You don’t like taxes? I get it. You can’t support gays and transgenders? Fine. That’s your right to adopt whatever values you choose. But this is America, and you do not have the right to rage and intimidate, judge and condemn, and hurt those who disagree with you. This is not Russia. This is not China or North Korea. This is not Venezuela, Syria, or any of the other nations led by dictators and tyrants. 

This is the United States of America. We are a democracy, not an authoritarian regime. We are free here to establish our way of life that enables us to live in unity and cooperation with everyone else and their way of life. If we do not like how our government operates, we register to vote legally and cast our ballot for the person or persons we think can lead us together. The ones who are rational, intelligent, understand government, care about all of us, and seek to lead us to be a strong, humane, unified nation. 

We are never going to get that from Donald Trump and J.D. Vance. Their agenda is divisive and abusive. They drain politics of its meaning. They have no use for justice and equality. They do not have the ability to create human loyalties or inspire human greatness. They are not interested in unity. They want total control. Do you ever hear Trump or Vance talk about us working together? Sharing? Helping? No, it’s all about doing what they want against those they refuse to accept or work with.

You cannot have a democracy under that kind of leadership, and you cannot have a cohesive nation. All you get is chaos, betrayal, and alienation. The country is run by dereliction, dissent, and desertion. 

We need leadership focused on national solidarity, cultural identity, and politics concentrated on public goods, not private interests. Leadership within an intellectual community but possessed with a human spirit that leaves no one behind. 

The celebrated writer and political commentator Walter Lippman once wrote, “The national unity of a free people depends upon a sufficiently even balance of political power to make it impractical for the administration to be arbitrary and for the opposition to be revolutionary and irreconcilable. Where that balance no longer exists, democracy perishes.”

That balance is at the heart of this presidential election. Tump and Vance have no idea how to create or maintain that balance. They are not interested in balancing political power, only in controlling and manipulating it.

It is time we get beyond this damaging and dangerous politics of harassment and intimidation, of rage and threats, and elect leaders who want to build a nation of strength and unity. 

Kamala Harris and Tim Walz will get that done.