Calumny

 The New York Times ran an article yesterday in which they detail how, in the last few days before the midterm elections, Republican candidates are resorting to the most rancid possible personal attacks to try to chip away at Democrats' clear lead in the polls. In some cases, they are dredging up details from the opposition candidates' personal lives that ought to be treated as off-limits. 

But in other cases, they are simply making up outrageous and lurid accusations out of whole cloth. One Republican candidate calls his opponent a "groomer," based on no evidence whatsoever. Our vice president darkly implies that a Democratic candidate could only have stood up for the rights of trans children in the past because he has some creepy sexual fixation on the subject. 

In other words, the GOP candidates are doing what demagogues long have done. They lie. They "hawk for news / Whatever their loose fantasy invent /[...] as though / The abounding gutter had been Helicon / Or calumny a song," to quote W.B. Yeats ("The Leaders of the Crowd"). 

They are like Edgar Lee Masters's "Editor Whedon," from his Spoon River Anthology—they exist only "To scratch dirt over scandal for money, / And exhume it to the winds for revenge[.]"

In the category of overly intrusive personal attacks, we have the notorious Ramaswamy ad in Ohio, of course. But we also have the attack ad from a Republican super PAC in Maine that has dubbed the Democratic Senate candidate in that state a "freak" for having children with his second cousin. 

Susan Collins has apparently disavowed the ad for its incivility, but she has not hesitated to resort to the classical rhetorical device of calling attention to the same detail of his personal history by pointedly stating that she will not call attention to it. As she reportedly told Politico this summer: "I’m not going to bring up the fact that the mother of his two children is his second cousin."

I see the play here, but it seems to me like a strategy that could backfire. It may just underline the Democratic candidate's rural and working-class bona fides to point out that some details of his personal life may seem a bit odd to college-educated urban elites. In other words: calling him—however indirectly—an inbred yokel may actually work well for his positioning in this race. 

This is only one of two cases this year in which accusations of incest have played a strangely prominent role in the election. Republicans have long accused Rep. Omar (now running to keep her seat) of having married her brother for immigration purposes, and the New York Times this past week reported that there may actually be some evidence behind at least part of these allegations. 

Who knows who's telling the truth here. Maybe this reporting is inaccurate. Or maybe there's a sympathetic explanation here. Maybe her brother's life was at risk in Somalia, and a marriage to a U.S. citizen was his only realistic chance at survival.

Regardless, there's nothing in these allegations that the Bible would not countenance. In his poem Cain: A Mystery, Lord Byron made a point of noting the obvious fact that—if we are to believe the Genesis account—the first family must have been entirely the product of inbreeding. Cain's wife in Byron's drama thus protests there can be nothing sinful in marrying her brother. 

George Bernard Shaw, in a footnote to his Quintessence of Ibsenism, refers to the "curious persistence" of this interest in defending the validity of incest "in the higher poetry of the nineteenth century." He speaks for most of us when he writes: "It is as if one said 'It is not wrong to stand on one's head.' The reply is: 'You may be very right; but as nobody wants to, why bother about it?'"

(But, it has been said, Byron for one did actually want to. Raised separately from his half-sister, he did not have the benefit of the naturally occurring Westermarck effect.)

So much for the allegations that are at least partially based on a shred of truth or genuine reporting. Republicans, in their desperation, have also gone even further, in some races, and have invented scandalous allegations based on nothing.

J.D. Vance, for instance, has even gone so low as to make sly, roundabout insinuations of pedophilia, for which he has no evidence of any kind. He reportedly said of one Democratic candidate: "A guy that age who is so obsessed and focused on transgender children, I don’t know about you, but I never want to see that guy’s web browser history." 

Let us observe here that J.D. Vance and his party are the only ones who want the government and its coercive apparatus to have any involvement whatsoever in what trans children are doing. If anyone is "obsessed" with them, it is the Republicans who want to use jails and fines to determine what kind of medical care they receive, what bathrooms they use, or what teams they play on. 

To quote Arthur Schopenhauer: "here lurks in the background the [...] purpose of doing away with personal freedom and individual development, in order to make men into mere wheels of a [...] machine of State and Religion. This is the path that once led to inquisitions, autos-da-fe, and religious wars." (On the Basis of Morality, Payne trans.)

Republicans like J.D. Vance, then, are the only ones competing on the field this election season who are "obsessed and focused" on trans children. They relentlessly bring up the issue, since stigmatizing out-groups is the only other tired device they have in their toolkit to try to divert attention from the obvious economic and cost of living issues that are really at the center of this election. 

All any progressives have ever asked, by contrast, is for the government to leave this community alone. And that, truly, is all we ask of Republican candidates in this election on all of these personal issues. Stop trying to stigmatize people's personal lives and private choices, and maybe focus on the public matters that are actually legitimate subjects of political debate. 

We say, with A.E. Housman: ... if my ways are not as theirs

Let them mind their own affairs.

Their deeds I judge and much condemn,

Yet when did I make laws for them?

Please yourselves, say I, and they

Need only look the other way.

But no, they will not; they must still

Wrest their neighbor to their will,

And make me dance as they desire

With jail and gallows and hell-fire.