Republicans this election—as every election now—have gone all in on genocidal exterminationist propaganda against trans people. Some Democrats like the openly bigoted Ohio Democrat Marcy Kaptur, have responded, disgracefully, by throwing trans people under the bus and openly using anti-trans slurs.
Other Democrats, though, have defended trans people by saying that attacks on them are a distraction from real issues. As one elegant example, Democrat Sam Forstag, running in a competitive seat in Montana, answered a fusillade of bigoted transphobic crap from his opponent Aaron Flint on trans participation in sports and trans medical care by saying:
Government has no business sticking its nose into our personal lives, whether that’s a gun safe, whether that’s a doctor’s office. I don’t want a politician anywhere near it. So, well, let’s leave sports to the leagues that actually run them. Let’s let people live their lives with dignity and make their own private personal decisions, and let’s keep politics the heck out of it. Because what I see with that kind of anger and rhetoric is a lot of singing and dancing, and they’re singing and dancing while they pick our pockets. I won’t stand for that.
Forstag frames GOP anti trans bigotry as government overreach designed to distract people from issues that really matter, like corruption and cost of living. It’s “singing and dancing”—a way to keep people’s focus over there to prevent you seeing what they’re doing right here.
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Bigotry is not just an electoral gambit
Forstag isn’t wrong; GOP bigotry against trans people, against Muslims, against immigrants, is an electoral strategy. The GOP does not want people thinking about runaway inflation or Trump’s horrifically unpopular war in Iran, or about the horrifically unpopular president at all. So they try to shift the conversation to what Forstag refers to as “lies and anger” in the hopes that voters will focus, not on how miserable the government has made them, but on how miserable they would like the government to make other people.
At the same time, though, bigotry isn’t just a strategy. Republicans don’t just advocate for the extermination of trans people because they want to distract voters from high gas prices. They also advocate for the extermination of trans people (and Muslims, and immigrants) because they genuinely, as a high priority, want to exterminate those people. Trump has set up concentration camps for immigrants; he’s withholding federal funds from hospitals that provide gender affirming health care to trans young people; he’s launched an illegal war of aggression on a Muslim nation.
Trump is putting real muscle, real money, real effort behind terrorizing and ultimately behind exterminating designated marginalized people. He wants to hurt them. Violence against marginalized people is not just an electoral strategy to conceal Trump’s real goals of self-enrichment. It is a goal in itself.
This is obvious when you look at other fascist regimes which inspired MAGA. Hitler used anti-Jewish propaganda to justify and build authoritarian fascist power. And then he used that fascist power to exterminate Jews. The KKK used racist propaganda and racist terror to seize power for white Democrats in the South. And then they used that power to terrorize, lynch, and murder Black people.
For fascists, racism is both strategy and goal. Racism is core to fascism and massively overdetermined. That’s why even when Republicans admit that anti-trans ads aren’t especially effective at shifting votes, they can’t let them go. Anti-trans ads hurt and terrorize trans people, and so for Republicans they are a good in themselves, even if they don’t actually move the electorate at the ballot box.
Nationalizing bigotry
This is not a hidden agenda. Everyone—both Trump’s allies and his critics—knows that he does in fact want to destroy trans people, immigrants, Muslims, and other marginalized people. So why don’t Democrats say so? Why frame bigotry as a distraction when it’s obvious that it’s also the point?
Political scientist Julia Azari explains the disconnect as an issue of nationalization. Political parties try to poison each other’s brands; individual politicians in close races often respond by distancing themselves from that brand or focusing on local issues. Politicians try to staple their opponents to the national brand while slithering away from the negative connotations of their own national brand (without alienating their base.)
This cycle (as Azari notes) Republicans are up a creek because (a) Trump is incredibly unpopular; (b) Trump is absolutely ubiquitous on all media all the time, and (c) Trump is a uncontrollable narcissistic rage demon who tries to destroy any politician (like, say, Texas Senator John Cornyn) who attempts to distance from him. As a result, even experts at independent branding, like Maine Senator Susan Collins, are struggling as the massive blue tsunami backlash to Trump gathers momentum.
For the most part, then, Republicans are trying to de-nationalize the election while Democrats are trying to nationalize it. But there is an exception. The Republicans have attempted to nationalize races involving Muslim Democrats—particularly the Michigan Senate race with Abdul El-Sayed, and Ilhan Omar’s Minnesota House district. Azari explains, referencing the unprecedented, grotesque late election federal raid on Omar’s home:
if we understand the raid against her as political, we should also understand it as an effort to nationalize the midterms for Democrats. That is, to make all national Democrats have to answer for her and be identified with her. This doesn’t necessarily seem to have succeeded, but the strategy seems clear: raise the profile of Muslim Democrats, and attempt to tie all Democrats to them and to Islamophobic claims about them.
To put it another way, while Democrats’ goal is to associate the Republicans with Trump, Republicans’ goal is to racialize (and feminize) the entire Democratic party by associating them with members of their party who are viewed as racial (or gendered) others.
Fear of a non-white party
The GOP’s effort to racialize Democrats is hardly new. Ta-Nehisi Coates has pointed out that Republicans compulsively framed President Bill Clinton through tropes associated with Blackness to delegitimize him. Since the CRM, Democrats have been the party of Black voters, which means both Black and white Democrats have faced racist attacks (they’ve also been the party of women, and so male and female Democrats have faced sexist attacks.) George HW Bush’s infamous Willie Horton ad didn’t just paint Dukakis as soft on crime; it associated him with racist stereotypes of violent, criminal Blackness.
Republicans have tried to link Democrats to Black and marginalized people; Democrats have tried just as assiduously to disassociate themselves. As I discussed last week, Bill Clinton’s denunciation of Sister Souljah, Barack Obama’s denunciation of his pastor Jeremiah Wright, and Bernie Sanders’ insistence that Democrats should be ashamed to lose the white working class, all are part of a history of Democrats trying to avoid being linked too closely to Blackness and marginalization. This is also why Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer embraced his inner cringing coward and failed to issue a statement denouncing the raid on Omar’s home. He does not want the national party to be associated with a Black Muslim woman, so he withheld elementary solidarity.
The conventional wisdom, shared by both parties, is that being linked to marginalized people is electoral death. This is why Democrats are so leery of saying what is obvious—that the GOP is a fascist party which views violent extermination of marginalized people as its core reason for being. Democrats do not cite Martin Niemöller’s poem and tell their voters that we all need to stand up for those who are most vulnerable, because they do not believe that their voters will stand up for the most vulnerable. Instead, they say that the attacks on the vulnerable are a distraction, and that we should focus on real issues, like inflation, rather than on fake issues, like concentration camps, pogroms, and genocide.
There are some signs that things are changing. Again, as I recently discussed, El-Sayed and Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff have been willing to outright call the GOP bigots in a way that is historically quite rare—which means they are acknowledging that Republicans have as an explicit goal the subjugation of marginalized people. Forstag, too, when he says he wants government out of people’s personal lives, points towards the ways in which transphobia is a deliberate evil in itself, even if he ends up by framing it as a distraction.
And progressive groups of course are willing to be much more blunt than the candidates themselves.
These are all hopeful signs, and if the more aggressive stance leads to (or at least doesn’t blunt) a massive blue wave, it’s possible Democrats will be even more willing to push back against, and identify, bigotry in future cycles.
But there’s no doubt that overall Democrats continue to believe that a national party brand associated with marginalized people is dangerous, and that to win elections they need to shift the conversation to inflation, to affordability, to corruption, to war, to anything and everything except the vital need to fight against fascism and for multi-racial democracy. And it is, unfortunately, hard to fight fascism while convinced in your heart and soul that fighting fascism will harm your national brand.
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Ironically, the DEMOCRATS in the Southern states used these same strategies successfully during the Jim Crow era- which the GOP would be happy to point out to them now.