Time was when America revered a pioneer. A person who goes into uncharted territory, taking huge personal risks to do what nobody has done before. By any measure, Kamala Harris is an American pioneer — the first black woman and the first Indian American woman to be nominated vice-presidential candidate after a lifetime of firsts in high offices of service.
There is plenty about Harris that can be admired, as generations of Americans have admired those pioneers whose courage, motivation, perseverance, and character have put them on the path to greatness. As with every politician, there is also plenty of criticism about her positions.
On Thursday morning, Trump took those to new lows. Even discounting for the nastiness of politics, however, when it came to Harris after her historic debate against vice-president Mike Pence, the American president strayed beyond criticism into an area of political mean-spiritedness as narrow-minded as it is dangerous.
“She was terrible. I don’t think you could get worse. And totally unlikable. And she is. She’s a Communist, This monster that was on stage with Mike Pence, who destroyed her last night, by the way, but this monster,” Trump said on a television call-in the day after the debate in perhaps the clearest indication he felt that Harris bested his running mate.
In 'Trumpworld', that puts Harris in the same category as MS-13 gang murderers, terrorists, gunmen who committed massacres, and murderers of police officers—the only others whom Trump had called monsters, in somewhat justifiable political outrage.
But branding Harris a monster crossed a line of hybrid no-holds-barred racist-misogynist incitement and inflammatory rhetoric that exploits the implication that the Democrats want Communism and that they have become disloyal to his version of America. The insult compounds its effect with a unique form of vulgar dehumanising which trades in an undercurrent of fears Trump has been stoking for years — that America’s demographic is changing; that people of colour in power and immigration are undermining the white, rural, American way of life his supporters idealise.
He is fighting the battles that were gone with Gone with the Wind using a violent rhetoric of abusive words that work as dog whistles to extremist groups armed with plenty of firepower and an ideology that places them as defenders of “freedom.” A freedom defined as a society free of people they do not like.
As his political fortunes are faltering in the face of one of the world’s worst performances vis-a-vis the pandemic, Trump seems intent on taking every barrier and every value that permitted the United States to become a moral leader to the world down with him in his runaway bus to Armageddon in which he is constantly pushing the gas pedal down to the floor.
This is the bus coming straight at Kamala Harris.
Would her senate colleagues stand to her defense and protection?
“Calling the first Black woman to ever take the Vice Presidential debate stage a ‘monster’ tells you all you need to know about President Trump’s respect for women and people of color,” twitted Democratic Senator Bob Casey
“This person has more integrity in her little finger than most people have in their whole body,” said Biden in her defense. “It’s despicable. It’s so beneath the office of the presidency, and the American people are sick and tired of it. They know who this man is, it’s got to stop. It’s not only — this is one of the finest persons I’ve ever dealt with. This is a person who is ready, on day one, to be President of the United States of America,” he said of his running mate.
Nonetheless, amid head-shaking and outrage from Biden’s Democrats, the stunning silence of the entire Republican establishment is the loudest message.
American Republicans have entered into a complicity of silence that goes beyond failing to impose responsibility on the president’s words and actions; it doubles as an implicit endorsement of the spectacle of Trump-style politics. From their pre-Trump political records, it is entirely likely that many in the Republican party deplore what he is doing, but keep quiet for fear of a mean Trump tweet directed their way and justify their silence to others and to themselves by rationalizing that “he is very popular with passionate voters.”
Complicity aids and abets actions by others. In this case, Republican complicity affects the process in profound ways and contribute to harm, even when it falls outside of the paradigm of intentionality.
But America is not facing this for the first time. The high-handed badgering tactics, the flinging accusation without substance characterised the McCarthy era of persecutions and destruction of people’s lives through mean-spirited opportunistic statements that cannot be tracked down quickly enough to be confronted.
A similar mechanism of quiet support in the face of popularity and political capital allowed McCarthyism to continue unchecked, destroying lives and institutions with long-term effects that are at the core of Trump’s other unfounded accusation flung against Harris — that she is a Communist, playing on the worst Cold War American fears and memories of bloody Vietnam battles. Subtracting humanity from Harris by calling her a monster, Trump is banking on an exponential compounding of those fears with those of colored invaders, too monstrous for his version of America.
It is precisely this that makes Republican silence and failure to speak up against such attacks against a fellow senator particularly repugnant. They know what these types of things lead to, they have seen it before. They understand quite well that this is not only aimed to her political destruction but also threatens her life. If they needed any more evidence to convince them, on the same day FBI agents in Michigan arrested a group associated with the Boogaloo movement setting up to kidnap, “try” and possibly kill the Michigan governor as the start of a race war. A chilling, yet predictable development.
Trump’s name-calling of Harris as a monster emboldens such groups that see those comments as a call to action — to the shameful silence of America’s Republicans.
As Americans head to the polls next month, with an Indian-American on the ballot, the words of M.K. Gandhi stand as a conscience-raising warning and advice to those whose silence may prove tragically mistaken : “Silence becomes cowardice when occasion demands speaking out the whole truth and acting accordingly.”
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author's and do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of THE WEEK
