Preoccupied today with Larry matters. The estate sale finished last weekend, and went well, according to the sellers. But now the sellers of Larry’s house are charging *me* for things I kept, as if I stole things they think I’d promised that they could sell. Which I did not.
One item for today.
Slate, Scaschi Koul, 1 Aug 2024: Democrats Are Finally Going Low, and It Feels … Amazing, subtitled “Perhaps, finally, they are ready to deal with the swirl of awful that is Donald Trump.”
How to respond to Trump’s yearslong parade of luridness? Eight years ago, Michelle Obama gave a speech at the Democratic National Convention, one that would inadvertently shape the way the Democratic Party would handle Republican attacks for years to come. “When someone is cruel or acts like a bully, you don’t stoop to their level,” Michelle said. “Our motto is ‘When they go low, we go high.’ ”
It’s a nice idea. It felt good at the time for Democrats to at least be able to pat themselves on the back for their own morality. But it’s one that has not ever really won elections. Hillary Clinton famously lost in 2016, proof positive that staying above the fray wasn’t an effective strategy for this new type of Trumpian Republican who does not care about having a fair, clean fight. Maintaining the high ground in politics has been a failed strategy for almost a decade now. In 2008 you could reliably hope that a candidate’s decency would stop a voter from running her mouth at a town hall about how the Democratic candidate was a maybe-terrorist. Now you’re almost guaranteed he’ll join in. (“He is the founder of ISIS,” Trump said of Obama in 2016.)
Once again, this is understandable in light of the evolution of morality. Going “low” means appealing to tribal morality and intuitions; going “high” means appealing to higher morality and cosmopolitan sympathies. Everyone has base tribal morality built in; only a few can conceive of cosmopolitan morality. I’ve blogged about this over and over again. You can appeal to everyone by calling the other side names, as, alas, the Democrats are now doing. Only a few are responsive to higher callings.
