Josh Marshall has identified the rapid rise of “groomer” discourse within the mainstream Republican Party, so that what was once an extremist, “crazy” notion is now a prime political talking point and weapon for rank-and-file GOP politicians. Further, what was initially a slur used to attack transgender people has evolved to encompass a broad range of GOP attacks against what they perceive as all forms of sexual deviance, meant to tar not just sexual minorities but the Democrats who advocate for their rights. Marshall writes that:
The entire bundle of conversations about transgenderism, gender identity and homosexuality have been very suddenly repackaged as “grooming” and “pedophilia.” Any discussion of gender identity or homosexuality in schools is now “grooming” kids for pedophiles. Even same sex marriage — which is, of course, by definition for adults — is another part of the “grooming” agenda.
[…] The new equation is that anything that doesn’t amount to a staunch defense of sexual and gender traditionalism is just some form of pedophilia and “grooming” children for pedophiles. That is the governing equation that has exploded across the right really just over the last two months.
[…] It is a very rapid turn of events by which the most outlandish and genocide-friendly features of the Pizzagate and QAnon movements suddenly became totally ubiquitous and mainstream among Republican officeholders from Capitol Hill all the way down to the local level.
It is hard to find a more glaring example of the mismatch between the Democrats’ posture toward the Republican Party and the radicalized GOP's no-holds-barred politics than the emergence of groomer discourse as a key strategy. By equating basic issues of human rights propounded by Democrats with sexual abuse of minors, the Republican Party now claims, explicitly, that the Democrats aren’t simply a party that traffics in moral turpitude, but represents a form of evil that no good American can accept. This is not just a strategy to rally the base to the polls; it’s a strategy to rally the base to the barricades, and to their gun lockers. As Marshall has noted elsewhere (and as the title to this piece nods to), labeling your political opponents as child molesters is an incitement to violence. The language is de-humanizing and all-encompassing, painting a conspiracy of evil so vast and incomprehensible as to invite the necessity of cosmic retribution by god’s willing instruments. It is a political language that makes democratic politics impossible — how can there be any sort of compromise with such moral reprobates? It suggests that political defeat for one’s enemies is insufficient; they must be destroyed, annihilated, killed.
And yet, despite this clear evidence of Republican radicalization, we continue to hear from President Biden that the Republican Party is a reasonable party, a party that loves America, a party that is necessary to the functioning of American democracy. Whether the groomer rhetoric actually ends in outright violence against Democrats should not be the line that the GOP needs to cross before Democratic leaders like Biden acknowledge the reality of the danger.
This doesn’t mean that the Democrats should simply mirror the same dehumanizing language and totalizing spirit of destruction towards the GOP. But Democrats are living in a fantasy world if they think that there can be any sort of meaningful political partnership with an opposition that has embraced a messianic, absolutist view of politics that denies any legitimacy to the Democratic Party. More to the point, Democrats are also misguided if they don’t understand the importance of alerting and mobilizing their own base against such a deranged and militant right-wing movement. In this, the Democrats’ somnolence is akin to the party’s turgid response to Republican attacks on voting and civil rights, which at this point constitute a full-blown effort to reverse America’s halting progress towards equality over the last half century. By ignoring clear signs that the GOP has transformed into an authoritarian entity opposed not only to democratic governance, but to the freedom and equality that are the essence of civil society, Democrats are arguably doing the opposite of what they should, lulling Americans into thinking that they can safely tune out political news, or choose not to vote in November because they don’t perceive how very high the stakes are.
Any debate over whether the Democrats can or should engage directly with the GOP’s inflammatory groomer rhetoric should have been ended by Michigan state representative Mallory McMorrow’s epic takedown of a Republic opponent who targeted her with such language. The shock waves that McMorrow’s speech has sent through the Democratic firmament are a sign that the party is more than ready for a rethink of the default attitude that there’s no need to respond to extreme GOP rhetoric that equates Democratic politics with child rape. Among other things, the effectiveness of McMorrow’s speech helps us understand the extreme vulnerability of this right-wing attack line. When it is held up to the plain light of day, and examined for what it is, any ordinary citizen can see that it is insane, foolish language far removed from the moral high ground it claims to stake.