Grassroots/Hank Kalet

A Defining Moment

The 2024 election is about control of one’s body and one’s identity, and it is clear that the Republican ticket poses a danger to both.

The attack includes the 2022 Dobbs ruling on abortion and the repeated rhetorical assaults on the trans community, but is much deeper and darker, part of an effort to erase much of the progress we have made as a culture since the end of World War II.

This may seem like hyperbole. It may sound extreme. But my language is a direct response to the actions, plans, and rhetoric being used by former President (and current nominee) Donald Trump, his running mate J.D. Vance, and elected members of the party, which attempts to frame their bigotry as protection, and masks the very real assault on freedom of identity and bodily autonomy.

These attacks go back to the late 1950s, but have accelerated since the elections first of Bill Clinton and later Barack Obama, before really taking off during the COVID and post-COVID era. Trump is a central figure in this, his “Make America Great Again” slogan, with its emphasis on “again,” is designed to play on the fear and grievance of those who see their majority or power status waning. Trump has encouraged a sense of resentment, mostly among White voters, by narrowly defining who he sees as “American” and making direct attacks on immigrants, Muslims and other groups as threats.

Bigotry is as much about power as it is about hate and resentment. The bigot — whether racist, sexist, or anti-LGBTQ+ — demands control of the terms of debate and the bodies being discriminated against. They want to define what those bodies mean and place them within a hierarchy of power that always places the bigot at the top.

This is the lens thorough which we need to understand his recent comments about Vice President Kamala Harris’ race.

“I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black and now she wants to be known as Black. So I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?”

His questioning of Harris’ “blackness” is most overtly a way of undermining her within the black community, but also of stripping her of autonomy over her own identity. Trump is saying that she does not get to define herself, that he — a rich White man — gets to do that and, by extension, gets to hold power.

Vance’s comments on “childless cat ladies” reflect his participation in a movement that wants to grant extra voting rights to families (parents would get proxy votes for each child) as a way of offsetting the votes of single individuals and childless couples because, as this movement argues, only those with families have a stake in the nation. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, has called this weird, but I think that underplays the danger here and ignores how it ties to a larger effort to define Americanness as tied to what the right has always called “traditional families,” i.e., two heterosexual parents with biological children.

This voting theory echoes earlier efforts at disenfranchisement — denying women the vote because their husbands should be making those decisions, or poll taxes that denied the property-less or poor from voting. The difference here is that this effort has been defended as “empowering children,” though children would not be making any decisions for themselves.

Empowering children and protecting women were also at the center of the attacks on Algerian boxer Imane Khelif and Taiwanese boxer Lin Yu-ting of Taiwan, both of whom are being defined as trans by the right because both were banned from an international competition based on questionable testing by a body that itself was banned from the Olympics for a variety of infractions.

Both boxers are women, as Thomas Bach, president of the International Olympic Committee, made clear after one of Khelif’s opponents abandoned a fight. They were born and raised as women, but also apparently had higher levels of testosterone than “normal.” The fighters, who both medaled at the Paris Olympics, became political pawns in the attack on a trans community the right refuses to recognize.

Each of these cases implicates personal definition and power, with a conservative movement arrogating to itself the power over individuals’ identity and bodily autonomy. A second Trump presidency — especially if it comes with Republican control over both houses of Congress (it already has the Supreme Court) — will only take us back to a far less equal past.

Hank Kalet is a poet, essayist and journalist in New Jersey. He teaches journalism at Rutgers University. Email: hankkalet@gmail.com; Facebook.com/hank.kalet; Instagram, @kaletwrites; X (Twitter), @newspoet41; Substance, hankkalet.substack.com.

From The Progressive Populist, September 1, 2024

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