When "One of Ours" Does Something Unforgivable
What the Swalwell accusations tell us about the politics of predation
Over the past week, we have learned a great deal about one of the more prominent Democrats in America, and what we have learned is not good. Eric Swalwell, California Congressman and candidate for Governor, has recently been accused of sexual misconduct by four women, including a former staffer who says he raped her.
I’m not going to get into the veracity of the accusations. I believe the accusers, for obvious reasons, but I’m not here to write the next bit of speculation or opinion, at least not on that part of the story.
I’m sure that sounds a bit cryptic, so I’ll explain. Stories like this are terrible, and they are also extremely disappointing. After all, I think I can speak for many when I say that I liked Swalwell, and I liked most of the positions he took on issues I care about. I also liked the fact that he was not easily bullied by Trump and his goons; Swalwell has had many public brawls with the lunatic right in America, and he is under almost constant attack from political rivals and the CEOs that fund them. He’s one of Trump’s favorite targets, a fact that made me like him almost instinctively.
But the moment the story broke, all of that changed. And it didn’t just change for me – it changed for almost everyone who claims a political position even a hair left of center, and also for anyone who claims to be a decent human being.
And that’s how it should be.
That said, stories like this one, as terrible as they are, tell us a lot about how we react when “one of ours” commits a crime, and it also tells us a lot about how different we are from our opposition when this kind of thing happens.
Simply put, if Swalwell were a Republican, his chances of surviving this scandal politically, and perhaps criminally, would be far greater. After all, there is a massive government entity whose sole purpose is to protect Republican sexual predators and their rich friends. It’s called The Department of Justice. There is also a massive political movement whose job is exactly the same. We call it MAGA.
If you are a Republican in America today, you are either a predator yourself, or you support predators. That’s a tough look in the mirror, I bet. And while binary arguments like the one I just presented are typically bullshit, if we test this one, we’ll find that it holds up. And as maddening as that statement will be to my GOP friends and neighbors, it is nearly impossible to refute. After all, under Trump, the GOP has fully abandoned each and every major principle it ever claimed at any point in the last half century, leaving sexual predation as the only uniting principle they have left.
If I were friends with Eric Swalwell, and if he trusted me, I’d ask him to end his campaign for Governor and resign immediately. But if I were his lawyer, and my job was to defend him “without passion or prejudice,” then I’d tell him to switch parties and avail himself of the predator protection machine we call the GOP.
Brett Pransky is a writer, a teacher, a father, and a husband, but rarely in that order. He spends his days amplifying the voices of freedom and democracy as an Editor right here at The Political Voices Network, and he spends his nights trying to fix the world one clever sentence at a time.