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And it was fun to see Democratic gubernatorial candidate Katie Hobbs make featuring two border sheriffs who support her, shoring up a political shortcoming on border security.

Call these moves flip-flops if you want, or misleading, or lies. Whatever. What I liked is these two candidates were recognizing majority opinion on two hot issues — border security and abortion rights — and trying to reassure voters they have mainstream positions. The voters can decide if they believe them.

This is old-fashioned “tacking to the center,� a tactic politicians used to take after they won their primary elections by appealing to their party’s base. It’s much preferable to the politics that we have seen too much of this year — existential doomsaying about the stakes of the election.

Talking about saving the country from deliberate destruction by Democrats became a mainstream Republican talking point after Donald Trump lost the 2020 election and blamed fraud. That in turn unleashed Democratic existential warnings as well, meaning many politicians are predicting catastrophe if their side doesn’t win.

Among other candidates, Kari Lake, the GOP nominee for governor, has repeatedly framed her candidacy in existential terms. , at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Aug. 6:

“I know they want us to think it is a battle between left and right, but this is truly a battle between those who want to save America and those who want to destroy her.�

, she encouraged attendees to fight with her against “the evil forces trying to bring this great nation to our knees — the globalists, the Marxists, the cartels here in ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥, the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), and frankly, the biggest threat might just be the corrupt career politicians in our own government.â€�

Masters has made similar comments. At a July 22 “Save America� rally with Trump in Prescott Valley, he mused about what six years of Hillary Clinton as president would have meant.

“I think that literally would have been the end of this republic, and Donald J. Trump saved us from that fate,� .

Of course, in 2020, Democrats were saying much the same thing about the demise of democracy if Trump won reelection.

‘A political war’

The idea that the existence of the country is at stake is a common talking point on the right, and obviously false. Anyone who knows Democrats or liberals — and I know my share — knows this is false, because the people they know are not trying to destroy the country. But Republicans, similarly, see themselves as safeguarding our political system, not destroying it.

When you talk about your opposition in the aggregate or abstract, it’s easy to demonize them. For months, the fundraising appeals by a GOP candidate for the state House, Cory McGarr, have caught my attention for this reason.

McGarr, who won the GOP primary in LD17 along with Rachel Jones, characterized the opposing party as “radical socialists� and “Marxist Democrats� while also slamming supposed “RINOs� in his party.

It’s common lingo among those immersed in conservative media — “we are in a political and ideological war� — but it is incomprehensible for those of us outside it.

And interestingly, during the , McGarr was conservative in his point of view but didn’t demonize the opposition, as he did in his emails. It’s harder to demonize individuals in front of you than an aggregation of supposed political enemies.

Biden demonizes GOP

Now, it’s easy for me to see through the ridiculous existential threats raised by Republican politicians, because I lean left politically myself and know, for example, that neither I nor the people I know are Marxist-Communist-pedophilia-spreading Satanists. It’s ludicrous, actually.

But when I see how ridiculous those demonizing labels are, I have to, in good faith, look at the existential rhetoric coming from the left as well and question it. That rhetoric is not hard to find.

Democrats’ main existential warning lately has been about threats to our democratic system, though the overturning of Roe v. Wade and climate threats also come into play. And on the left, demonizing rhetoric comes from the top.

“Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic,� President Joe Biden said in . “MAGA Republicans do not respect the Constitution. They do not believe in the rule of law. They do not recognize the will of the people.�

This rhetoric also filters down to state and local politics. In the LD17 debate, one of McGarr’s Democratic opponents, Dana Allmond, started her opening statement this way: “This Nov. 8 ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥ns are going to elect lawmakers that are going to save our democracy and our dignity.â€�

Now, I think Democrats’ fears about damage to democracy are more grounded than Republicans’ warnings of the destruction of the republic by Marxists. That’s because the last two years have been filled with real-world efforts to overturn the will of the people in the 2020 election, especially here in ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥, but punctuated by the Jan. 6, 2021 effort to stop the peaceful transfer of power.

Anti-democratic authoritarianism has a real hold on some conservatives, thanks to the catastrophizing rhetoric of people like Trump and Bannon.

Still, I worry about the social impacts of both the Democrats’ and the Republicans’ political catastrophizing and demonizing. In ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥ we saw during the week of the 2020 election several examples of political violence, including one killing. Another man shot up cars in the parking lot of an elementary school because he thought the election had been stolen from Trump.

This week, Republicans have argued that in North Dakota, by a man who killed a teen whom he labeled a member of a “Republican extremist group,� echoing Biden’s “extremist� rhetoric in the Sept. 1 speech. that politics was the real motive, though.

We’re not a mob

What seems to lead to the hatred and fear is the sweeping demonization of the political opposition as an existential threat. When Biden tried to separate “MAGA Republicans� from other Republicans in his comments about their threat to democracy, it failed, because MAGA Republicans are the bulk of the GOP. He was essentially demonizing the whole political opposition.

What politicians ought to do is what I saw happen when the candidates faced each other in the LD17 debate. They talked about themselves and the issues, disagreeing forcefully if sometimes awkwardly. In person, the ad hominem critiques were few.

That’s telling, because it’s how we naturally relate to each other as people, rather than as an aggregated mob such as “The Left� or “MAGA Republicans.�

We will have rough politics, of course, and should, especially after rulings like the one Friday that took ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥ back to a pre-statehood abortion ban.

But it’s more constructive to attack an opponent, for, say, shifting positions on abortion or border security, than to call them part of an evil movement that is an existential threat to our system. We still have to live with each other, after all.