I think we can agree that political advertising is never going to go away. It may also be possible that we could find partial agreement that some of that advertising is going to be useful, assuming we agree that politics is both a necessary and important part of national life.
But of course, as with all limited resources, the question of where to allocate those resources and in what proportion does come up. How much should go to "helping people" versus "helping people vote wisely" might be an interesting debate, but I seriously doubt it could ever result in anything like agreement except in the smallest of settings -- say electing officers to your local charity.
However, and I think this is important, the fact that the Republican Party spent a minimum (I say minimum because we only know of the money they actually tracked) demonizing something like 4,200 people, mostly young, is in fact quite extraordinary. Less than 100 kids and young people in each state, struggling with gender identity, have been held up shameful public scape-goating for no other reason than to instill "fear of the other" for no other reason than to garner votes.
It does not speak to any policy that one might intelligently consider as a guide to casting their ballot. It does not talk to the questions of what sort of people do we wish to be.
I was just thinking about a friend of mine (who actually is a Scot), who has quite severe Tourette Syndrome -- no mild "tics" here, he can be a bit shocking when people are around who don't know him. But what can he do? Some "tics" can be managed (not cured), some cannot. Nobody really knows what causes Tourette Syndrome.
Likewise, nobody really knows how the brain decides that its gender identity does not agree with the gender assigned to the physical body it is housed in. What can such a person do? Try to manage, try to find a way to comfortably exist both within their own body, and in their society.
What can possibly justify spending so much money to demonize so very few people?
