STEVE SEBELIUS: Don’t forget your humanity while waging political battle

It’s political season and that means harsh rhetoric on the campaign trail.

We saw it all week during the Democratic National Convention, as President Donald Trump was targeted by speakers for failings great and small. And we’ll see it again next week as the Republican National Convention gavels to order and Democratic nominee Joe Biden comes under fire.

That’s as it should be. Politics is about competing ideas and people who deeply believe in them. It’s natural that there will be friction, raised tempers and shouting.

But there are limits — or at least there should be.

On Aug. 15, President Trump’s younger brother, Robert, died. The president made a special visit to see him in his final hours and apparently the two were very close.

The next day, however, the bubbling cesspool of hatred and bile that is social media erupted with opprobrium instead of sympathy. People took the occasion to lambaste a hated president. The hashtag #WrongTrump started trending.

For anyone who has experienced the loss of a close sibling, the pain and grief of the moment is bad enough without the entire world piling on. That kind of rhetoric isn’t just churlish and utterly inappropriate, it’s damn inhuman.

Who among us sees somebody in pain and decides to add to it? Only on social media — with the cloak of anonymity, the cover of the crowd and the license to take leave of social norms — could people act with such monstrous insensitivity.

Some may argue that Trump’s own insensitivity and narcissism justifies treating him poorly, and surely such people can report a long list of the president’s offenses against norms, including his own outrageous assertion that the late Rep. John Dingell had gone to hell.

But the real road to hell is occasioned by that very thinking, that our own behavior can be as awful as that of people with whom we disagree.

We’ve lost something in our politics, the ability to see people with whom we disagree as not only our fellow Americans, but as fellow human beings. We see them now only as avatars of everything we hate and distrust, not real flesh-and-blood people with families and feelings. As a result, it’s all too easy to demonize them.

The same thing happened a few days earlier, when Biden announced California Sen. Kamala Harris as the Democratic vice presidential pick. Almost immediately, the insults began — not about her politics, but about her personally. Signs were made announcing the ticket as “Joe and the Hoe,” and T-shirts with the theme were selling on Amazon.com.

A joke? Try disgusting, horrible and demeaning, to say nothing of misogynistic, racist and evil.

Again, Harris can’t expect to be shielded from all criticism. She’s in politics, so criticism of her policies are fair game. Criticize her for changing her stance on health care, or her background as a prosecutor (the left says she was too tough on crime, the right says too lenient) or for abandoning her earlier criticism of Biden’s busing votes when she joined the ticket.

But there’s no justification for calling her a whore, no matter how much you might hate her politics. And anyone who did so has lost a part of their humanity.

Contrast all of the bile on the national stage with a scene from Carson City.

On Aug. 4, the penultimate day of the special session, term-limited Assemblyman John Hambrick rose to give his final speech. He thanked the Assembly and his colleagues for their 12 years of and friendship, and they gave him a heartfelt ovation in return. And this took place on the same day Hambrick had cast votes with the Assembly minority against bills favored by the majority.

But Hambrick’s pushing the red button didn’t matter as much as who he was: a friendly, genuinely nice man who treated everybody with respect, embraced life (good and bad) with gentle humor and was a friend — a real, authentic friend — regardless of your political party. His colleagues, Democrats and Republicans, were genuinely moved by his words.

Why? Because they haven’t lose sight of the fact that Hambrick is a fellow Nevadan, a fellow American and a fine human being, too. Would that we could all see people, especially our political opponents, the way we saw John Hambrick on his last day in the Assembly.

Contact Steve Sebelius at SSebelius @reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0253. Follow @SteveSebelius on Twitter.