Dan Rodricks

I listen for the candidate who speaks of children — not that Americans should have more of them, but that we should take better care of the ones we have. I listen for the candidate who speaks of children because elections are about the future.

You might vote in November based on a single issue or grievance, but the overriding issue is the future of the country — the one we leave for our children and grandchildren, our nieces and nephews and the neighbors’ kids.

After all the chaos of the last decade, it’s time for American adults to grow up and think first of the younger, smaller ones around us.

Maybe you think it goes without saying that a national election — for president, the Senate, and the House of Representatives — is about the future and, in essence, all about children.

But I rarely, if ever, hear the election framed this way.

Democrats argue, rightfully, that the election is about making sure the next president and Congress respect the Constitution, something essential to keeping this republic and something, prior to Donald Trump, no one worried about. If that’s the primary reason you vote — to keep a felon and wannabe autocrat from returning to the White House — fine. That’s a vote about the future, both the immediate one and the one we convey to the children and young adults of 2024.

But, beyond preserving democracy — and I realize it’s hard to think that anything could be more important — the next election is about an even larger matter: The life American kids will have.

Are we going to accept, as Trump’s running mate JD Vance says, that mass shootings are a “fact of life”? Are we going to stop electing do-nothing senators and representatives who forever live in stark fear of the gun industry and the most zealous and selfish gun owners? Do you really want your kids and grandkids living in fear of gunfire in their classrooms?

Are our kids and their kids going to face frequent environmental disasters resulting from the climate change that Trump and his allies still dismiss? Are we going to stop electing leaders who ridicule atmospheric science as “the climate-change alarm industry”? Or are we going to give our precious votes exclusively to candidates who respect science and support ramping up our efforts to reduce carbon emissions?

Do we really want to support candidates who diss teachers and undercut public education funding — and accept the mediocre results — because they lack the nerve to raise taxes?

If we keep failing to do something extraordinary about guns, if we elect a president who wants to drill for more oil, not use less of it, if we send to the Senate men and women who care more about tax breaks for millionaires than funding for schools, what kind of life are your kids and grandkids going to have?

Even if you don’t accept these arguments — if you’re content with an armed society, if you think climate problems are exaggerated, if you think school funding is already adequate — you still can’t escape a fundamental question: Which presidential candidate would be the best role model for your son or daughter, grandson or granddaughter, niece or nephew, or the kid next door?

When I say this is a fundamental question, I mean it: Which candidate, Donald Trump or Kamala Harris, would you want your 11-year-old son or daughter to admire, even emulate?

That’s practically a rhetorical question. As you can guess, I think Harris is a far superior choice in this regard. But this isn’t about me. I’m putting this question to my fellow Americans, Republicans and Democrats and independents: Who’s the best role model for your kids?

The late poet and author Robert Bly argued that Americans, in an increasingly cynical atmosphere, have lost our “vertical gaze” toward leaders we admire and respect. These days, the first instinct among many is to tear down those who step forward to lead, and in a most personal, often vicious way. Bly saw that tendency as adolescent; he called ours a “sibling society” that lacked sufficient grownups and resulted in a particular penalty for children: Surrounded by self-absorbed adults in various stages of protracted adolescence, boys and girls are unable to satisfy their instinctive appetite for role models.

I look around and I listen. I wonder and worry how all the partisan hostility and political weirdness plays on the minds of our young as they try to make sense of their country in a presidential-election year. Many of the so-called adults who pass loudly before them fail as role models.

Real grownups would not allow the mass shootings to continue. They would not engage in ridicule of the science warning about climate change.

Running for office, responsible adults would resist easy, cynical appeals to low-information voters. They would not exploit prejudice and fear, but speak proudly of the nation’s ethnic and racial diversity. They would make protecting and educating children a national priority, and never accept ignorance, poverty, or violence as “a fact of life.”

I’ve said some of these things before. But recently, muting much of the political noise, I came to the conclusion that every vote should be about America’s children, and every candidate judged on that count. They should also be judged on their smarts and integrity, their respect for truth. But I listen specifically for what they say about kids. Every grownup should.