America has descended to the abyss of abusive electoral discourse
Election Day, November 5th, 2024. By B. Kumaravadivelu
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No matter who wins today, both Republican and Democratic campaigners bear responsibility for dragging the American political discourse to an unbearably low level.
I came to this country in 1984 and watched for the first time an American presidential campaign. During that year, President Ronald Reagan, a Republican, was seeking re-election and he was challenged by former Vice-President Walter Mondale, a Democrat.
I watched the 1984 presidential election with excitement.
Now, I watch the 2024 campaign with trepidation.
What a difference 40 years can make in the tone and tenor of a presidential campaign.
At the time of the 1984 election, Reagan was 73-years-old and Mondale was 56. Mondale made Reagan’s age and his mental acuity, along with his hawkish foreign policy, a prominent focus of his debate.
They debated twice. In the first, Reagan fumbled and meandered his way through the debate.
Later, Mondale recalled in his memoir: “It was actually a little frightening,” because Reagan “mangled” his familiar anecdotes, gripped into the podium and “even started forgetting some of his lines.”
And yet, neither Mondale nor any other Democratic leader accused Reagan of being unhinged or unstable or unfit — abusive words we frequently heard during the current presidential campaign.
During the second debate, Reagan responded to Mondale’s criticism of his age, exhibiting his characteristic wit and wisdom which won laurels from everybody including Mondale.
Mustering all his well-trained cinematic articulation, Reagan said calmly and confidently: “I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.”
He was re-elected with a thumping majority.
In 1994, five years after he left the White House, Reagan made it public that he was afflicted with Alzheimer’s disease.
Through the campaign, the two gentlemen showed admirable respect for each other.
They both exhibited decency, dignity and discipline.
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Sadly, the 3-Ds are conspicuously absent during the current presidential campaign. Instead, the airwaves are filled with 3-Ss — slander, smear, slur.
Consider the following select epithets used by both campaigns. Focus on unacceptable abusive terms, not who said about whom, although it is easily discernable:
Unhinged. Unstable. Fascist. Dictator. Mentally impaired. Low-IQ individual. A prostitute with pimp handlers. Dumb as a Rock. Crazy. Nuts. Antichrist. Trash.
Of all the abusive words we heard, one word may stand out as a metaphor for this presidential season: garbage.
It all started when, during Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally, a comedian named Tony Hinchcliffe made racist, bigoted comments. He said Puerto Rico is a “floating island of garbage,” Jews clinging to money, Palestinians throwing rocks, and Black people carving watermelons.
Unable to bear the stink of garbage, President Joe Biden made what his staff called a gaffe. He said Puerto Ricans are “good, decent, honorable people. The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters. His demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American.”
As Republicans latched on to the gaffe and tried to turn the tables by declaring that Biden’s garbage comments is evidence of Democratic disdain for conservative Americans.
In response, the White House press secretary issued an unconvincing explanation: Biden was merely referring “to the hateful rhetoric at the Madison Square Garden rally as ‘garbage.’”
Seeking to take advantage of the Biden comment, former President Trump took to the cab of a garbage truck in Wisconsin, a political stunt which went viral. He told his supporters in a North Carolina rally: “We know what they believe, because look how they’ve treated you. They’ve treated you like garbage.”
The garbage back and forth took center stage with the election just a few days away.
Everybody other than partisan zealots wanted this stinking campaign to be over.
Conservative columnist?George Will?put it right. “Of this mercifully truncated presidential campaign we may say what Samuel Johnson said of Milton’s “Paradise Lost”: No one ever wished it longer. Why prolong this incineration of the nation’s dignity?”
He also offered a wise suggestion: “Whoever wins, both parties should be penitential about what they have put the country through. And both should begin planning 2028 nomination processes that will spare the nation a choice that will be greeted, as this year’s has been, by grimaces from sea to shining sea.”
A possible cure to “break America’s political fever,” wrote Professor of Philosophy Kwame Anthony Appiah, may lie in what’s called fallibilism.
Fallibilism, he explained, urges all of us to “recognize, from an outsider’s perspective, that one is subject to the same tendency to error that one sees in others.”
Anybody listening?
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