Lawmakers don’t brawl as they did in slavery debates before the Civil War. But they’ve made up for abandoning violence by making their rhetoric more extreme. It’s been three years since The Week
illustrated
rhetoric inflation with a graph showing a near-vertical rise in politicians’ use, for example, of the term “existential threat.” The drift has surely accelerated since then.
But it’s not only elected officials riding the tide of exaggeration. The rhetoric and the logic of activists also reject nuance. To accuse someone of racism is the gravest of insults, but it is common to do so. Those pushing critical race theory insist you’re a racist unless you’re an active anti-racist — a status attained only by asserting ideas and taking actions that good people rightly deplore.
Abjuring nuance also characterizes debate over Donald Trump. Democrats and other vehement critics of the former president suggest that you’re for him if you’re not constantly active against him. It is, indeed, arguable, but it is not incontrovertible, to say one’s default setting should be unstinting denunciation of Trump and his many grievous faults. But failing to do so does not mean you accept his repeated falsehood that he won the 2020 election, for example, or that the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, was OK.
A Pew Research Center poll last October found that although two-thirds of Republicans and sympathetic independents want Trump to remain a major political figure for years, the majority of them don’t want him to run for president. Many people like his policies, like the voice he gave to the concerns of ordinary people, and like his willingness to battle biased left-wing news media, but they don’t like the idea of having him and his repellent characteristics at the top of the GOP ticket.
This, as James Antle argues in his Washington Examiner magazine
cover story
this week, is the nuanced path Gov. Glenn Youngkin took in winning election in the increasingly blue state of Virginia. Perhaps the main reason such nuance is unacceptable to Trump’s most insistent critics is that it seems widely acceptable. It succeeds. It is dangerous to Democrats electorally, and so they denounce it as unprincipled.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy
walked briskly away
from a CNN reporter recently when asked about the Republican National Committee cackhandedly suggesting Jan. 6 was “legitimate political discourse.” McCarthy was doing what politicians do, aligning himself with voters with whom he and his party can win the next election. Refusing to be drawn into comment that might damage GOP election chances is not unprincipled, merely on-message. In this, McCarthy was doing what Democrats do when they squeeze Jan. 6 for every ounce of partisan advantage — they’re lining up with their base.
Like those Virginians who elected Youngkin, most Republicans and many independents prefer not to dwell on ugly events and an ugly past president and instead prefer to talk about their practical concerns and the future. Voters walked away from Trump in 2020. That’s what GOP leaders are trying to do as well.
