Whether a TV talking head or a keyboard warrior, we must do better with political speech | Opinion
Over my 20 years of working professional in politics, we’ve strayed far from the high-minded political discourse imagined in Hollywood productions such as “The West Wing” and pushed further into the truest representation of American politics, the HBO show “VEEP.” Our politics have become abrasive, crass, and display an almost proud ignorance of policy issues. They have also become exaggerated, emotional, and, as we saw this weekend, violent.
As someone with a voice in politics, I’ve been working the past several years to tone down my own rhetoric. That doesn’t mean avoiding an aggressive tone, I’m still going to be snarky, insulting, and sometimes witty, but it does mean choosing my barbs more carefully.
One of the great honors of my professional life was serving as the spokesman for the Republican Party of Kentucky under Chairman Mac Brown. Mac trusted me and generally gave me full creative freedom when it came to my public comments. However, to Mac’s credit, one of the few guardrails he put on me was to avoid words like ‘fight’, ‘war’, and other phrases that could be misconstrued as a call to violent action because you never know what unhinged person may hear it and take it seriously. I think that’s an increasingly important lesson we should all heed.
Today, everything from pension reform to taking AM radios out of cars has suddenly become a threat to our very way of life. Hating someone is ok, hate is a valid emotion. But equivocating someone who supports net neutrality or mandated masks during COVID with Hitler? Just stop it. This level of hyperbole is unsustainable and this weekend, we saw what it breeds.
This shooting in Butler, Penn. was a predictable inevitability. Democrats have been told for a nearly a decade that Donald Trump is not just an existential threat to our nation but an immediate one. Of course someone finally acted, it was only a matter of time. While I vehemently disagree with a good deal of his policies and believe they are antithetical to my values both as Republican and an American, I do not believe Donald Trump (or Joe Biden for that matter) represent the end of our democracy. And the reality is, neither do most of the politicians telling you they do.
Professional political operatives aren’t in the business of wasting money; we want to win. We pay for polls to test which messages are most likely to motivate voters and base our campaigns around the results. The fact is, as much as Americans claim to hate negative campaigning, it’s the only thing that moves votes. American politics are a reflection of us and, sad to say, position papers and policy proposals simply don’t move or motivate voters. As a result, politicians and campaigns use aggressive rhetoric they may not believe, which is fine until it crosses the line from ‘this person is bad’ to ‘this person inherently evil’.
The language we use in political discourse has devolved over the past 20 years to a point where honestly I’m shocked we’re still speaking in complete sentences. And while we as Americans take our cues from our leaders, it’s hard for me to put all the blame on the politicians because they’re only reacting to their constituents.
As we move towards the homestretch of the most emotionally charged Presidential election in decades, there is potential for things to get even worse. That’s why I am asking everyone, regardless of who you support, whether you’re a TV talking head or just a keyboard warrior on-line, do better yourselves and demand better from your politicians because we never know how someone out there might take our words and act, as we saw this weekend.
Tres Watson is a former Republican Party of Kentucky spokesman, founder of Capitol Reins PR, and host of Kentucky Politics Weekly podcast.