Only One Thing Can Cool the Nation’s Political Rhetoric: Election Day and After

This is a clash of civilizations, indeed of civilization versus barbarism, not just a clash of parties, policies, or cultures.

It became a commonplace, in this year’s election campaigns, for candidates and pundits to characterize this year’s vote as the most important in decades or perhaps even in the nation’s entire history. Every election is consequential, yet this one does seem more seismically forceful than most. The contrast between the nation’s two political parties looks much more like a clash of civilizations than a battle over public-policy issues.

That is exactly what this is. Both presidential candidates have been using martial imagery and casting aspersions toward one another’s personal character. The presidential election campaign suggested that two very different kinds of people are living in this country and cannot possibly accommodate either one having power over the central government.

This is a clash of civilizations, indeed of civilization versus barbarism, not just a fight between parties, policies, or cultures.

The red-blue political divide has become a war between two tribes, with one side indicating that nothing less than their breed’s full dominance of all the nation’s institutions of power is acceptable. The other side argues that the central government has taken up too much power and we must reduce its load before it malfunctions and self-destructs.

The Harris-Walz campaign and mainstream media have continually characterized the Trump-Vance team as Nazis and claimed that their Make America Great Again agenda is a cover for Nazism. The sitting president referred to Trump-Vance supporters as garbage, a more explicit term of derision perfectly in alignment with their rhetoric of the last dozen years, which has characterized Republican voters as bitter clingers and racists who are deplorable, irredeemable, weird, and dangerous semi-fascists, extremists, insurrectionists, domestic terrorists, fascists, Nazis, followers of a petty tyrant, and now garbage.

Donald Trump has deployed awful language throughout this political career, and in the current year he has called Harris, Biden, and their advisors and political appointees Marxists, communists, and fascists who “live like vermin,” scum, very dangerous people, absolute garbage, an enemy from within, “the ones who are destroying the country,” and other such terms. Trump has called Harris “a radical left lunatic who will destroy our country.”

It is worth noting that Trump is bipartisan in his aggressive rhetoric, regularly excoriating Republicans who cross him. Trump generally aims his barbs at criminals and people in power in government, the media, private nonprofit organizations, and big businesses allied with Democrats, scolding “lunatics in our government,” purveyors of fake news, tech censors, and the like.

The rhetoric within the political arena indicates that Trump has a strong dislike for people currently in power in the United States, and that national Democrat politicians have powerful feelings of distrust and disdain toward a large percentage of the American people, possibly even a majority thereof.

Many people blame social media for the corruption of political language, and of course Democrats and the national press (the latter being a subset of the former) say that Trump is the one who started the rhetorical decline. That is not true, however: Obama preceded Trump in this behavior, and Hillary Clinton cast aspersions against her political opponent at least as profligately as Trump did throughout 2016.

Democrats, moreover, have indulged in incendiary accusations against one another in primary contests in 2016 and beyond, with Harris famously accusing Biden of racism in a 2020 debate while saying she did not think he was a racist, an obvious dodge.

Technology and changing manners in American society have certainly contributed to the corruption of political rhetoric, but the real cause of the hostility in the nation’s political culture and the heightened accusations of malice is the excessive concentration of power in Washington, D.C. If this is the most important election in the nation’s history, it is because we are voting on who will control the biggest, most powerful, most expensive, most politicized, most weaponized, most intrusive, most partisan, most profligate, most reckless, and least accountable American government ever.

As a quick indicator of the size and irresponsibility of the federal government, note that the national debt has risen by 38 percent since 2019 and is now at 122.43 percent of GDP. Federal government liabilities (funded plus unfunded) per citizen are now $651,951, while total household and business assets are just $642,061. Let that sink in for a moment.

There is too much at stake in our elections. Congress and the White House have allocated more than our entire current store of private assets toward future spending.

These claims on the fruits of the American people’s hard work, saving, and investment are irresponsible and unconscionable. It is understandable that those being subjected to this confiscation are appalled, and that those who want to represent those people’s interests engage in heightened language to express their anger.

It is equally understandable that those who aspire to spend all that money and thereby enjoy the power of the world’s biggest purse would come to resent and perhaps even despise anyone who stands in the way of that happy outcome. These enlightened individuals are certain that they would be less selfish about the spending of all this wealth than the unexceptional drones who worked to create it and the greedy capitalists who invested their personal assets in building it all.

Government experts know far better how to “invest” the people’s wealth, and they always do so far more impersonally and without favoritism, or so they claim.

The only way to reduce the intensity of this dispute is to shrink the stakes involved. To clean up the nation’s political rhetoric, we must reduce the power of our government—dramatically and uncompromisingly. Until then, our declining political rhetoric will serve as an accurate indication of how thoroughly our government is destroying our wealth and our very viability as a nation.