All politicians engage in degrees of hyperbole. Even so, we expect that political candidates will not become completely untethered from the facts as we know them: that they will not seek the favor of the least-informed by making statements that ignore the truth.
Those of us who follow such things thought years ago that we could put to rest the once-popular communications idea of the demagogue. The term was widely used when I was an undergraduate way back in the days before indoor plumbing. The idea is that a person could rise to power in civil society by pushing lies and falsehoods on a susceptible public.
I remember putting a dusty 1954 volume of Reinhard Luthin’s red-covered American Demagogues back on a library shelf in the early 1970s with the firm belief that our democracy had moved on. I assumed that Luthin’s work was not where the future of American political communication would go. There would be no more jingoistic fabulists in American politics to match the discredited figures of Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy, Louisiana’s Huey Long, Boston Mayor James Curley, and others. Surely our era of detailed backstories and proliferating media would prevent chronic liars and nativists from rising to become political heavyweights. As a nation we had become wiser if not happier.
But here we are well into the 21st Century, encountering the same kinds of willful prejudice-baiting, scapegoating and misstatements that made the rhetoric of figures like McCarthy so damaging. The Senator was not beyond holding up an empty sheet of paper and declaring that it contained the names of “known communists” who were presumably prepared to sell America out to the Soviets. Never mind that these alleged traitors were often artists, writers and even musicians. Who knew that the composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein was a threat to the “the American way of life?”
To be sure, all politicians engage in degrees of hyperbole. Overstatement is part of the campaign process. And some claims are not readily testable on empirical grounds. Even so, we expect that political candidates will not become completely untethered from the facts as we know them: that they will not seek the favor of a mob by making indictments they know to be false.
Trump’s strategic use of false assertions uttered to please a crowd has begun to fill a catalogue of certifiably incorrect claims.
If Luthin were alive today to revise his study, Donald Trump would have to be added to his examples. Trump’s strategic use of false assertions uttered to please a crowd has begun to fill a catalogue of certifiably incorrect claims. Many of his statements are breathtakingly dishonest. Most of us have heard them in familiar iterations:
-That President Obama is not an American citizen,
-That Obama is a “founder” of ISIS,
-That the President “invaded” Afghanistan,
-That Hillary Clinton was plausibly behind the death of family friend Vince Foster,
-That Ted Cruz’s father played an active role in the assassination of President Kennedy
-That voter fraud is a significant problem in American elections.
The list goes on to many more bogus claims. As of last week, the Pulitzer Prize winning organization Politifact found that 70 percent of the claims made by Trump in this campaign were mostly to completely false. In the same categories the percentage for Hillary Clinton was 28 percent.
The irony here is, of course, that in an age of proliferating information and easy access to it, there could still be so many of us who are not put off by Trump’s false claims. The conventional explanation is that we all exercise a “confirmation bias,” sometimes also known at the “theory of motivated reasoning.” The theory is simply the conventional idea that we look for evidence to confirm what we already believe, ignoring the rest. But at some point even a diehard believer probably can’t prevent the cognitive dissonance created by finally confronting the disconnect between support for a favored figure and the ransacking of settled truths. It’s one thing to find this pattern in a friend or relative with mental illness or clear cognitive deficits. It’s another to accept it from a person who wants to represent the United States to the rest of the world.
You can doll-up the 140 character/20-word limit as “microblogging.” But that term hardly does justice to the vacuous sneering this social media form has unleashed into our national discourse.
Over the years pundits have been fond of identifying the chief villains responsible for creating our seemingly hardened political life. At least in terms of national politics, a host of problems have been identified that have undermined American democracy. Take your pick: the short eight-second sound-bite common to television news, the tendency of the press to cover campaigns like horseraces and poker games, too much money in the process abetted by the 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court decision, the growth of television attack ads that hardly mention the candidates that pay for them, or the decline of the conciliatory impulse as a candidate virtue.
But if I had to pick only one irritant of the American body politic in this election cycle, it would be the cancer of Twitter as a means of making and setting news agendas. You can doll-up the 140 character/20-word limit as “microblogging.” But that term hardly does justice to the vacuous sneering and sloganeering this social media form has unleashed into our national discourse. It may be harmless for private users. But it has become a bludgeon used by too many campaigns.
Twitter creates two fundamental problems. The first is that it forces a communicator to stand out quickly, usually by texting intellectually dishonest and hyperbolic assertions: features we have gotten to know to well because of the Donald Trump campaign. Simply speaking, the format makes less likely any kind of thoughtful interactive discourse, often encouraging the rankest kinds of under-qualified claims. A Twitter account can be like an arsenal of bombs dropped from drones. Each rhetorical explosive is lobbed at a distance that saves the sender from having to answer a counter-response. As a means to bypass the media, Twitter is a campaigner’s dream.
The second problem is that too many in the press love these text feeds. If you happen to be a lazy or overworked reporter, you need reach no further than the Twitter feed of the campaign you are covering. All of the provocative quotes you would like to get from the candidate are there, calculated to be as subtle as a snowball in the face.
Better yet, quotes from Twitter usually come as easy building blocks for a story built around the hackneyed idea that journalism needs to feature conflict. Charges made on a feed are easily matched up to counter-charges from a competing campaign that is monitoring the competition. Paste together these shouts into the ether and you have a story without ever having to consider a full stump speech. This process allows the impression that the essential press-politician equation is in tact. More realistically, the impression is more illusion than reality. A politician can “speak” to the press without holding a real briefing where follow-up questions might get asked. And a reporter can go home at a decent hour without the inconvenience of having to show up at a campaign event.
To be sure, this kind of ‘campaign by proxy’ matches the ways we now live. Texting is our distraction and obsession. So we hardly notice that the press/politician dialogue that has traditionally been an essential part of our democracy has been muted.
