Since the Trump and Brexit bombs exploded and sent shockwaves through Western civilization in 2016, the contest over who can issue the direst prognosis for the state of humanity has raged.
At first, the years themselves took the brunt of the blame. Some variation of “F*** 2016!” was a common post to see on social media, particularly following news of a natural disaster or a celebrity death. More beloved actors and musicians seemed to be dying that year than ever before. For secular liberals with college degrees — i.e. the Democratic base — it was as if we’d been hexed. It’s amazing how instinctively religious even the irreligious can be.
The more sophisticated of the bunch wondered aloud if we’d been sucked into a darker channel of the multiverse, so disorienting was the defeat of Hillary Clinton (and on the day of Leonard Cohen’s death, no less!).
The nonstop battle of pessimistic one-upmanship raged online during the Trump presidency. A Swedish child activist was beatified antemortem for her majestically performed pessimism on the issue of climate change. She has since fixed her steely aim on capitalism itself, to the surprise of exactly no one. (Her eventual conversion to conservatism, which will likely occur around the age of 40, will be even less surprising).
During these years, the word “existential” saw its first real rise to popular prominence. This was much to the dismay of philosophy majors everywhere, irked as they were by its repeated misuse and blue over losing exclusive rights to a “smart person” word.
These and numerous other examples of linguistic inflation raised the stakes of ordinary political conflicts to battles of cosmic consequence. Every news story, no matter how explicable or innocuous, suddenly exemplified the most insidious “isms” and “acies” known to man. Listening to Mozart in the comfort of one’s own home became suddenly suspect since much of classical music was written during a time when slavery existed.
Our language has become so watered down that we can no longer communicate any sense of scale. If a white supremacist military force suddenly began to conquer Europe as Germany did in the 1930s, what words would we use to communicate the urgency of the matter? After all, it was just this weekend that House Majority Whip James Clyburn, (D-SC), claimed a Republican takeover of Congress would set us on track to “repeat what happened in [Nazi] Germany.”
The COVID-19 pandemic brought the valorization of panic and pessimism to new heights. It is no surprise that anti-science hysterics prevented schools from reopening in a reasonable time frame. They couldn’t “follow the science” and reopen schools once it became clear that COVID posed no significant threat to children because they’d already crossed the rhetorical rubicon. After all, COVID was the equivalent of a gazillion 9/11s! It would have been impossible for them to simultaneously “follow the science” and save face.
All of this helps to explain the utter cynicism of the Democratic Party’s closing message for the midterm elections. They wanted voters to believe that anything short of a straight-line vote for Democrats would lead to the end of democracy itself. But we all know —and even they all know — that this is hysterical nonsense. Even true-blue believers must sense the incoherence behind the warnings of a democratic overthrow of democracy.
But that hasn’t stopped the Left from trying desperately to drum up fear and paranoia once again. Just last week, MSNBC’s resident historian Michael Beschloss — who is there, ostensibly, to offer measured and sober historical analysis — jumped the shark with comments so transparently absurd and cynical that even Chicken Little blushed.
Appearing on All In with Chris Hayes, Beschloss pondered the implications of our coming election.
“A historian 50 years from now — if historians are allowed to write in this country and if there are still free publishing houses and a free press, which I’m not certain of,” he began. “But if that is true, a historian will say, what was at stake tonight and this week was the fact whether we will be a democracy in the future, whether our children will be arrested and conceivably killed.”
Hate-watchers and love-watchers alike had the same reaction: Hang on, what was that last part?
Yes, that’s right. Michael Beschloss, a prince among pundits, wants you to vote Democrat because otherwise your children will be rounded up and killed.
Lest my inbox flood with accusations of letting wacko Right-wingers off the hook for their role in creating this clownish political environment, it should be noted that, yes, a certain subset of conservative conspiracy nuts have long suggested that every world event of the last 100 years has been meticulously planned by a nefarious cabal of “globalists” who serve the interests of child-sacrificing reptilian overlords. Let me also say that those people have been and will continue to be nuts.
But what is stunning is how closely the Michael Beschloss’s of the world have come to resemble the far-Right conspiracists they despise so much.
It would be nice for both sides to regain a sense of rhetorical scale in the coming years. It is important to speak plainly about the anxiety we all feel about the future, but we don’t need to leap quite so far to be persuasive. The Obamacare “death panels” scare tactic didn’t stop Obamacare 13 years ago, just as “the fate of democracy is on the ballot” won’t help Democrats today.
A little adult behavior would go a long way. It might even win an election or two.
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Peter Laffin is a writer in New England. Follow him on Twitter at @Laffin_Out_Loud.
