Moments of great speech hold a special place in American memory. Tremendous oratory has long acted to help crystalize the pivotal moments of our nation’s history: the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the March on Washington, and the Battle of Gettysburg. Moments of meaning and poignancy cannot be discussed generations later without referencing the oratorical skill used to capture and drive them. In this election cycle there is little question about the importance of speech, but there is major alarm about its evolving form.
This theme of American political rhetoric has been practically inescapable, often showcasing grizzly dimensions with which we are both unfamiliar and uncomfortable. Donald Trump’s brash and aggressive speaking style has succeeded in grabbing the spotlight and ushering in a new tempo for American political speech. This tone is not new to an American public that is more sharply divided now than it has been in recent memory. Rhetoric coming from every direction of the political spectrum has become increasingly emotionally charged, pitting political opponents directly against one another as they compete to appeal to the public.
Through this lens, it is hardly surprising that the vicious and often expletive-ridden speeches given by Donald Trump have worn through their initial shock value rather quickly and rapidly become normalized, bringing even established politicians to make comments that in other times would likely be deemed inappropriate.
By publicly questioning Hillary Clinton’s physical fitness, Donald Trump created fodder for Internet forums, sparking rumors of complex partial seizures, post-concussion syndrome, dementia, Parkinson’s Disease, and a brain tumor. When Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani was asked what he thought of this, he responded by encouraging the press to “go online and search Hillary Clinton illness and see the videos for yourself.” This is striking, as establishment politicians tend to try to keep their distance from conspiracy theories. But Giuliani is not alone in his divergence from what has long been accepted as normal speech.
Ben Carson joined Giuliani in peddling conspiracy theories, explaining that the pyramids were not in fact tombs, but rather large storage chambers for grain. Mike Huckabee called out Obama, criticizing his trust of Iran as a move that would “take the Israelis and march them to the door of the oven.” Democrat Jim Webb gleefully joked about killing an enemy combatant on stage. Marco Rubio even went so far as to publicly champion the size of his “manliness.” Even Hillary Clinton, a beacon of establishment politics in a race fraught with anti-establishment sentiment, teased her audience about her affection for self-deleting snapchats, referencing her cache of scrubbed emails. While it’s not uncommon for politicians to speak in poor judgment or say things they later regret, we’re either seeing a wave of poor judgment, or the normalization and gradual adoption of a new political atmosphere and a new way of speaking.
But there have been casualties along the way. Harnessing populist support by use of a larger than life entertainment personality, Trump managed to win the Republican Party nomination, stitching himself into a party that still wasn’t sure if it wanted him. Along the way, other candidates, faced with the challenge of outperforming Donald Trump, piggybacked off the strategy that originally catapulted him into their midst. By letting their arguments slouch to Trump’s level, the Republican candidates gradually changed the culture of their speech. Trump’s style earned him the free media attention that he needed to run a successful primary campaign while simultaneously bringing other candidates to publicly discuss the size of their hands and other organs, how tough their mother is, the exceptional qualities of their wives, or a slew of other topics. These familiar waters worked for Trump, but for politicians invested in policy and state, they distracted and detracted from matters of substance.
In hindsight adopting these nonconventional practices may have been the establishment’s fatal flaw. It opened the door for and legitimized dialogue with Trump, in Trump’s own language. This stooping from conventional behavior created the opening he needed to build support and clinch the party’s nomination, giving him a more established platform from which to broadcast controversial messages.
Though this cocksure strategy disregards convention, precedent, and in many cases respect, it does in some ways articulate genuine feelings that play a meaningful role in American politics. These feelings have generally laid dormant, simmering below the surface of the relatively respectful form of civil discourses used in establishment politics.
The arousal of these sentiments harkens back to the Jacksonian era, a time when rival politicians readily attacked each other’s families and character, bringing back an old mold that plays on our feelings and anger in ways that seemed to have been cast out of establishment politics. Newspaper articles calling Andrew Jackson’s mother a prostitute, his wife a whore, and questioning Jackson’s race were circulated, other newspapers called John Quincy Adams, Jackson’s incumbent opponent, “The Pimp” and aggressively accused him of corruption and enabling sexual misconduct. Even Abraham Lincoln, widely recognized as one of our greatest presidents, presented outlandish conspiracy theories as part of the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates. Since then social and political mores and polling numbers have built a general standard of what is acceptable and what is not. But those standards are amorphous and now seem to be changing before us.
By forcing his way into the establishment’s spotlight, Trump has used his support to force a bridge between his own aggressive methodology and our form of establishment politics. Trump may be a new kind of politician, but the tropes he represents are not new to the conservative party. Spurred on by his supporters, Trump has played into a workingman narrative that already existed on the conservative aisle for many years. Trump tried step into this through an examination of his own history, but it was not Trump himself and his small loan of a million dollars that drew connections to working class voters, but rather his language and rhetoric. The speeches that Trump gives and the tweets he fires out fill a colloquial and conversational image. His words are filled with energy and expletives, mirroring the way that much of America’s population genuinely speaks, both verbally and through social media. These quick and intuitive comments eschew the canned, dry approach characteristic of establishment politics. Among Trump’s supporters this speech isn’t simply engaging–it’s celebrated. Supporters praise Trump’s commitment to candid speech and his refusal to tone down his speech in the name of political correctness.
The growth of this colloquial attitude, spread by Donald Trump, is what has given rise to the irresponsible comments and actions of Rudy Giuliani and other establishment politicians. A vernacular attitude is nothing new in the American political sphere. Politicians have worked to cultivate working class appeal since the founding of America. But for the first time that appeal is not coming from someone like President Dwight Eisenhower, who appealed to the common people as a man of similar stock, but still possessed an incredible wealth of knowledge and aptitude for international relations and diplomacy. Donald Trump is cultivating this same anti-elitist support, but he is bringing none of the statesmanship that others had before him.
Trump, and the wave of aggressive rhetoric he has brought with him, have played on age-old sentiments that have existed since the founding of our nation. But for the first time, they are empty of substance. This new movement threatens to destabilize our establishment, not simply through the use of ad hominem attacks or derogatory language, but by replacing substantive political thought with a new rhetoric of empty aggression. It is the normalization of philistine style that has lead to establishment politicians such as Rudy Giuliani or Marco Rubio acting out in abnormal and unacceptable ways. Trump has brought with him the surge of a new political bearing that America had wisely tried to distance itself from, but now, dancing ever closer, we are in danger of devolving from informed discussion and debate to name calling and mudslinging. If we continue with these playground politics, we may indeed never grow up.