Serving the High Plains

Political incivility started somewhere

The death of former President George H.W. Bush has been met with as much mourning for the gentlemanly politics he practiced as for the man himself.

Bush saved incivility for America’s enemies, launching genuine armed hostilities against Manuel Noriega, the gangster head of Panama, and Saddam Hussein, who tried to spread his cruel despotism into neighboring Kuwait.

But in politics, Republican Bush fought hard within reasonable limits, as did the Democrats of that time. What happened between then and now?

Why, without the excuse of a pointless, dangerous war, was President Barack Obama hated as much by the right as President Richard Nixon was by the left in the late 1960s and early 1970s?

Why does contemptuous political behavior now dominate both sides?

While I know I’ll get blowback, I think the incivility we experience now started with GOP Rep. Newt Gingrich of Georgia. Gingrich developed the Contract with America in 1994 and used the language of war propaganda to describe political opponents and their ideas.

Frank Luntz served as Gingrich’s pollster in the mid-1990s. Luntz, who is also a master wordsmith, became enamored with Gingrich’s warlike language and, together, the two wrote a memo to Republican leadership that changed conservative campaigning from that time forward.

The memo urged Republicans to talk of Democrats and their policies with words like “corrupt,” “devour,” “greed,” “hypocrisy,” “liberal,” “sick,” and “traitors.”

Suddenly, conservatives stopped debating their cause as a better alternative and started to frame their opinions as the only conceivable alternative to preserve the republic, using the words against Democrats that wartime propagandists used against the Axis powers.

Since Luntz was also a pollster, he was able to market-test his wartime terminology and found it registered positively with a lot of people. He became very influential.

That approach to political language quickly swept into Fox News and the right-wing radio stations that dominate the nation’s midsection. It converted Rush Limbaugh from an entertaining right-wing personality to a preachy propagandist.

Two decades later, the right’s barrage of insulting, belittling and paranoia-inspired language against Democrats has led to an unintended consequence: President Donald Trump and his fiercely loyal following.

Even Luntz now criticizes Trump and Trumpism often on his Twitter account.

What’s sad is that too many Democrats also have caught on to how powerful one- and two-syllable insults and epithets can be, and have now adopted that approach to their political discourse.

Our mourning of George H.W. Bush has reminded us of a time when political leaders understood that a political opponent on one day may be the friend you need on the next. It reminds us that mutual respect and efforts to understand opponents and opposition once led to consistent, beneficial results.

That time cannot return too soon.

Steve Hansen writes about our life and times from his perspective of a retired Tucumcari journalist. Contact him at:

[email protected]

 
 
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