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The insult election and politics of outrage — whatever happened to the US?

The insult election and politics of outrage — whatever happened to the US?
Steven Boykey Sidley
By Steven Boykey Sidley
3 Nov 2024
Facebook
10
We are a matter of hours away from the US elections, and the noise of the barkers on either side has become a series of dissonant, fearful and outraged shrieks and cries. It is worth stepping back to try to unravel how America got here.

For those who don’t remember clearly, on 7 October 2016 the Washington Post released the transcript of a video in which presidential candidate Donald Trump said:

“And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ‘em by the pussy. You can do anything.”

A few hours later I posted this on Facebook:

“Publicly I proclaim that I have had a lightning bolt of prescience. If I am right about this, you have to do whatever I say for the rest of my life.

“Here it is, and I have not read this anywhere else. Trump will resign in the next two weeks and turn over the candidacy to a more sober presumptive VP Pence. (Is this even legal?). He can’t survive this one, neither can any Republican candidate who supports him, neither can the GOP.

“As I say, you heard it here. If I am wrong, you can go back to taking everything I say with a pinch of salt.”

Not only did Trump survive and thrive, but so did the candidates who supported him, as well as the GOP itself. I have since tasted the salt of my overweening confidence – which is less important than this question:

What has happened to American politics? What has happened to the quality of the candidates, the office bearers, the electorate, what has happened to the gravitas of the entire enterprise?

To put this in perspective, I searched online for candidates and office-bearers in the US who have been drummed out of office or lost their candidacy because of their moral failings (rather than theft and corruption) and/or impolitic proclamations. A slew of disgraced ex-politicians came up over many decades, most shamed for their sexual peccadilloes (usually extra-marital affairs or other sexual improprieties) – people like Gary Hart, John Edwards, Duncan Hunter, Wilbur Mills, Anthony Weiner, David Vitter. Their careers were quickly truncated.

Politics of threat, deceit and insult


Extramarital affairs and sexual improprieties? These don’t even move the needle nowadays (and may even be a net positive for some voters). Neither it seems, does sexual assault, or mocking a physically handicapped person, or insulting US POWs, or accusing Mexican-heritage judges of bias, or any one of thousands of other insults, previously taboo, which would have ended a candidacy in a heartbeat a short time ago. It seems that the politics of threat, deceit and insult has won the day, and perhaps the future.

I have viewed American politics for decades from multiple perches. I have a US passport, live in South Africa, but spent two decades of my early adulthood in Los Angeles. While I was there, I was struck, above all, by the civility of politics.

I knew Democrats and Republicans and a couple of hopeful independents. There were left-leaning media and right-leaning media. There were short, reasonably even-keeled disagreements, usually about reproductive rights or women’s rights, affirmative action, the role of religion or who carries the burden of taxation. Americans, during the decades I was there, were surprisingly apolitical. Most people simply didn’t talk about it much, except for the intellectual elites on the east and west coasts.

After Nixon exited in shame, politics sunk into the background, a bore for most. There were few families or friendships ripped apart by arguments about Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II, Obama. Yes, a smattering of excitable ideologues in the bleachers might have been preaching the end of the world, but the rest of the population simply took off a few hours on election day to quietly vote for their favourite candidate before going out for pizza.

Then Trump arrived and everything changed. He roared into the political spotlight saying things that no one had said before, things that no one had ever heard from any political candidate in history. Impolitic is too flaccid a word to describe the barrage of weaponised slights and insults that poured out, then as now. Surely this could not hold, he would be drummed out, if not by voters, then by his colleagues.

What had changed?


In the mid-90s more than 70% of Americans got their news from legacy media. Today that figure is about 35%, less than half. More importantly, one of the inviolable moral pillars of the legacy news outlets during the past century was a commitment to fact-checking and, with that, at the very least, an attempt at objectivity. Consumers trusted that news organisations were trying to tell the truth, even when such a goal was understood to be, at best, aspirational.

Today around 50% of Americans access news on social media. The range of content is vast and there are no filters. Consequently, there is no incentive to read a 5,000-word article or even watch a 30-minute interview; a clip or sound bite is a reasonable proxy. The proud mission of truth-seeking that fed our legacy media has become threadbare in this online world – there are few fact-checking departments and very few social media journalists come through journalism school and then endure the hard grind of apprenticeships at venerable media institutions. 

Worse, as the untruths and half-truths of social media have pushed the electorate to extremes, so have many traditional media houses either folded or (worse) capitulated to the chaos of opinion, vs fact. Cue Fox News on the right and CNN on the left.

So where does this leave us in the lead-up to this election? In a landscape of unchecked information without ballast, where anything goes, anything can be said, aired and distributed via the algorithms of attention and eyeballs, where outrage outweighs the crushing bore of veracity. One candidate will supposedly force us into a Stalinist autocracy, forcing our kids to have gender reassignment surgery and allowing illegal immigrants to rape and kill our families. The other side will usher in an updated version of a vengeful mediaeval theocracy where women will be forced to breed and new tech-drunk billionaire mullahs enabled by blindly loyal judges and legislators will stuff their bank accounts and decide our fate without the annoying hindrance of democracy.

There really are a good many people who believe one or other of these fantasy futures. How on earth is anyone else supposed to make sense of it all?

Trump did not sculpt this landscape; he sort of wandered in at exactly the right time. It has given him oxygen and he has inhaled it deeper than most. The Democrats are now breathing the same air. Politics in the US will never be the same.

Steven Boykey Sidley is a professor of practice at JBS, University of Johannesburg. His new book, It’s Mine: How the Crypto Industry is Redefining Ownership, is published by Maverick451 in SA and Legend Times Group in the UK/EU, available now.

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