The state of public discourse in this country has degenerated to a nadir where words like Nazi, lynch mob, extortionist and other overloaded hyperbolic trash talk is routinely thrown around. How can the parties be expected to have a civilized discussion about anything when language like this is becoming commonplace and worse accepted. Sorry but the fish stinks from the head down, and if President Obama does not very publicly use the presidential megaphone to tell both parties to cease and desist from hurling this unproductive venom, then he has to bear a good deal of responsibility from the resulting consequences.
Op-Ed Columnist
Nazis, Lynching and Obamacare
By FRANK BRUNI
You might think that the methodical extermination of millions of Jews by
a brutal regime intent on world domination would resist appropriation
as an all-purpose metaphor. You might think that genocide, of all
things, would be safe from conversion into sloppy simile.
You’d be wrong.
After Paul Ryan’s fact-challenged address at the Republican National
Convention last year, the chairman of the Democratic Party in California
actually compared
him and his compatriots to the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph
Goebbels. A short time later, the chairman of the Democratic Party in
South Carolina likened that state’s Republican governor, Nikki Haley, to
Adolf Hitler’s mistress, Eva Braun.
At that point Abraham Foxman, the national director of the
Anti-Defamation League, did what he shouldn’t need to do even once, let
alone the multiple times that he’s been forced to. He implored
politicians and pundits to stop it already.
No matter. Allusions to Nazi Germany were back for debates over gun
control and, of course, Obamacare. Ted Cruz, the Senate’s prince of
tirades, compared people who claim that the new insurance program can’t
be stopped to those who rolled over for Hitler and the Third Reich. This
prompted a public reprimand from John McCain, who has developed
something of a sideline career of swatting Cruz on the nose. They’re
like a hapless master and his hopeless dachshund. The former keeps
trying to housebreak the latter, while the latter just beams at every
mess he makes.
It’s not only Nazis who are flourishing in this era of metaphors gone
mad, of analogy bloat. Lynch mobs are also having a good go of it. A
senator who was quoted anonymously in The Times last week used that term
to describe the Republican lawmakers who had lit into Cruz during a private luncheon, and lynching was invoked more disturbingly by the chief executive officer of A.I.G., who recently said that public complaints
about Wall Street bankers’ bonuses were intended “to get everybody out
there with their pitchforks and their hangman nooses.” This, he added,
was “sort of like what we did in the Deep South.”
How absolutely bonkers. And yet how unsurprising. We’re awash these days
in metaphors as overworked as our political debate is overwrought, and
it’s impossible not to wonder how much one contributes to the other.
When nuance and perspective exit the language, do they exit the
conversation as well? When you speak in ludicrous extremes, do you think
that way, too?
Obamacare has proved to be not just ideologically divisive but
linguistically fertile. There’s seemingly no event or passage in
American history to which it can’t be compared.
The terrorist attacks of 9/11? Check. Back when Mike Pence, Indiana’s
Republican governor, was still in Congress, he summoned that day’s
horror to characterize the Supreme Court ruling that upheld the
Affordable Care Act.
Slavery? Check. Ken Cuccinelli,
the Republican candidate for governor of Virginia, has described
opposition to Obamacare in terms of stands against fugitive slave laws.
The hyperbole and hysteria make any constructive debate impossible, and
they insult the past, robbing important events of the specific meaning
and individual detail they deserve. Consider our recurring “-gate”
mania. We equate each new scandal, whether extra-large or fun-size, with
Watergate, and by willfully misremembering President Richard Nixon’s
crimes, we dilute them. It’s just a suffix for the taking, a point of
comparison for such wildly unrelated matters as the spilled secrets of
Arkansas law enforcement officers who were supposedly privy to Bill
Clinton’s private life. Troopergate, that was called.
For President Obama, Benghazi was supposed to be his Watergate, and so
was the I.R.S.’s scrutiny of conservative groups, and so were a bunch of
other things I can’t even remember anymore. They blur and fade, which
is not to say they didn’t matter. It’s to say that when everything is
supposedly like everything else, nothing’s distinctive. It’s all one big
mush.
For that reason, among others, we should watch our words. They have
consequences. As irresponsible and detestable as the recent actions of
the most conservative wing of House Republicans have been, we’d be
better off without figurative talk of hostage taking and guns to heads,
without headlines like one in The Huffington Post that said: “Boehner
Threatens to Shoot the Hostage.” That sort of language only turns up the
heat.
And I cringe at how pointlessly hurtful it must have been for a 9/11 widow or widower to listen to the right-wing moralist Gary Bauer exhort voters
to fight back against President Obama’s agenda the way passengers on
United Flight 93 fought back against hijackers. Or for Holocaust
survivors to hear all this gratuitous Nazi talk.
You know what’s just like Germany in the 1930s? Germany in the 1930s.
We’re in an unfortunate place, but we needn’t travel back there to
describe it.
