The evil hyperbole of our politics
Hyperbole is as constant in politics as rubber chicken dinners. Candidates love to exaggerate their own achievements, but they really love to exaggerate the shortcomings of their opponents.
They pretend their political foes are the spawn of Satan and they conveniently forget to mention that not so long ago they, too, shared many of the same positions their opponents champion today — positions they hypocritically condemn in the hands of the opposition.
(Think Mitt Romney bending over backwards to disparage “Obamacare” in the 2012 presidential election, a policy that bore a striking resemblance to the health-care plan he introduced as governor of Massachusetts.)
But sometimes hyperbole and hypocrisy are wholly unnecessary tactics in the game of government.
For example, when it comes to besting Republican presidential Donald Trump, the truth and nothing but the truth is a candidate’s best weapon. This is because Trump’s ignorance, boorishness and bigotry are naked. They are plain as the piece on his head.
It isn’t hyperbolic to call Trump “dangerous” or “fascistic.” It’s just true. (How else do you describe a guy who suggests that he will accept the result of the U.S. election only if he wins the race?)
But it is hyperbolic, as New York Times columnist Frank Bruni argued in a recent column, to describe leaders of far lesser odiousness than Trump in such severe terms — leaders who, like Romney, appear to be decent people with bad ideas.
In fact, argued Bruni, if Americans are to learn anything from the current election, it’s that the language often used by liberals of the past to describe men such as Romney, John McCain and even George W. Bush, was outlandish in the extreme and irresponsible — especially when considering the far scarier policies and tactics employed by Trump today.
“The sad truth,” writes Bruni, “is that we conduct the bulk of our political debate in a key of nearhysteria. And this renders complaints of discrepant urgency, about politicians of different recklessness, into one big, ignorable mush of partisan rancour.”
But Trump’s candidacy doesn’t just put American hyperbole into perspective; it puts Canadian hyperbole into perspective, too. The way that the Canadian left — from politicians to journalists (myself included) — often regard people across the political aisle is no less outlandish. When former prime minister Stephen Harper was in office, he was referred to quite regularly as a tyrant and a bigot. (I didn’t particularly care for the guy but he wasn’t exactly Mussolini.)
Earlier this year, otherwise very reasonable NDP MP Niki Ashton suggested that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had rendered the House of Commons an unsafe space when he accidentally elbowed a colleague.
NDP MP Brigitte Sansoucy felt compelled by the incident to bring up domestic violence, as though Trudeau wasn’t merely a hot-headed guy in a hurry, but a violent bully.
And then of course there was the suggestion by some liberals in the aftermath of former Toronto mayor Rob Ford’s death, that it is unnecessary — if not foolish — to mourn a leader whose policies hurt so many marginalized people.
The incidents I listed above are all very different but they point to the same impulse: to make monsters of men and women who are anything but. Going forward it would be nice if liberals on both sides of the border cut out the fear mongering and doomsday hyperbole around establishment candidates who they believe may not be the best for the job, but whose ascension doesn’t threaten democracy as we know it.
It would be nice if we could accept once and for all that people with bad ideas aren’t, as a rule, bad eggs themselves. I can acknowledge, for example, that Harper’s economic world view, and Romney’s position on gay marriage, run counter to what I believe is right and good without declaring that these men are evil zealots.
Donald Trump, a legitimate zealot, makes it significantly easier to do this. Emma Teitel is a national affairs columnist. Her column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.