Are Today’s Gladiators Slashing Each Other with Words Losing Spectators in the Colosseum We Call Democracy?
Today we’re witnessing a war not fought with guns and bombs like in Ukraine and Gaza, but with just as destructive surreal superlatives in that battlefield called politics.
It’s a war of words between the left and the right, each saying “they have us in their crosshairs.” Today all sides are fully armed with arsenals of pejoratives they crossfire, calling one another the worst specimens of humankind bent on trashing our constitution, bankrupting our economy, and destroying our country.
President Biden calls Republicans “threats to democracy.” Progressives call conservatives everything from “bigots” to “Nazis.”
It’s nothing new for Democrats to speak ill of conservative Americans. But, in recent years, armed with sharper vocabulary, progressives have amped up their attacks on their fellow Americans.
Longtime Democrat strategist James Carville unsheathed a new comparison sword. Discussing Speaker Johnson and conservative Christians, he made a bold, inciting claim. Now, Johnson is fighting back.
Carville claimed during a recent interview that Christian Republicans represented a greater threat to the U.S. than Islamic terrorists. Really? Islamic terrorists? That terrible?
House Speaker Johnson responds in an intense tweet on X calling the remark “twisted and shameful” for a leading Democrat strategist to say millions of Christians in America are a greater threat than foreign terrorists who murdered more than 3,000 Americans. Johnson calls on Democrats to condemn Carville’s comments but says almost proudly they won’t!
There’s nothing new about Democrats attacking conservatives, especially Christian conservatives, but it’s just become more intense and nastier. Yet often the detractors fail to explain how people loyal to the country and who believe in the Bible are as big a threat as Muslim extremists who hate us and long to irradicate the United States off the face of the earth.
And what do both Biden and former president Trump really mean when they call each other the gravest threats to democracy?
Then they’ll say something like “and if you want to save America, you’d better vote for me and not the democracy destroyer in chief!” But is anyone thinking about the impact these attacks are having on those caught in the crossfire of all these hateful hyperboles—the voters?
Can this war to see which candidates hit the hardest and lowest, also be in the words of Trump in another context, “poisoning the blood of our country.” Can it be leading to an anemic voter turnout, maybe the lowest in our Nation’s history? If so, my friends that will be the hardest hit to our democracy!
Let us never have to change our name to THE DISUNITED STATES OF AMERICA!
Tom Madden is a WORDSHINE MAN, the title of his latest book about how to make writing inviting and he wishes more politicians would read it. Madden says politics can be a lot shinier if those practicing it could stop all the hateful hyperboles they fire at one another, which is turning off the very people they need to inspire—the voters. Madden also offers PR services his firm TransMedia Group has been providing effectively for over 40 years.
