Hakeem Jeffers is hardly alone, as a politician of either political party, in employing intemperate language and in sometimes making outright false accusations against office-holders from the other party.
And yet, politics – even partisan politics – doesn’t have to be vicious and ugly, though it largely is these days.
It doesn’t have to be filled with lies about one’s opponents or about the other party’s legislative record. It doesn’t have to be based on Democrats accusing Republicans – and Republicans accusing Democrats – of being fascists or communists or authoritarians, of being corrupt or venal or anti-American or anti-democratic or racist or sexist or worse, or all of the above.
Donald Trump is perhaps the most abusive, most vicious, and rhetorically ugliest of America’s 21st century politicians to-date. Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and Chuck Schumer, no strangers to the issuance of ugly, vicious, and false accusations against Republicans and others who oppose them, are still pikers compared to Trump.
The dilemma faced by many voters is that – for all of his ugly meanness and despite his cavalier relationship to the Truth – Donald Trump, at least some of the time, advocates policy choices that may be better for the United States than those policy preferences of his political opponents, some of whom are more scrupulous and, indeed, more high-minded.
According to one aspect of The Law of Political Entropy – a term I thought I made up, until I googled it – the quality of political discourse tends to worsen over time, becoming wilder, coarser, baser, more generalized and less specific, less accurate and less concerned with accuracy, more abusive, more vicious, more ugly. That downward spiral of American political rhetoric, political advertising, and even political journalism, is not inevitable. It can be intentionally interrupted and perhaps even reversed.
But if all that voters ultimately care about is WHO wins and not HOW they win, then we will remain stuck with politicians who will say and do whatever they can get away with, who will do anything and everything short of committing indictable offenses in order to defeat political opponents, to win legislative battles, to capture and maintain political power.