Our incredibly angry political moment
There were two big moments in politics on Thursday.
1) Speaker Nancy Pelosi brusquely shut down a conservative reporter’s question as to whether she hated President Donald Trump.
2) Former Vice President Joe Biden got into a heated back-and-forth with an Iowa voter at a town hall in which the man said Biden was too old to be president and Biden challenged the man to a pushup contest or an IQ test.
Both moments had something in common: vitriol — and ill intent. Which perfectly typifies our current moment in American politics.
While there’s a tendency to focus on the reactions from Biden and Pelosi, I think there’s actually more value in looking at the other two participants. In Pelosi’s case, that’s a reporter from Sinclair Broadcasting, a conservative TV conglomerate, who asked a purposely provocative question designed to elicit a response from the normally disciplined Pelosi as she was leaving her weekly news conference. In Biden’s situation, the questioner falsely accused Biden of sending his son, Hunter, to Ukraine and told the former vice president he was too old to run for president — both of which were clearly provocative attacks.
In both cases the politicians responded with emotion. And anger. Or at the very least, deep annoyance. Which a) is their right and b) was the clear goal of both of the questioners.
That we live in a moment in which this sort of purposely provocative questioning is not only tolerated but also lionized among fellow believers is a testament to how far our civil discourse has eroded. If the goal of asking politicians questions is simply to make them angry and then make fun of them for being angry, we are in rough shape.
It also speaks to the anger coursing through the public that both Pelosi and Biden chose to react, and react the way they did. Anger, of course, and the weaponizing of it for political gain also sit at the heart of Trump’s political magic, as it were. Trump was elected in 2016 in large part because of his ability to channel the rage coursing through the electorate. And he has governed, amazingly enough given that he is the President, as an aggrieved victim of a system hopelessly biased against him.
The simple truth is that politicians aren’t so different from the people they represent. The levels of frustration, distrust and disgust they feel are high — so high that they are less able to keep it under wraps even when they know that allowing their actual emotions to show will make an encounter into a major moment.
We’re all on a razor’s edge. And unfortunately, there’s more political gain in reinforcing our divisions than in reminding us of our common humanity.
The Point: This feels like a moment of real crisis in American politics, when the anger and disillusion we’ve been holding in can’t help but burst out. And the 2020 election is still almost a year away.
