The Democrats’ Profanity Campaign Is Stupid by Design
The Democrats’ Profanity Campaign Is Stupid by Design
At the risk of exposing myself as a stuffy, bourgeois traditionalist who doesn’t “know what time it is,” or whatever your preferred rationalization may be, Republicans of an earlier age had a point about the “coarsening of American culture.” The 1990s-era GOP probably couldn’t conceive of the licentiousness that would come to typify pop-cultural products a couple of decades after their warnings. There was also plenty of wisdom in Andrew Breitbart’s admonition that “politics is downstream from culture.” And as the culture has grown more comfortable with salty language, politics has followed suit.
For quite some time, individual politicians — in particular, those possessed of an unveiled contempt for conventional propriety — have sought to convey passion and zeal by liberally deploying four-letter words. The president isn’t above such vulgarity, nor are his opponents. If these crass displays could once be written off as earthy expressions of candor, that is no longer the case. Donald Trump’s opponents seem to have embraced profanity as part of a strategic effort to rehabilitate their party’s tarnished brand.
The Democratic Party’s new “it girl,” Texas congresswoman Jasmine Crockett, provided the lead anecdote in a Politico story this month highlighting the Democratic Party’s campaign of strategic f-bombing. “Somebody slap me and wake me the f*** up because I’m ready to get on with it,” she told reporters in a failed effort to produce a compelling response to Trump’s address to a joint session of Congress. She summoned a similar level of sophistication when she was asked to respond to Elon Musk’s governmental activities: “F*** off.”
Politico identified the growing number of Democratic lawmakers who have all of a sudden shed the shame that would have once accompanied their use of obscene language. Senators Ruben Gallego, John Fetterman, and Brian Schatz have accused the Trump-era GOP of presiding over a lot of “sh**” conditions that are only “getting sh***ier.” Oregon Democrat Maxine Dexter tried to warn us that she doesn’t “swear in public very well,” before she proved her point: “We have to f*** Trump,” she grudgingly determined. In calling for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s resignation, over his dissemination of operational military intelligence on a Signal thread populated by administration officials and reporters alike, Senator Tammy Duckworth concluded that the secretary isn’t just mendacious. He’s a “f***ing liar.”
It’s all a rather transparent strategy aimed at conveying rough-hewn authenticity, which undermines the whole point of the strategy. If your goal is to present yourself as impulsive and unpolished, so overcome with ardor that you have no time to observe dated standards of decorum, sticking to a script doesn’t get that job done.
When it comes to cultural products, even the gratuitous use of profanity serves a purpose. Puritanical efforts to police that in artistic fare tend to backfire on the policers. The coarsening of political discourse is something else entirely. The highest objective of artistic expression is the art itself, but profanity is deployed in politics as a means to an end — an anti-intellectual shtick aimed at manipulating the audience into exhibiting an emotional response to otherwise deficient stimuli.
This sort of thing cheapens the discourse because it is itself cheap, and it acclimates the country to a low, sordid level of speech that dispenses with erudition in favor of fervency. Most importantly, the liberal use of profanity makes its user sound as though he’s incapable of anything more intellectual. There was a time in living memory when politicians tried to avoid giving their opponents evidence that they’re as dumb as their critics claimed.
I’m not opposed to the use of four-letter words in private settings. I’ve been known to rattle off a paint-peeling cascade of expletives in response to frustrating conditions, serious and trivial alike. And I have little time for a censorious cast of moral scolds who seek to stifle vulgar art, even if I, too, bristle at the fact that my children must navigate a far more boorish world than the one in which I came of age. There’s nothing shameful about enjoying low culture as well as the high sort. But politics is, or should be, different.
This lament surely marks me as an anachronism, an easily dismissed artifact from a time when the highest form of argumentation was valuable and valued. Well, call me old-fashioned, but I would rather sacrifice whatever relevance is available to those who play to the cheap seats than pretend to be an idiot for their benefit. Even if that conviction seems to be a minority proposition.
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