I live in Georgia and attend (online) school in Boston. I have deep friendships in both places. Since well before Georgia’s controversial new voting law, half of my friends have been convinced that Republicans love to marginalize minority and poor populations. The other half believe that Democrats, if given too much power, will destroy our freedoms and abort our babies.
I have smart classmates in Boston, and I have smart friends and family in Georgia. Believe it or not, they mostly want the same things. Both sets of friends have compassion for marginalized and disadvantaged people, both love and respect women’s rights to make decisions, and both love children. Beyond that, both want to help the poor and disenfranchised, both want women to be treated fairly in society, and both want to ensure that human life is viewed as sacred.
The only difference between them is their methods.
Credit: contributed
Credit: contributed
For example, both those who want to raise the minimum wage and those who oppose it care about the poor. The former believe that minimum wage increases will help them, while the latter believe that these increases will have unintended consequences on employment that will ultimately hurt the poor. Both those who advocate for abortion and those who protest it care about women’s rights. The former consider these rights more important than the preservation of what they consider to be a not-yet-human fetus, while the latter consider these rights to be less important than the preservation of what they consider to be a human baby.
How have we gone from debating the economic implications of minimum wage laws and the meaning of life to claiming that one side hates the poor and the other side hates babies? Through what I call “rhetorical armament.”
Rhetorical armament is not primarily based on logic. It is based on fear. At its core, it is the same basic problem that underlies resume inflation, overuse of superlatives and nuclear proliferation. No candidate wishes to tell the “simple truth” on their resume if they know their competitors are embellishing their resumes. This creates a cycle of increasing resume embellishment.
No friend wants to claim their vacation was “normal” when their friends claim their vacations were “amazing” and “incredible.” So, each friend escalates their use of superlatives, pushing the conversation to increasing levels of absurdity. No country wants to have traditional weapons when others have nuclear weapons, which leads to nuclear armament. In each scenario, de-escalation is preferable for all parties, but each party’s fear of the other’s behavior leads to poorer outcomes for all parties involved.
Similarly, no political party wants to call the other party’s policies ‘well-intentioned but flawed’ because they fear the other party will accuse them of hating babies or poor people, which would lead to them losing moral credibility. And so, both parties seek to beat each other to the punch by escalating their rhetoric, each making wilder and wilder moral accusations.
This is, in part, why we are where we are. We have allowed fear of the other to drive us into rhetorical armament, the result of which is felt every time we turn on the news.
There are no quick solutions to this problem because trust and courage do not come quickly. But they are the only way towards rhetorical disarmament. We disarm by leaning into our fears of what the other might do and choosing to behave decently anyway. We do this by proclaiming that the other side is well-intentioned, and engaging with them. We do this by reminding our friends and our families that the other side does not hate babies, or poor people, and that they too, like us, love America.
Chris Musser lives in Buckhead and is pursuing a master’s degree in public administration from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.
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