By Noah Rothman
Thursday, March 16, 2023
A tone of bleakness is quickly spreading through the nascent race for the 2024 Republican Party presidential nomination, the Washington Post’s Ashley Parker recently observed. Donald Trump, who has pledged to serve as the instrument of Republican voters’ “retribution,” isn’t the only one to have embraced what the Post called “dark, apocalyptic themes.” The whole GOP field, declared and undeclared, is deploying doomsday rhetoric.
“America is on a path of doubt, division, and self-destruction,” Nikki Haley fretted, warning of Joe Biden’s ongoing campaign to destroy “people’s patriotism” and replace it with “dangerous self-loathing.” Ron DeSantis lamented the onset of “dystopia, where people’s rights were curtailed and their livelihoods were destroyed.” Senator Tim Scott admonished the White House for leaving America’s borders “unsafe, insecure, and wide open,” supplanting law and order with “fear and chaos.” “You’re going to have World War III, if something doesn’t happen fast,” Trump prophesied in his speech to CPAC attendees. Republicans in general “warn that Biden and a ‘radical,’ ‘woke mob’ of liberals are determined to ‘destroy’ and ‘ruin’ the nation,” Parker wrote.
It’s all a profound departure from the note of sunny optimism Ronald Reagan struck, noted pollster Frank Luntz. He may have elided the fact that sunny optimism wasn’t on offer in 1980 but only in 1984, when the Republican imperative was to convince voters that things weren’t half bad. At least, that important caveat didn’t appear in Parker’s dispatch.
The Post reporter did allow that Democrats have also appealed to “hyperbole and dark language.” To take one example, President Biden and others in his party have warned that Republicans, “whom they deride as ‘extremists’ . . . out of step with most Americans,” are eager to cut Medicare and Social Security.
Apocalypticism is currency in the Republican Party at the moment, but such rhetoric is no stranger to Democratic politics going back years. Indeed, it extends well beyond labeling the GOP “extremists” for wanting to reform America’s dangerously unfunded entitlement programs. Sometimes, it seems like eschatology is all that gets the Left out of bed in the morning.
“I’m the last thing standing between you and the apocalypse.” That dubious proposition was put to New York Times reporter Mark Leibovich by presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in October 2016. When humanity survived her election defeat, she pivoted to warning voters about the GOP’s genocidal campaign to . . . impose a per capita cap on Medicaid funding. “If Republicans pass this bill,” she warned, “they’re the death party.”
As Yuval Levin observed, the 2020 Democratic primary featured a slate of candidates who innovated fresh and exciting ways to scare the daylights out of their potential voters.
Former presidential candidate and Washington governor Jay Inslee informed voters in 2019 that the next administration — Joe Biden’s administration, as it turned out — represented our “one chance at survival.” Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren insisted that the “climate crisis is an existential risk for our world,” and “every living thing on this planet is at risk.” She pegged the point of no return at around 2029. Her opponents, perennial candidate Beto O’Rourke, Montana governor Steve Bullock, and future transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg thought we might be able to eke it out until 2030 “before we reach the horizon of catastrophe.”
Andrew Yang did them all one better in his book warning of the terrible future that awaited us following the Rise of the Machines. The businessman turned presidential hopeful forecast a “best-case scenario” in which America descends into chaos akin to “The Hunger Games or Guatemala with the occasional mass shooting” in the absence of his preferred reforms. At worst, “despair, violence and the utter collapse of our society” would be our fate.
All this is nothing compared to the lengths center-left columnists go to terrify their readers.
“Apocalypse will become the new normal,” New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote in 2019 amid a series of Australian forest fires. “Things seem a bit End Times-y right now,” Boston Globe columnist Yvonne Abraham confessed in January 2020, “what with that almost-war against Iran and the Antipodean conflagration.” During a short-lived panic over the declining bee population, we were warned that “man would only have four years left to live” if the pollinators disappeared.
None of this is especially new. “The survival of the United States of America as we know it is at risk,” warned America’s shadow president, Al Gore, in a July 2008 speech. “And even more — if more should be required — the future of human civilization is at stake.” Indeed, American campaign rhetoric has featured allusions to the end of civilization at least since mankind acquired the capacity to engineer such a thing.
Given how long we’ve had to endure it, all this tiresome rabble-rousing must serve a purpose. There is instrumental utility in working your most devoted partisan followers into such a froth that they’d be willing to advocate, canvas for, and donate to a candidacy or cause. As Levin observed, it is as simple as it is misanthropic: The party in power wants you to feel good about the status quo, and the party out of power does not.
At the very least, it’s hard not to have noticed this decades-old trend — one that correlates closely with political cycles. That is, unless it’s in your interest not to notice it until it affords you the opportunity to cluck your tongue at the special cynicism of politicians you don’t like.
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