Caelin Bragg
Lantern Staff
The rhetoric and conversations surrounding our politics today resemble more the bickering and feuds of sports fans rather than the serious, reasoned discussions they should be.
Insults and name-calling are just the tip of the iceberg of the problems in our modern political discourse. People seem to spend most of their brain power thinking of a clever insult or whatever buzzword pops into their head first rather than an impenetrable argument to sway others.
Think of the “discussions” that happen when passionate fans of rival sports teams interact. It’s all yelling and insults without any actual reasonable conversation or debate happening. This is what our political “discussions” have become now; no one seems to care about end results, they only care about the game as it’s happening, which I guess is just the result of humans’ natural tribalism taking over. Human beings are instinctually tribal in nature; we associate and are loyal to our specific group even when it’s a losing battle, and it’s extremely difficult and unlikely that someone will break from their tribe once they’ve joined it.
And this unfortunate turn in our political discourse is not tied to one tribe more than the other. It’s clear which tribe it originated from, and while fun to lambaste them, there’s very little point in caring about that anymore when everyone is guilty of it now.
Even when people begin signaling their virtues, they’ll resort to these same tactics when the opportunity arises. I’ve seen the most die hard, Trump-hating liberals use his same hateful mockery on more than one occasion. Just be better than those you claim to hate.
This shouldn’t be a controversial thing to say, but it happens more often than one would think, and it’s hard to take anyone who exhibits the same childish name-calling and jeering seriously when they claim to disavow it when others do it.
It’s also very hard to tell how serious this problem is when it’s hard to tell who is real and who isn’t anymore. Bots, whose sole purpose is to troll and be ideologues for whoever created it, only muddy these waters more, but there are enough real people partaking in this new political discourse to still recognize that we have a problem.
Political parties aren’t sports teams, and their candidates are not the players, so they should stop being treated as such. This is more important than the squabbles that result from a missed or wrong penalty in a sports game; this is the deciding factor for most of our lives, and for some people of a less privileged background, a matter of life and death.
