Against Political Hyperbole
Ridiculous exaggerations are the political norm in 2024, but they are both counterproductive and wrong.
Political discourse on the Internet has been completely consumed by what I’ll call the Springfield Affair: the claim, proffered by Donald Trump during his debate with Kamala Harris, that Haitian migrants are eating household pets in the town of Springfield, Ohio. The rumor itself has been percolating online for some weeks now, but it received a primetime airing during the debate when Trump said, “In Springfield, they are eating the dogs. The people that came in, they are eating the cats. They’re eating – they are eating the pets of the people that live there.” This was undoubtedly the most memorable moment of an otherwise boring night and the only line that permeated into the broader media ecosystem. The genuinely hilarious memes playing off the statement rocketed around social media, made easier by the obvious connection to The Simpsons. In reality, however, the story was essentially bunk.
There are no credible reports of Haitian migrants – in Springfield or elsewhere – eating household pets. Some legitimate reports have emerged of people killing geese in a park for food, a deranged woman cooking and eating a cat, and collecting of roadkill for meat, but none of these involved Haitian migrants or Springfield, Ohio. Besides the former president himself, his running mate Ohio Senator JD Vance has been one of the major voices promoting this false claim – stating that he has received firsthand reports from constituents on the issue, but conveniently not providing any such reports. In an interview this weekend with CNN’s Dana Bash, Vance acknowledged using the salacious rumors as a means of attracting attention to the actual plight of Springfield: that it is suffering under a proportionally large influx of unintegrated Haitian migrants.
This massive growth in population, by some measures bringing 20,000 new arrivals into a town of 50,000 in just a few years, has significantly stressed Springfield’s ability to adapt. The town was already a microcosm of the broader Rust Belt decline, having lost upwards of 25% of its population, much of its industry, and fallen into the grasp of widespread narcotics addiction. Now, schools are struggling to integrate sizeable numbers of ESL students who speak a unique language with few local translators available, local charities and food banks are understaffed and undersupplied, and housing costs have rapidly increased given the speed at which this influx occurred. These are very real issues – covered by the New York Times itself – and they would arise regardless of the origin of the migrants.
But these actual, real-life problems, ones that speak to a larger electoral issue around the challenges of large-scale migration and assimilation, have been completely overwhelmed by the bogus story of the cat-eating Haitians. And that is itself redolent of a serious concern in our modern politics: the exaggeration epidemic.
Just as the hyperbolic claims of Haitian migrants eating cats have made it impossible to discuss the actual issues around immigration and assimilation, the liberal response to those allegations has done the same thing to their concern. The left believes – in this case, largely correctly – that these spurious and inflammatory claims have at least some grounding in racism and xenophobia. The singling out of Haitian migrants has been loaded with animus and inspired a variety of truly despicable rhetoric in the online fever swamps. But this isn’t representative of the candidates themselves, nor anything they have said directly. Instead of focusing on the reprehensible exaggeration of problems with integration into pet-eating criminal migrants, the left has gone with a vile exaggeration of their own: that the Republican party and its presidential ticket are actual Nazis.
This isn’t a new thing; Donald Trump (and George W. Bush before him, and Ronald Reagan before that) was called the second coming of Adolf Hitler from the day he was elected president. But it is accelerating. Trump, Vance, and their backers – of which I am not part, just to be clear here – have been labeled as Nazis who are deliberately inciting a “pogrom” against Haitians across America. Their evidence lies in the vague bomb threats made against local institutions in Springfield, which they attribute to Republican rhetoric. In reality, those threats were all hoaxes, mostly perpetrated, according to Ohio Governor Mike DeWine, by foreign adversaries. One does not need these base exaggerations to accurately state the problems with the Trump/Vance rhetoric on Haitian migrants. In fact, just as with those false claims, these ridiculous smears only undermine the reasonable case to be made.
It’s absurd that this needs to be said, but it does: stop comparing your opponents to Nazis! This not only makes you look ridiculous and melodramatic, it is an immense insult to the victims of Nazism itself – some of whom are still alive. I wrote about this back in 2021, just days after the riot on January 6, arguing against comparisons to Kristallnacht or Nazism generally. If you truly understand and appreciate the evil that was the German version of fascism, you wouldn’t make these comparisons. That so many people do is indicative of one of three things: a total lack of historical knowledge, a cynical attempt to use past atrocities to smear political opponents, or a complete disregard for the truth. Perhaps all three. Reductio ad Hitlerum isn’t a good argument and only undermines whatever point the accuser is trying to make, while simultaneously ratcheting up the temperature of discourse to a boiling point.
A similar case can be made about those who claim that Trump’s election would spell the “end of democracy” and bring about an authoritarian state wherein he would rule forever. Among the proponents of this theory are the sitting president of the United States, the Harris/Walz campaign, and the vast majority of the left-wing political class. This opinion does have some basis in the former president’s willingness to countenance extreme means to challenge his 2020 election loss, but it once again hyperbolizes to the point of ludicrousness. American democracy is incredibly strong and robust. It is not even remotely susceptible to a total overthrow within a single presidential term, especially not by a group of people as clownish as those surrounding Donald Trump. The number of people across various branches of government – both state and federal – the judiciary, and the military that would have to collude in such a coup would be enormous and unwieldy. It simply isn’t anything close to a potential outcome, much less a probable or guaranteed one. Focusing on this hyperbolic claim only undermines the fact that Trump did indeed countenance the ‘stolen election’ lie. That is plenty disqualifying on its own.
Of course, the right mirrors this apocalyptic rhetoric and has for quite some time. Remember the Flight 93 Election? I do. That “America is on the verge of destruction by Democrats” line was repeated in 2020, but was a hard sell given the fact that the nation was dealing with a world-rending pandemic and massive race riots at the time. Of course, after nearly four years of the Biden/Harris administration, America has not died; I would contend that it has gotten worse in key geopolitical and economic ways, but that is what happens when people I vehemently disagree with win elections. America would survive a Harris administration too, even if our world standing is severely damaged in the process. But the choice to frame the election in existential terms allows people to ignore the very real and reasonable criticisms of the dangers of a Harris presidency. When the same rhetoric is used over and over again and never comes true, it becomes rote and loses its potential for impact. After enough time, people no longer listen to the boy who cried wolf.
The political right has its very own version of the Nazi smear, one that I despise just as much: the fictitious claim that Democrats are actually Communists. I’m as anti-Communist as they come. I hate all forms of totalitarianism, and Marxism has been a far more globally destructive ideology than even Nazism, largely due to its longevity and reach. The Soviet Union was indeed an Evil Empire, Communism murdered nearly 100 million people in the 20th century, and the long reach of Stalin (with the tacit approval of the Roosevelt administration) plunged half of the world into utter human darkness for close to 50 years. The Chinese Communist Party is currently the paramount force for outright evil in this world. The whole ideology is poison. The pejorative label “Communist” should be as reviled as “Nazi” is, and just as sparsely used. Which is why I find Donald Trump calling Kamala Harris a “Communist” utterly deplorable.
There are no real Communists in American politics today – not even Bernie Sanders, although he has come pretty damn close. We should be thankful for that. Harris is a radical San Francisco progressive. Her ideas on everything from cultural politics and economics to foreign and military affairs are, in my opinion, very bad. She would be a genuinely awful president who would undoubtedly make America worse. But she is not a Communist. Asserting that she is diminishes the very real body count of that abhorrent ideology, one that is still tallying victims by the hour. Not only does it do that, it once again overshadows and undermines the point that the GOP should be making: that Harris/Walz is the most radical left-wing ticket since McGovern ran in 1972. Their real ideas – taxing unrealized gains, exploding the deficit, allowing unfettered illegal immigration, projecting weakness abroad, appeasing Iran and alienating Israel, restricting gun rights, packing the Supreme Court, and pushing extreme climate change policies – are bad enough. There is no need to distract from those well-documented policies with facially absurd allegations of Communism.
Hyperbole is not abnormal in political discourse, American or otherwise. It is a useful rhetorical trick from time to time and can often be politically advantageous. But it has accelerated to Ludicrous Speed at this point. The obsession on both right and left with exaggeration has had many negative consequences. It has heightened tensions between ordinary Americans, broken up families and friendships, incentivized and excused violence, and driven both greater extremism and broader cynicism about the political process. And it isn’t even a good tactic in rank punditry terms: it only serves to undermine what are very real political issues and discredit those who engage in it.
Unfortunately, it does not seem like either side of this debate is willing to drop the hyperbole even a tad. There will not be any mutual disarmament, which means that unilateral disarmament would feel like political suicide. But it could actually work if done by the right candidate, making their opponent look unserious, highlighting provable issues, and treating the American people like adults, not toddlers. In 2024, we certainly do not have any such candidates. Thankfully though, and in spite of what the hyperbolists proclaim, this will not actually be the last election in American history. We’ve always got 2028 to look forward to.