On Political Rhetoric and Understanding Our Limitations
By Daniel Krausz | January 14, 2021
Amid the sound and fury of the current political climate, we frequently hear a cacophony of calls to lower the temperature on the rhetoric being used. It’s something that comes up frequently in the aftermath of events like major elections, riots and political assassinations, among other things. The thought process goes that the passion of one’s conviction is a great thing, vital to a functioning democracy, but simply has to be expressed with less rancor. The predicament here, of course, is that a portion of the very passion of conviction that we are seeing stems from the vilification of the opponent in the first place, thus making the pleas for softer rhetoric somewhat circular, and unsurprisingly, yet to be particularly successful.