Newswise — A Baylor University professor says violent metaphors are nothing new in American politics, but the 24-hour news cycle and anonymity of the Internet "open the floodgates" for extremists who have no way of being held accountable.
Use of violent metaphor — such as Sarah Palin’s “crosshairs” map aimed at Democrats who voted for Obama’s health care bill — permeates American political language and always has, says Dr. Martin J. Medhurst, the Distinguished Professor of Rhetoric and Communication at Baylor University, and a professor of political science whose research focuses on the nature and effectiveness of political rhetoric.
What has changed is round-the-clock communication forms, including the Internet, talk radio and multiple cable outlets, Medhurst says. On the positive side, that invites more people to participate in democracy. But on the negative side, because people online can maintain anonymity, “there are virtually no gatekeepers. Under those conditions, you find the most extreme views being expressed by people who have no way of being held accountable.”
Politicians constantly speak of wars and going to battle, whether the enemy be drugs, inflation or terror, but most people do not take them literally, and the metaphors generally are not effective, Medhurst said.
“When you engage in war, that presumes that there will be victors and losers,” he said. But such wars have no end, and “when people come to the realization that it’s really not the kind of war, like World War II, where we will have a victory and sign a piece of paper and it will all be over, they will be discouraged.”
While political rhetoric is present in other democracies, “Americans from the very beginning have tended to a more violent discourse,” Medhurst said. “You can go all the way back into the 18th century and find all sorts of examples of the use of rhetoric. This is very deeply woven into the American culture and in the American experience. Violence permeates our culture in a way that it does not permeate some of the European cultures, especially the social democracies such as Sweden, Norway, and Finland.”
Medhurst contributed to and co-edited 2008’s The Prospect of Presidential Rhetoric and Words of a Century: The Top 100 American Speeches, 1900-1999.
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