Robert Brent Toplin
On Thursday October 27, 2022, the top news story of the day related to an attack at the San Francisco home of Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. Mrs. Pelosi’s husband received hammer blows from an intruder who was looking for his wife. Many commentators associated the incident with hateful characterizations of Pelosi expressed in radio, television, and internet communications. They tended to overlooked statements made by her Republican colleagues in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Ugly characterizations of Nancy Pelosi have a long history dating back to her selection as Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives in 2007. In 2010 Republicans launched a “Fire Pelosi” project that portrayed her as an aggressive dictator. The G.O.P. made her removal from the leadership post a major goal in the midterm elections. Now, a dozen years later, the demonization continues. Congressman Barry Moore of Alabama recently said Pelosi “wants to put America LAST.” In a tweet, Representative Barry Loudermilk of Georgia charged Pelosi with turning “the people’s House into a dictatorship” and trying to “destroy her political enemies.” During Arizona’s primaries a Republican candidate for Congress pretended to shoot actors representing Pelosi, Biden, and Democratic senator Mark Kelly. In a video Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia called Pelosi “a traitor to our country who should be executed for treason.” Greene explained, “It’s a crime punishable by death – is what treason is.”
G.O.P. strategists understand the value of putting a face on villainy. Voters are more emotionally engaged when they view a single person as a symbol of the nation’s problems. Republican tacticians applied this approach when dealing with Hillary Clinton. She had an approval rating of 65 percent in 2009 when she began her stint as Secretary of State, and her popularity remained high until she stepped away in 2013. But when Clinton emerged as the leading Democratic candidate for the White House in 2015 and 2016, her rating crashed. Months of negative political messaging damaged her reputation.
This year the Republican Party spent $40 million on ads that referenced Pelosi. She ranked fifth in total ad spending by congressional candidates or committees associated with the Republican Party from Labor Day to late October 2022. The only subjects that received larger advertising expenditure from the G.O.P. were taxation, President Biden, inflation, and crime.
Attacking strong women in leadership positions, such as Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi, probably appealed to some male voters, but characterizing individuals as villains is not an exclusively sexist exercise. From 2008 until 2016 Republicans made Barack Obama the target of sharply negative characterizations. Joe Biden has been on the receiving end since he emerged as the Democrats’ choice for the White House in 2020. Rhetoric from the right blasted other prominent people, too, including Dr. Anthony Fauci and George Soros, individuals that made significant contributions to humanity.
Republican lawmakers have been vilified in political commentaries, too, and some were assaulted by deranged individuals. In 2017 a gunman fired on a group of G.O.P. congressmen at a baseball practice, and an angry man tried to attack Republican congressman Lee Zeldin of New York.
Yet incendiary language towards political opponents has been practiced more aggressively by Republicans. A 2022 headline in the New York Times summarized findings from a computerized study of more than 3.7 million examples of sharply partisan words in tweets, Facebook ads, newsletters, and congressional speeches. The Times found Republicans used divisive terms and phrases – “demonizing speech” — far more than Democrats.
Contemptuous rhetoric by Republicans in Congress has been growing since the late twentieth century. G.O.P. representative Newt Gingrich made notable early contributions. He encouraged war-like language in the 1980s and 1990s. Gingrich recommended Republicans use terms such as “sick, “pathetic,” “lie”, “anti-flag,” traitors,” “radical,” and “corrupt” when referring to Democrats. In 2014, the Pew Research Center reported that partisan antipathy was spreading beyond Washington and affecting American social life. In 2021 a Harvard study found extreme political segregation had become the norm. It concluded “most Democratic and Republican voters live in partisan bubbles, with little daily exposure to those who belong to the other party.”
Years ago, many Democrats and Republicans in Congress developed friendships despite their disagreements over ideology and policy. The relationship between California Democrat Jared Huffman and Republican Paul Gosar of Arizona was an example of bipartisan cooperation. The two worked together closely on committee assignments, but in recent years their relationship soured. Huffman, the Democrat, was appalled when Gosar voted against certifying the 2020 election and shared a video showing him killing a fellow representative, congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York.
Current tensions in Congress are not as dangerous as they were before the Civil War, but they are beginning to resemble those hostilities. In 1858 hostilities related to slavery turned into a brawl on the floor of the House. A representative from the South grabbed the throat of a Northern representative and quickly about thirty lawmakers rushed into a no-holds-barred battle. Present-day quarrels in Congress are not being settled by fisticuffs, but fighting words are being employed abundantly in political speech.
As Americans try to draw lessons from the shocking news about an attack at the home of Paul and Nancy Pelosi, it is useful to recognize that incendiary comments about Nancy Pelosi came not only from Donald Trump and hotheads on radio, television, and the internet. Elected representatives in Washington also villainized Pelosi. The attack at Nancy Pelosi’s home demonstrates how an unstable individual can be inspired to engage in violence after being exposed to numerous ugly characterizations of a public figure. The alleged attacker had posted conspiracy theories online about Covid vaccines, Pizza Gate, the 2020 elections, and other topics. An acquaintance told CNN he was “out of touch with reality.”
Barack Obama addressed this problem when discussing the attack on Paul Pelosi. The former president called on elected officials to “explicitly reject” hateful language. Obama warned, “If our rhetoric about each other gets that mean, when we don’t just disagree with people, but we start demonizing, making wild, crazy allegations about them, that creates a dangerous climate.”
It would be helpful if Republican leaders reminded firebrands in their party that it is time to tamp down the hateful rhetoric and act like respectable public servants.
