From the Archives: Too Negative?

From the Archives: Too Negative?

From the Archives: Too Negative?

If disdain for incumbents and Tea Party insurgency are the stories of this election, it should be no surprise that campaign ads have gone ?negative.? A new study suggests that ads this year are the most negative in a decade. On the other side, a Washington Post reporter tells of a fantastical place (North Dakota) where unemployment is low, campaigns deal with policy, and candidates are kind to one another; and two biting satirists drew hundreds of thousands to the National Mall on Saturday, imploring the media and politicians to play nicer and be more civil.

But the 1990s were bad, too, weren?t they? And Nicolaus Mills (in the Summer 2001 issue of Dissent) cautioned against the mistake of ?[looking] back on the 1990s and [thinking] that the savaging of President Clinton was unprecedented.? In fact, the ?tradition of savaging the powerful has long and honorable roots in American politics, beginning with the revolution and the savaging of King George III and his ministers,? and carrying on more or less continuously to the present day.

As David Greenberg?s Spring 2009 Dissent article might remind us, there was much worrying about ?negativity? in 2008, too. ?For at least two decades, journalists, scholars, political consultants, and the public have grown increasingly fretful about the tenor of politics, with ?negative campaigning? serving as a focus for these anxieties.? More than that, the focus on negativity is often conservative?Greenberg argued that ?we live in an age that is haunted by an idealized notion of the political sphere, located somewhere in the irretrievable past.? He followed with a prediction, and a hope:

Obama will then have to step out from behind the postpartisan shield to speak as a liberal and a Democrat. If the Republicans, in this hour of emergency, resolve to block new and needed legislation, Obama will find the reinforcements he needs only by arriving at a surefooted position of conviction. He will have to rally his ideological base, marshal his partisan loyalists, and argue from a sense of principle. That will require many things, not least moving beyond the politics of feigned outrage.

Read Nicolaus Mill?s article here.

Read David Greenberg?s here.