The use of Political Hyperbole

[AgnosticBoy]

Politics has a lot of hyperbole, and although it's not supposed to be taken literally, but it seems that politicians don't care if it is.

For instance, when Democrats say that those who oppose abortion are against choice, that's likely hyperbole. But it tends to be taken by the electorate to mean that Republicans want to control what women can do with their bodies, like what we find in patriarchal societies.

When Republicans that say that school districts want to groom your kids when exposing them gender identity, then the electorate will tend to take that to mean that Democrats want to make kids gender neutral or open to choosing whatever gender they'd like.


What's the reason for all of this hyperbole? I found one article that goes into this topic from The Week:

America's addiction to hyperbolic rhetoric is an existential threat to the United States.

Actually, it isn't. But putting it that way sure got your attention, didn't it?

And that, dear reader, is a big part of the problem.

We live during a time of extreme rhetorical inflation. Just in the past few days, the president of the United States has declared a national emergency about would-be immigrants attempting to cross the southern border into the United States. This situation isn't a national emergency at all, and the fact that previous presidents have made similar declarations doesn't make it any less egregious.

And the reason for hyperbolic rhetoric like Trump's statements about immigration is this according to the author...

The reason is obvious: They want to move public opinion in their direction, and they seek to get it with a rhetoric of alarmism. Opinion journalists have adopted this approach, in part for the same reason — because they think their best chance at persuasion is to indulge in intentional overstatement — but also because, once again, standing out in the clamorous marketplace, winning an audience and profit-generating online traffic, requires some attention-grabbing gesture.

Wallace-Wells devotes a good part of his excerpt arguing that outright alarmism is the only way to rouse a deaf world to the perils that await us. I doubt it. More than anything else, that approach to persuasion resembles the exaggerations and distortions that many people associate with advertising, electoral campaigns, and, increasingly, political debate more generally — all of which regularly float hyperbolic claims that are all-too-easy to dismiss precisely because of how unhinged and partisan they sound.

For Discussion:
- How do we combat this type of hyperbolic rhetoric?
- What are non-partisan ways to get the point across to Americans to where they will take issues seriously (assuming that that's a big reason why hyperbole is used)?