“We have a yappa yappa monkey circus here,” a local councillor snapped during a council committee meeting.
“They are political mercenaries … popcorn parties … a coalition of corruption,” a party leader called new parties campaigning in their historical strongholds, only to be called out by another for “baasskap”.
A ruling party official challenges a new party and its leader, declaring “he and his chihuahuas must learn some manners”, and in turn the party was painted as “liberators of yesteryear” and “sell-outs to the interests of colonial powers”.
And in another incident, an opposition firebrand labelled a senior opponent a “wrinkle Botox fake face”, while slinging the words “liars” and “fraudsters” at some opponents, and “game changer” and “messiah” at others.
All this makes for exciting news and when reported, finds its way into the everyday talk of citizens. It is more than mere rudeness or offensive rhetoric, but a strategy for political campaigning, one with which the electorate is familiar and therefore patient – the so-called game of politics that politicians play.
“The game” refers to the public and popular drama that election campaigns carefully choreograph to trigger citizen emotions, capture their imagination and win their trust, even if only for a moment to win a vote.
It is the public contest of words and perception designed to capture media attention and determine the heroes and villains of the stories people tell during gossip and corridor talk.
Inevitably, voters become more than innocent bystanders, but active participants simply by the act of indulgence, reminding themselves and each other to take claims by parties with a pinch of salt, especially during elections.
The contest of offensive rhetoric represents a particular kind of politics that focuses only on rhetoric, on what a political agent says – the words they use, most often in an insulting or threatening way to define a situation, elicit a response or discredit an opponent. This is “nasty politics”.
This is different to “gutter politics”, which uses the details of actual events to launch personal attacks, character assassinations, and scandalmongering to discredit the opposition. In nasty politics it is simply to have voters in their mind’s eye associate offensive images with particular political actors or threatening images with possible events that may take place, and to do so in an outrageous way.
At its best, nasty politics will comically label an opponent in an insulting way, and at its worst may threaten physical violence – a range of offensive tactics almost all on display during the campaigning and presidency of Donald Trump in the United States. His is a prime example of a campaign that deploys nasty politics.
In his success, analysts read an underlying support for more conservative viewpoints, even when on the surface, voters seem to want to distance themselves from Trump’s uncivil rhetoric.
The logic here is that in established democracies voters associate the demand for politically correct rhetoric with the ruling class who want to retain power – political correctness conceals the self-serving agenda of the political establishment, the argument goes.
For frustrated voters, the polite rhetoric and consultative posturing of ruling parties over time becomes indicative of the failures of progressive politics, enabling a more generous reception of uncivil rhetoric and strongman politics.
The statement, “I don’t like the way he says it, but at least he tells it as it is” provides the argument in defence of nasty politics.
Read in this way, nasty politics may in actual fact offer a legitimate tool for views at the margin to disrupt views at the centre and so gain access to power.
* Rudi Buys, NetEd Group Chief Academic Officer and Executive Dean, DaVinci Business Institute.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
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