Keeping Republicans' eyes on the road

Lawmakers don’t brawl as they did in slavery debates before the Civil War. But they’ve made up for abandoning violence by making their rhetoric more extreme. It’s been three years since The Week illustrated rhetoric inflation with a graph showing a near-vertical rise in politicians’ use, for example, of the term “existential threat.” The drift has surely accelerated since then.

But it’s not only elected officials riding the tide of exaggeration. The rhetoric and the logic of activists also reject nuance. To accuse someone of racism is the gravest of insults, but it is common to do so. Those pushing critical race theory insist you’re a racist unless you’re an active anti-racist — a status attained only by asserting ideas and taking actions that good people rightly deplore.

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