Politics is Not a Name-Calling Contest

Dr. Munr Kazmir
5 min readAug 11, 2023

Donald Trump has crossed — yet another — line with his latest insult against Chris Christie.

Photo by Gayatri Malhotra on Unsplash.

“Trash talk is for suckers.” — Friday Night Lights

The 2024 campaign season is already upon us — not that the last campaign season ever really ended, or that the 2026 and 2028 campaign efforts haven’t already begun.

Like the holiday shopping season coming earlier and earlier every year, so too does the Thunderdome of American campaign politics in a sharply divided nation. Almost perfectly poised in opposition to each other, like two planets of a similar size exerting equal force on the objects around them, the two main political parties have split the U.S. nearly exactly in twain.

With such a narrow margin, no one party should be undertaking sweeping policy changes or whole-of-government reforms. Not in this democracy. There just isn’t enough support, on either side, for anything too extreme.

In the middle is where most of us live politically anyway, at least offline and probably online, too. Extremist viewpoints from the right and left alienate the vast middle, the silent majority.

Unfortunately, American politics, like social media, has become a contest of extremes: Who can say the most outrageous things? Who can deliver the…

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