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... Watching Donald Trump bluster and bluff his way through a presidential campaign, I wonder if we underestimate the ways in which Internet vitriol has broadened the parameters of political debate. We are "shocked, shocked" by Trump's language, but all of it is exactly the sort of thing anyone can encounter in the normal course of reading about politics online. John McCain isn't a war hero? I'll bet he finds worse insults than that on his Facebook page, and so does everybody who writes about him. All Mexicans are rapists? I open my Twitter account every morning to find similar and worse (my personal favorite, translated from Polish: "Reading what that @anneapplebaum writes I understand anti-semitism. Jews have an incredible gift for pissing you off"). The language of online political discourse is now so extreme, and often so far divorced from reality, that Trump's words fit right in, especially when they make no sense.Trump's defenders -- and I know because they tell me so online -- say they admire him because he is allegedly "anti-establishment." They are wrong: He isn't anti-establishment at all. As a vastly wealthy man -- one who can invite an ex-secretary of state to his wedding and expect her to come -- he lives at the very heart of a certain slice of the establishment. But of course he is different from other politicians in another sense: He is the only presidential candidate who uses, on television, the kind of language normally found in the comment section of a celebrity Web site or the more aggressive Reddit forums. Vulgar insults, racist slurs, manufactured "anger" and invented "facts" are all a normal part of debate in those kinds of public spaces. Thanks to Trump, they have now migrated to presidential politics, too ...
Anne Elizabeth Applebaum (born July 25, 1964) is an American and Polish journalist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author who has written extensively about communism and the development of civil society in Central and Eastern Europe. She has been an editor at The Economist, and a member of the editorial board of The Washington Post (2002–2006). She is married to Poland's former Minister of Foreign Affairs Radosław Sikorski.
