Dumbing it down
by David Atkins
If you had an inkling that political discourse was getting dumbed down by the day, it appears you were right:
The Sunlight Foundation determined that Congress is talking at nearly a full grade level below the level at which members spoke seven years ago, according to its study of the Congressional Record—the official record of members’ proceedings and speech. The foundation applied the Flesch-Kincaid grade level test to congressional conversations and found that today’s Congress speaks “at about a 10.6 grade level, down from 11.5 in 2005,” senior fellow Lee Drutman wrote in his analysis. Sunlight also found that the newest as well as the most conservative members of Congress on average speak at the lowest grade level.
Is it a surprise that all the new Tea Partiers are dumbing down the discourse? No, it isn’t. But then, that may be part of the reason they were successful. Strategists often note that Democrats speak more to the brain than to heart, while Republicans do the reverse. Part of speaking to the heart means speaking in language that most people can understand. The article’s accompanying chart, meanwhile, shows that Democrats have also been vulgarizing their speeches, just not as dramatically as Republicans.
So maybe the drop in linguistic register is a good thing for democracy. But I can’t help feeling that when the political discourse of the highest lawmaking body in the land drops down to a 10th grade level, we lose something vital to democracy in the process.
Of course, as long as all the legislation is written by the lobbyists, anyway, I guess it doesn’t much matter what’s in the speeches.
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