Why has the political class's discourse degraded so much

BarcelonaI read an article in The Economist in which they measure the length of sentences in the best-selling books on the New York Times list since 1931. In the novel Frenchman's Creek, by Daphne du Maurier, from 1941, we find sentences of nearly forty words. In contrast, Colleen Hoover, the best-selling author in the USA in recent years, uses just over ten. They also measured the speeches of the British Parliament and found that they have shortened by a third in just ten years.

In Spain, reading rates are not low: the latest surveys from the Federation of Publishers show that two out of every three Spaniards claim to read in their spare time. But the joy is short-lived when we review the PISA test results, as the reading comprehension of the students who took it is the worst since its inception in the year 2000. The person in charge of the study at the OECD, Tue Halgreen, explains that students have become accustomed to reading quickly and are starting to have trouble with texts of more than four hundred words. This column, for example, has about five hundred.

Neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf, from UCLA, explains in her essay Reader, Come Home (Viena, 2021) that she wanted to reread a novel by Hermann Hesse that she had loved in her youth and that, when she tried, she found it to be a mountain to climb. She said that the sentences seemed long and difficult, that she was reading too fast to understand them, and that she had to go back again and again, becoming increasingly frustrated. Then, she imposed a routine of twenty minutes a day of slow reading of the same book and, in two weeks, she recovered what she calls cognitive patience: the capacity to hold a sentence until the end without skipping to the next one.

When we read a long sentence we keep an idea in the air, unfinished, until the next sentence gives it meaning. We call this subordinating. A sentence of ten words does not subordinate anything, what it does is juxtapose. This is exactly what populist speeches do: a syntax without subordinate clauses, where each position is complete in itself and does not need the other to make sense. In The Economist they also ran the inauguration speeches of American presidents through the Flesch-Kincaid readability test (a formula that estimates the years of schooling needed to understand a text based on the length of the sentences and the words): George Washington's required a postgraduate level; Trump's, that of a high school student. Populisms do not gain ground because people have become stupid, but because they speak to the size that our attention can sustain right now.

Perhaps we could apply Maryanne Wolf's recipe to parliaments: twenty minutes a day of slow reading of classics, mandatory for all politicians, before entering the hemicycle. Not for culture, although that too, but for syntax, so that those who represent us might once again be able to hold one idea while listening to another. The representatives of the people should be the best of us and not the degradation we see every day live.