Why are we no longer shocked to hear "son of a bitch" called in politics?

Barcelona"Son of a bitch." A voice rang out among the participants at the PSOE rally in Teruel during the final stretch of the Aragonese election campaign. The speaker was Belén Navarro, a PP councilwoman in Vallanca, a town of 128 inhabitants in the Rincón de Ademuz region, and the target of her anger was Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez. Despite the outrage expressed by the Socialists and also by the Sumar coalition, who demanded that the PP dismiss the councilwoman, the outburst was not new, but rather a successor to the infamous "I like fruit" rhetoric championed by the Popular Party. Under the leadership of the Madrid president, Isabel Díaz AyusoSuch offenses hardly cause a stir anymore in a political landscape increasingly accustomed to personal attacks.

Insults, in fact, have become increasingly commonplace in politics. From Vox, Santiago Abascal has turned this dynamic on its head, leaving Sánchez's mother out of the equation: "Mom is not to blame at all, I prefer to call him pimp whores"," he said at a recent rally, while in the background Vox supporters openly insulted the PSOE leader. US President Donald Trump is one of the leading exponents of using personal attacks for political gain: he calls journalists, mostly women, ""little pigs" and "stupid"", refers to his former rivals in the White House as "weak" and "pathetic," in the case of Joe Biden, or "stupid" and "lazy" in the case of Kamala Harris, and describes immigrants as "animals" and "rapists and criminals." The Argentine Journalism Forum reported earlier this year that, since taking office in December 2023, Milei has posted more than 16,800 messages containing insults on social media, and that the peaks in these messages coincided with key economic announcements, demonstrating that the conflict and the a.

In conversation with ARA, Marc Guinjoan, PhD in political and social sciences and lecturer at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, ​​states that until recently the use of insults was not common. correction and resort to insults as a political resource. According to Guinjoan, his discourse of crisis and threat links with that of bonds against bad, that of the people against the Corrupt elites: "Demonizing the rival is not only possible, it works"

Bonds and traitors

Following the theory of affective polarization developed by Shanto Iyengar, an American political scientist and professor of political science at Stanford University, insults don't aim to convince anyone on the opposing side; their objective is purely identity-based. They reinforce the cohesion of one's own group through contempt for the other. Thus, the voter doesn't vote so much out of love for their party as out of hatred for the rival, and the outburst becomes the perfect fuel for that hatred. The populist needs insults to define who the "true people" are, Iyengar reminds us. Thus, by insulting journalists, judges, presidents, or minorities, the leader is drawing a moral line where those who are with him are the "good guys" and the rest are traitors.

Although the phenomenon should be "largely confined to the sphere of far-right populist parties," as Guinjoan points out, insults are not their exclusive domain. The most active minister in the far-right, Óscar Puente, for example, referred to the far-right agitator Vito Quiles as a "sack of shit," and the ERC spokesperson in Congress, Gabriel Rufián, repeatedly described the former Valencian president Carlos Mazón as a "psychopath." Be that as it may, this is not common language outside of far-right parties, and for that reason, even within the PP, voices quickly emerged criticizing the insults directed at Sánchez by their councilwoman, and at one time there was also an attempt to downplay the Madrid president's fondness for fruit.