Why is political messaging so crazy?

This post will be a little shorter than usual, but I wanted to quickly investigate and explain an idea posed to me by a peer recently. That is, the increased "craziness" of political messaging from more "extreme" candidates (on both sides!) in the past ten years can be traced back to the Citizens United case in 2010.

Essentially, this idea is based on the assumption that unrealistic and unattainable political calls from both sides of the political spectrum are not actually genuine on the part of politicans; they are an appeal to big money donors who are more extreme in their beliefs. These claims include things like defunding the police, or banning abortion in all situations and forms. Both of these are things that are pretty unattainable in politics and are not desired by the majority of the public, yet remain talking points for politicians.

Why?

Money. The nature of political spending has changed such in the past decade, because of SuperPACS, that political canidates really only need the support of a few ultra-wealthy donors or interest groups to fund their campaigns. As a result, politicians pander to these interest groups and donors, and this often takes the form of extreme and unrealistic messaging.

This is mostly important to consider because of the way it seems to be shaping the general public's perception of politics and current events in America. Political divide in the US has unequivocally been rising, and I think that has been significantly accelerated by political messaging coming from politicians and interest groups. There have always been fringe ideas present in politics, but they seem to be taking center stage recently--and the increased partisanship means more competitive elections, and thus more money fueled into these political campaigns. The US has been so politically divided that we had a civil war before; my hope is that we don't reach that point again any time soon, but this increased divide and crazy messaging surely isn't helping us form a unified country.


AM