UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — It’s easy to lose sight of history in today’s 24-hour news cycle, especially when it comes to politics. Each election seems like it has the most divisive ads and what Mary Stuckey describes as “despicable discourse.”
Stuckey’s latest book, “Deplorable: The Worst Presidential Campaigns from Jefferson to Trump,” published by Penn State University Press, looks back at previous presidential elections to explore how campaign rhetoric tapped into fears around race and inequality. Stuckey is Edwin Earle Sparks Professor of Communication Arts and Sciences and recently appeared on the Democracy Works podcast to discuss the book.
In the book and in the podcast interview, Stuckey reiterated that deplorable elections are not defined by which candidate or political party wins or loses.
“I'm interested in questions of democracy, not questions of partisanship,” Stuckey said. “What makes an election deplorable then is not who wins; it's the kind of anti-democratic language that gets circulated. And that language is always floating around in our politics. … This book really arose out of a need to address that tension in a way that felt reasonable.”
Stuckey said that the idea for the book started shortly after the 2016 election and was the product of commentary about Donald Trump being “uniquely terrible.” However, Stuckey said that anyone who studies political science or history knows that divisive rhetoric is nothing new in presidential politics.
Stuckey defines deplorable elections as those that contain rhetoric that’s overtly or implicitly exclusionary and designed to serve anti-democratic ends. Examples in the book include the 1924 election, which was heavily influenced by the Ku Klux Klan across the political spectrum, and the 1968 election, which saw the use of Richard Nixon’s “Southern strategy” to mobilize white voters in the Civil Rights Era.
“If your question is really what's good for democracy, then you have to be very serious about what constitutes a threat to democracy and what those threats look like,” Stuckey said. “And those are questions that I think are the most interesting questions that people are talking about today.”
Listen to the podcast episode at democracyworkspodcast.com or by searching “Democracy Works” in Apple Podcasts, Spotify or any podcast app.