Ignorance: Today’s Trendy Political Insult

Photo by Caleb Woods on Unsplash

If there’s one word that makes the knife drag deeper between the political divide nowadays it’s “ignorance” — what has become an increasingly popular allegation. President Trump has on numerous occasions been paired with the word “stupid” in headlines and voters on both sides of the aisle have become quite accustomed to accusing the other of simply blind idiocy.

Across the board, the word instinctively makes people bristle, heating up political frustration. In addition, its resulting defensive import emotionally drives people to further barricade their beliefs. Needless to say, it’s a good example of an inflammatory word. But those that utilize it — sprinkling it throughout their tweets, daily conversations, and internal commentary — slowly lose any sense of there being anything less than appropriate with habitually tossing out the barb that is “ignorance”.

Frankly, it’s not a good idea to encourage the use of this word. And my reasons for this are less tangled up with propriety than they are with the consequences of the reductionist attitude that using this word so often entails. The accusation of ignorance is so overused that it’s ironically making its underlying supposition stand out as more questionable — that underlying supposition being that half of the nation (irrespective of which side you stand on) is fundamentally stupid. For some, the…