Op-Ed: We’re not at a crossroads, but the stakes are high: This election year’s metaphor of choice

In 2016, when politicos reach for a metaphor to describe the election, they often invoke “stakes,” and especially stakes that “couldn’t be higher.” It seems to me they used to prefer “crossroads,” but I don’t hear much about crossroads anymore; mainly it’s about those stakes that for some reason can’t get any higher. When Jerry Brown finally decided to endorse Hillary Clinton, for example, he did so because “the stakes couldn’t be higher,” not because we’d reached a “crossroads.”

Seeking numerical confirmation of my suspicion, I used the Nexis database to catalog the number of times the phrase “stakes couldn’t be higher” appeared in news articles with the names “Obama” and “Romney” from January to September 2012. I got 52 hits. I did the same for “stakes couldn’t be higher” with “Clinton” and “Trump” from January to September 2016. I got 111 hits. I did the same for the word “crossroads,” and the candidates’ names from January to September of 2012 and 2016. For Romney vs. Obama, “crossroads” appeared 2,477 times. For Trump vs. Clinton, “crossroads” appeared 1,171 times.

Maybe we’ve just exchanged one hokey phrase for another, but I wonder if the shift doesn’t signify a different outlook from the one we had in elections past. A different outlook, and a bleaker one.

Almost every presidential contest has been called a “crossroads” of some kind. “Today,” wrote South Carolina GOP Chairman Chad Connelly in 2012, “our country is at a crossroads and the existence of [the] American dream is threatened like never before.” Michael Brown, a delegate to the Democratic convention in 2012, likely would have disagreed with Connelly about everything, but about the country’s metaphorical location he concurred: “I feel like our nation is at a crossroads where one side diminishes science and history,” he told the Star-Telegram. “It is my duty as an American and a father to work to give my daughter the best chance to have a better life than I have led.”

The trouble with crossroads — literal crossroads — is that if you come to one and make the wrong choice, you can’t just pretend that making a better choice at the next crossroads will somehow fix the problem. You have to turn around and go back to the first crossroads and make the choice you should have made before. It’s a tired phrase, but at least it signifies the importance of a choice between two very different alternatives, one good and one bad. If you can call an election a “crossroads,” you must have some hope.

And that’s how we seem to have thought about the election of 2012: as a philosophical choice in which the nation might either continue its embrace of piecemeal socialism, or reject further government expansions into the free market. Democrats believed the former was the right, good path; Republicans wanted to take the other road, and they hoped to persuade a majority to take it.

That wasn’t necessarily an accurate assessment of the 2012 election, but that’s how partisans on both sides framed it. We were at a crossroads.

The “high stakes” metaphor operates differently. It doesn’t require hope. Just fear.

In a sense, “the stakes couldn’t be higher” is just another way of expressing the truism that this year’s presidential election is “the most important election of our lifetime.” Of course it’s the most important election in our lifetime; it’s the one happening right now, and we can’t predict the outcome or consequences, and that makes us nervous. Similarly: Of course “the stakes couldn’t be higher” because the winner becomes the chief executive of the United States government, and what could possibly be higher than that?

Mary Kay Henry, president of SEIU International, managed to combine the clichs in her Clinton endorsement: “For working families, the 2016 election is the most consequential of our lifetimes. The stakes couldn’t be higher — nor the contrast starker — on all of the issues our families need to get ahead.”

Although Henry mentioned getting “ahead” at the end of the second sentence, her diction isn’t quite coherent at that point (working families need “issues” to get ahead?). What she’s chiefly communicating — I don’t think I’m wrong in thinking — is the possibility of doom. If the wrong candidate wins, all is lost.

The National Rifle Assn.’s Chris Cox sounded just as fearful, maybe more so, when he spoke to the Daily Caller about the Supreme Court vacancy. “And the stakes, with Justice Scalia’s passing and that fifth majority vote being gone for the basic right to own a firearm, the stakes couldn’t be higher.”

We’re not facing a choice between two visions. For Cox, as for Henry, we’re facing danger and ruin.

“The stakes couldn’t be higher,” then, begins to sound like code for “I’m not happy about it either, but the alternative’s even worse.” This is an unhappy place. I wish we could go back to that stupid crossroads.

Barton Swaim is the author of “The Speechwriter: A Brief Education in Politics.”

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