Do We Need Civility In Politics?
On Friday, Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders went out to eat at the Red Hen, a small dining establishment in Lexington, Virginia. Based on Sanders' history of defending Trump administration policies — like the transgender troop ban and the forced separation of families at the border — owner Stephanie Wilkinson asked Sanders to leave.
Earlier in the week, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, a staunch defender of the family separation policy, was heckled by protesters at a Mexican restaurant. Nielsen left. Before that, Trump aide and architect of the family separating policy, Stephen Miller, was also heckled at a Mexican restaurant. Before that, alt-right figure Milo Yiannopoulos was heckled out of a New York City bar.
If Twitter and the Washington Post op-ed section are to be believed, we're at some sort of tipping point for the way we conduct political debate here in the United States. The crucial word here is "civility." Heckling top administration officials as they sit down to dinner is, according to this way of thinking, "uncivil." Asking these folks, who have chosen day in and day out to support and defend the policy decisions of Donald Trump, not to dine at your restaurant is "uncivil."
True, facing consequences for your political beliefs is scary territory! A commonly accepted political norm here in America is that you're free to believe whatever you want. We haven't quite figured out what exactly happens when those held beliefs come into contact with one another. Should all political debate be "civil?" If one administration's policies are so clearly disrespectful of basic human rights — going so far as to literally pull out of the UN Human Rights council — does one attempt to debate them respectfully?
Fortunately or unfortunately, this debate over the "civility" in US political discourse is not new. In November of last year, political writer Chris Hooks tackled of the idea of civility in politics as it applied to George W. Bush and Donald J. Trump. In his essay, Hooks argues that "civility" is something that is bandied about by those who are more concerned with the appearance of how politics is conducted here in the US than with the actual substance of those stated politics.
It is good to be nice, and civility in a vacuum is a fine attribute. But it's also worth noting who subscribes to the stylistic critique most strongly — people with relatively less at stake. Many political consultants adopt this framework. The grand game's not fun anymore, and they wish it were. The media adopts it too, because stylistic critiques are "safe," according to the unwritten rules of objectivity.
New Yorker Staff Writer Jelani Cobb put it more succinctly on Twitter.
In a follow-up op-ed, the Washington Post's Jennifer Rubin lays out a straightforward way of thinking about whether or not it is okay to shout at Trump administration officials:
It depends on how you view the child-separation policy. If you think the decision to separate children from parents as a means of deterring other asylum seekers is simply one more policy choice, like tax cuts or negotiations with North Korea, then, yes, screaming at political opponents is inappropriate. Such conduct is contrary to the democratic notion that we do not personally destroy our political opponents but, rather, respect differences and learn to fight and perhaps compromise on another day. If, however, you think the child-separation policy is in a different class — a human rights crime, an inhumane policy for which the public was primed by efforts to dehumanize a group of people ("animals," "infest," etc.) — then it is both natural and appropriate for decent human beings to shame and shun the practitioners of such a policy.
In other words, some people think that forcibly separating parents from children — effectively using children as a political tool to prevent asylum-seekers from coming to the US — crosses a line. Some think it's politics as usual. This is why Representative Maxine Waters supports public confrontation of Trump administration officials. This is also why Representative Nancy Pelosi believes that we must remain civil.
Who to believe? Splinter News' Hamilton Nolan suggests that you take a look at the current power dynamic between Washington and those who are affected by its polices, and decide for yourself.
It is telling that many of those who make their living in the political industrial complex, whether Democrat or Republican or Washington Post editorial page, find the idea of socially shunning people because of their politics to be abhorrent. Their shudders are a symptom of the fact that DC is indeed a swamp — a friendly swamp, where all the gators and slugs and mudfish meet up at the end of the day for cocktails, because to them, politics is a job. To the rest of us, politics is the use of power in a way that has very real effects on our lives. Poverty is an affliction of history and the failure to remedy history's crimes, of greed and self-dealing and the tax code. Sickness is often an affliction of the political decision not to build a fair and equitable health care system, so that a small number of people can get rich instead. Tens of millions of people around the world suffer under dictatorships that are supported by America to serve our own economic ends. People die because of political decisions every day. Politics is real. This is what is on one side of our current disagreement: death, and human rights, and freedom, and equality. And this is what is on the other side: wanting to eat at a nice restaurant without having anyone remind you that you are ruining people's lives. The sides of this scale are not even close to balancing yet.
If there is one thing to read on this dynamic — of folks demanding that we be nice to each other, regardless of what is up for debate — it's Tom Scocca's essential 2013 essay, "On Smarm," which, thankfully still lives on Gawker. While Scocca doesn't mention Trump, he does touch upon this idea of "civility" in politics — that it's grasping for a higher authority, not one of morals or a greater good, but that things must be conducted a certain way, or else the ideas they put forward are forfeit.
Where does the grease go? Smarm hopes to fill the cultural or political or religious void left by the collapse of authority, undermined by modernity and postmodernity. It's not enough anymore to point to God or the Western tradition or the civilized consensus for a definitive value judgment. Yet a person can still gesture in the direction of things that resemble those values, vaguely.
That gesture can almost serve as a source of comfort. The old systems of prestige—the literary inner circles, the top-ranking daily newspapers, the party leadership—are rickety and insecure. Everyone has a publishing platform and no one has a career.
Smarm offers a quick schema of superiority. The authority that smarm invokes is an ersatz one, but the appearance of authority is usually enough to get by with. Without that protection, to hold an opinion is to feel bare and alone, one voice among a cacophony of millions.
[Gawker]
It's notable that while some are urging a return to civility in politics, the President of the United States is out here slamming Rep. Waters and the Red Hen on Twitter, while Trump supporters are logging on and harassing the restaurant, and a few other unaffiliated restaurants that also have "Red Hed" in their name. As of yet, neither Trump nor Sanders have come out against the targeted harassment of the Red Hen. So much for civility.
