2 July 2018 — 0810 mdt

Incivility is not a virtue, and civility is not a vice

In his inaugural address, President John F. Kennedy, seeking to thaw the Cold War, said, “So let us begin anew — remembering on both sides that civility is not a sign of weakness, and sincerity is always subject to proof.” Today, many Democrats, glowing hot with anger at President Trump and the Americans who elected him, do consider civility a weakness, a vice, and believe that winning requires incivility — shaming, shunning, shouting, shoving, spitting, slinging rocks and mud — which they consider a virtue. After all, it worked for Donald Trump, didn’t it?

It’s tempting to conclude from the 2016 campaign that incivility was a winner. Trump was coarse, demagogic, rough as a cob, mean as a snake. At his rallies, he incited violence, reminding me of George Wallace's 1968 campaign. But Trump, as the Wesleyan Media Project’s analysis of advertising in the 2016 campaign revealed, campaigned on the issues far more than Hillary Clinton, who practiced the politics of personal destruction, denouncing the white working class, once a major and valued Democratic constituency, as deplorable homophobes and racists.

Trump, as Andrew Levison observes, connected with the white working class by articulating their belief that they were being held in contempt, and cheated by, various elites such as Wall Street traders, arrogant city sophisticates, and what Thomas Frank, in Listen Liberal, called the officer class: degreed professionals such as doctors, lawyers, and teachers. It was that message, not its uncivil delivery, that won the election.

But that lesson has escaped many Democrats and progressives. They’re angry that Trump won; so angry that they’re lashing out reflexively and wildly at anything and everything associated with Trump. They regard Sarah Sanders’ eviction from the Lexington, VA, Red Hen as the just result of righteous wrath instead of what it was, a mean and petty personal incivility inflicted by a vigilante arbiter of political correctness. They refuse to acknowledge that nonviolent civil disobedience differs from personal rudeness and vindictiveness. They want to knock heads, kick butts, slap faces. In their uncivilized fury, they’re trying to personally destroy people, trying to draw blood, trying to provoke screams of pain and tears of humiliation.

Their incivility is a mistake, moral and political. A summer of rage, of flash mobs in restaurants where high officials dine, of ousters from eateries not for misbehaving onsite but for legal activities conducted elsewhere, of doxxing political adversaries and stalking and picketing their homes, will not lead to the election of more Democrats. Indeed, it could lead to the election of more Republicans. And it surely will lead to the coarsening of our civic culture, making our nation a less civil, and therefore less pleasant, place to live.

There is no virtue in incivility, no vice in civility. If Democrats and progressives fail to embrace that truth, they will be embraced by a dystopia of their own making.