A relative told me this story: She had gone to a neighbor’s party, only to have the neighbor announce her arrival by saying something like, “You don’t have to worry, everyone. She didn’t bring the conservative with her.” And then, after telling me the story, my relative began to weep—not because of her neighbor but because of me. My existence as a known conservative proved to be just too . . . much. An open wound. An invitation for neighbors to shame her.
Twitter and Facebook have been doing their best to convince us that incivility is the nation’s beloved pastime, finally overtaking Trivial Pursuit and post-Thanksgiving indigestion on the list of traditional favorites. But I’m still surprised when it manifests itself in personal settings.
Not that a get-together of longtime neighbors is likely to be entirely free of politics. Modern urban districts tend to a uniformity of housing price, uniformity of price tends toward uniformity of social class, and social class these days often dictates an acceptable range of political views. Nibbling their canapés, sipping their wine, those urbanites could quite reasonably assume that their neighbors, sharing their class, would share their politics. But remarking loudly on a variation—announcing the social-class flaw of having a conservative relative—seems something previous generations might have labeled an impoliteness. With a raised eyebrow and perhaps even a setting-down sharply of a teacup.
I’ve treasured over the past few years a discussion I found on a leftist website about whether one should help victims of a car accident—if they were known to be Republicans. (After some back-and-forth, the commentators settled on an answer: No. Better they die.) Even that, however, was a little abstract and impersonal. More on point was the libertarian blogger who used Obama’s 2012 reelection to announce: “All family and friends, even close family and friends, who I know to be Democrats are hereby dead to me. I vow never to speak to them again for the rest of my life.” And the rhetoric has only escalated in the years since, with the 2016 presidential race making ugly everything it touched.
This isn’t new, of course. Look back through American history, and you’ll find plenty of raucous elections. If Jules Verne’s 1873 Around the World in Eighty Days is any guide, Europeans typically viewed 19th-century American elections as a cross between oratory and an all-in bout of pig wrestling.
The 1930s were scarcely better, and 1968 brought its own brand of nuttiness. But I still sense something new in the fetid air of politics. A certainty that those who disagree with us about ordinary political matters are not just mistaken but actually evil. Or stupid, maybe, if a kindler, gentler option is on the table.
Back in the mid-1990s, a senior academic told me, with great confidence, that the peak of political correctness had surely passed: A college like Princeton would be embarrassed if it didn’t have a single conservative on its faculty; a law school like Harvard’s needed at least a token figure. With a whoosh, those times disappeared. The sheer presence of a known conservative is enough to cause agitation on a campus these days, and faculty collegiality cowers in the corner, afraid to show its face.
And out of academia the disease has spread. Politics seems so important—so vital, so all-consuming. For too many, it dictates whether art can be judged as good. For too many, it sweeps aside intellectual discipline and expertise. Everything except cat videos is subject to political analysis, and a news story about a traffic accident quickly becomes an occasion for the readers to slang one another over whose political party allowed it or caused it to happen. No wonder people retreat to bubbles with their cats and cameras. It’s the only chance to turn down the volume of the political wrangling.
Manners are easy to think minor when compared with the great causes of politics, particularly when political views are taken as a sign of social class and more—something akin to religion. We’ve just elected what may be the most ill-mannered man ever to run for president, as he campaigned against a candidate who has demonized her opponents perhaps more than any other person in modern politics. And that’s possible only if manners don’t much matter to anyone: right or left.
Maybe manners ought not to matter. But as I struggle to understand the small changes from which our current impasses were built, I keep circling back to that moment when, announcing loudly the existence of a relative with improper political views, a woman tried to shame her neighbor—and succeeded.
