The audacity of the recent actions by immigration officials — separating children from their parents en masse, and warehousing the kids indefinitely in underequipped facilities — explains some of the recent abandonment of political civility. President Trump’s very nature, regardless of actions, explains some more.
But only some. Civility has been under open assault for a while in the U.S., and the root problem goes a lot deeper than the words or policies of any one president or party
When Resistance mobs harassed Trump allies in recent days when they were trying to enjoy dinner or watch a documentary about the importance of neighborliness, some liberal commentators were disappointed at the incivility, but plenty of others cheered it on. Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., encouraged more mobs to surround Trump administration officials at gas stations or in stores, and to drive them out — again, to plaudits from well-regarded progressives in respectable perches.
Some of these cheerleaders for mob politics and incivility claimed that extraordinary circumstances were behind their embrace of radical tactics. “Liberals are using their cultural power against the right because it’s the only power they have left,” Michelle Goldberg at the New York Times wrote, “and people have a desperate need to say, and to hear others say, that what is happening in this country is intolerable.”
The clear implication: Liberals are resorting to mobs and harassment only because they don’t have political power. It’s a gentler version of the explanations of terrorist violence: These young third-world men are impoverished and disenfranchised and so they lack peaceful ways to express themselves.
In one sense, this is a powerful insight. The sense of political powerlessness drives people to take up antisocial means of political expression. At the same time, this doesn’t explain the disdain for civility that the American Left suddenly displays, because that disdain predates Trump and the GOP takeover of government.
When Republicans controlled only the House of Representatives, and the Tea Party was clearly a dissident group within the out-of-power party, countless liberal politicians and journalists — including those speaking and writing from positions of power — saw no need to be civil toward the Tea Partiers. “Terrorists” akin to “Hezbollah” armed with “suicide vests” was the standard way the Times and MSNBC — and even Vice President Joe Biden — referred to them.
For more than a decade, the dean of liberal commentary has been Nobel Prize-winning economist-turned-New York Times blogger Paul Krugman. Anti-civility is the creed Krugman has preached. He gratuitously and falsely pegged the shooting of a Democratic congresswoman on the “Tea Party” merely taken “to the next level.” He implored his followers to reject the notion that “one should not be rude about people you disagree with.”
“Demands for civility almost always come from people who have forfeited the right to the respect they demand,” Krugman said. He made it very clear, again and again, that by this he meant all conservatives.
Many on the Left bought this argument. “Complaints about civility are the last resort of someone who’s run out of arguments,” journalist Tim Fernholz wrote in 2013.
The election of Donald Trump was itself an expression of the same sort of angst Fernholtz expressed here. It was a feeling of political powerlessness, and a feeling that the political class not only ignored, but actively disdained this slice of the populace.
So the Right blames its incivility on the Left’s incivility, culture wars, and elitist disdain. The Left blames it on powerlessness, or bad faith by the other side, or the boorish incivility and extreme policies of the current president.
None of these things is the root, though. The root is a few layers further below the surface. Such political anger, divisiveness, and incivility is inevitable when all of politics is moved to such a winner-take-all stage on such a massive, inhuman scale.
Goldberg is correct that a sense of disenfranchisement has motivated the Left’s incivility. But the disenfranchisement is much deeper than the gerrymandering of Pennsylvania’s congressional map. The chief force of disenfranchisement in America today is the erosion of civil society and local community.
Man is a political animal. He naturally needs not only to control his own life, but also to shape the world around him. In a healthy culture, men and women have many venues in which to do so: the parish church, the neighborhood, the local government, the swim club, the village public school, the bowling league, the Rotary Club, the workplace, and so on.
In America today, these middle institutions have eroded, thanks to technology, government centralization, secularization, a zeitgeist of hyper-individualism, and many other factors. The result is people without an arena in which to live out their identity as political animals.
So they focus their attention on the only political arena they see — the national stage covered 24/7 by CNN and the federal government. It’s inevitable that the average American is powerless on this stage. Every individual is powerless in a polity of 320 million. Of course the special interests, big business, and the revolving-door lobbyists will have more power inside the Beltway than ordinary folks will.
Yet the Bernie Sanders crowd sees their impotence in Washington and blames corporate lobbyists. The Donald Trump crowd blames the corrupt swamp or the coastal liberal elite. The #Resistance blames Gerrymandering and the loss of Merrick Garland’s Supreme Court seat. They all think that if they get the right fixes in Washington — someone who will stand up to the special interests, someone uncowed by political correctness, someone who will fight as dirty as the other side — they will get back their voices.
But it’s not going to happen of course. The proper playing field for most people to exercise their political muscles is on the local level, in a human-scaled institution of civil society. As long as so much of our population sees national politics as the only politics, our politics will be poison.
