The rhetoric here is bipartisan. Left and right strike exactly the same notes both in their charges of incivility and their responses to them—not surprising, since the roles tend to alternate with shifts in power and with events. The same conservatives who hammered on the “hate speech” of “rage-filled” Democrats during the Bush administration were warning against the “stifling of vigorous debate” that could result from an unreasonable emphasis on civility when liberals were criticizing the tenor of Tea Party rhetoric a few years later. “Civility equals censorship,” Rush Limbaugh said in early 2011. “That’s exactly what Obama and the left mean when they start talking about civility. That means shut up!” Change a few particulars, and that could be Paul Krugman back in 2003: “All this fuss about civility is an attempt to bully critics into unilaterally disarming—into being demure and respectful of the president.” Both sides go on from there to point out that civility isn’t the only thing that matters. “I’m all for good manners but this isn’t a dinner party,” Krugman says, and Benjamin Demott echoes him: “When you’re arguing with a thug, there are things that are much more important than civility.” “Civility is important,” Sarah Palin says, “but we can’t underestimate Americans who are very passionate about finding solutions to the problems that we face. And if that involves some healthy, vigorous debate, then allow it to be so.”
That sets the stage for the incivility wars, with each side accusing the other of hypocrisy. From Limbaugh:We don’t need lectures from uncivil leftists about civility, much less Obama. . . . the left is always on the march, always accusing, always throwing bombs, and the Republicans just sit there and take it?
And from Krugman:When Ann Coulter expresses regret that Timothy McVeigh didn’t blow up The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal laughs it off as “tongue-in-cheek agitprop.” But when Al Franken writes about lies and lying liars in a funny, but carefully researched book, he’s degrading the discourse.
Both sides do do it, if often in different ways, but the point of these charges is rarely just to remark on the ubiquity of the problem. In fact, these charges and countercharges of incivility represent one of the most effective rhetorical strategies in the assholism of public life. They’re aimed at showing not just that the other side is uncivil, but that its incivility arises out of an inherent character disorder that overrides other considerations—that to be one of those liberals or one of those conservatives, as the case may be, is to be an asshole by nature.
For those purposes, it doesn’t really matter whether the incivility is perpetrated by a political figure or someone who is politically marginal; indeed, if liberalism or conservatism is a mental disorder, then it will produce the same uncivil effect wherever it’s found, and any instance of that behavior becomes an occasion for abusing the entire breed. Some Tea Party protestors on Capitol Hill yell “nigger” at Congressman John Lewis and “faggot” at Barney Frank; the columnist and novelist Ian Spiegelman writes on Gawker: “Did we expect better of these brain-washed wood-dwellers? Most of that subnormal crowd spent better than a month’s salary to get to DC in order to scream down a policy that would benefit them.” The conservative site Breitbart.com posts a video headed “Obama Supporters Call Black Congressional Candidate ‘Uncle Tom,’ N-Word,” which is picked up by several dozen blogs and websites. In the video, the Obama supporters in question turn out to be three tipsy fourteen-year-old African American boys coming out of a concert, but commenters take the occasion to denounce them as “typical liberal trash” and deplore the “hate coming out of the left today.” In an article on “liberal incivility” at the American Conservative Daily, the patron in a West Hollywood bar who curses at Bristol Palin over her mother’s position on gay marriage is described as a “bitter homosexual lib” who “exemplifies the leftist disconnect with civility and who virtually exhales ha-tried.” The only way to draw an ideological lesson from the obnoxiousness of some barroom loudmouth is to embrace a “they’re all assholes” theory of political identities, in which case, in the natural course of things, you’re going to assholize yourself.
The vagueness and open-endedness of incivility makes this game easy to play, by permitting bogus moral equivalences between very disparate offenses. (In that way it’s like the related term “racial insensitivity,” which can accommodate both Michael Richard’s nightclub N-word tirade and Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele’s anodyne utterance of “honest injun.”) Not that there aren’t prototypical examples of political incivility. You think of people shouting down a member of Congress at a town hall meeting, of talking heads berating and interrupting each other on a cable talk show, or of a Wisconsin Democratic assemblyman shouting, “You’re fucking dead!” to a Republican assemblywoman who had just called for a surprise vote. Images like those drive most of the concern about mounting political incivility that shows up in the surveys. But they account for only a fraction of the episodes that figure in the back-and-forth accusations of political incivility, which can include just about any form of behavior that falls short of unconditional deference: describing Sarah Palin as “Caribou Barbie” or imitating her on TV, admitting that one hates George Bush, describing the Republican tax program as idiocy, accusing another Republican candidate of making false statements in a debate, calling bankers fat cats. Yet there’s also nothing here some partisans mightn’t defend as “necessary to a healthy vigorous debate.” How do you distinguish between the incivilities that are good for the democratic process and the ones that corrode it?
People do make valiant efforts to carve out some of the distinctions that “incivility” obscures. The Economist distinguishes between the rhetoric that’s ballistic—that somehow legitimates violence—and the rhetoric that’s merely toxic. There is genuinely menacing rhetoric out there, of course. You don’t have to be a semanticist to discern an overtone of violence when two senatorial candidates speak about “Second Amendment remedies” to America’s problems or when people show up at Tea Party rallies bearing signs that say “Warning: If [Senator Scott] Brown can’t stop it, a Browning can.”
But the “violent rhetoric” for which partisans denounce the other side usually stops well short of inciting people to shoot up city hall. The English language is shot through with idioms and expressions that allude to violence without inciting it, most of which pass without notice unless they’re called to your attention. One of the most disingenuous moves in the incivility wars is to treat these expressions with a specious literalism; politics makes Freudians of us all. After Joe Biden told a group of union members, “You are the only folks keeping barbarians from the gates,” the conservative magazine Human Events described him as having used the occasion to “mock the political opposition in vile terms.” The conservative radio talker Mark Levin asks why David Gregory hasn’t reported the “violent rhetoric” of Democrats, citing Senator Barbara Mikulski’s remark, “This entire debate has included throwing women and children under the bus.” In a piece at Media Matters on right-wing reactions to the passage of the health care bill, Eric Boehlert writes about the response of one blogger:Progressive politicians heed this warning: “Democrats who crammed this unwarranted bill down the throats of the American people who clearly and overwhelmingly opposed it deserve to be drawn and quartered.” That’s right, tortured.
And MSNBC’s Ed Schulz goes after Michele Bachmann for saying that she “wanted Minnesotans armed and dangerous,” when the context made it clear she was talking about getting people to inform themselves about an energy tax. (“I’m going to have materials for people when they leave. I want people armed and dangerous on this issue of the energy tax, because we need to fight back.”)46
The rational response to any of those charges is “Give me a break!” Nobody left, right, or center really believes for a moment that Mikulski was talking about throwing someone under an actual bus, much less urging that it be done, or that that a conservative blogger was literally calling for Democrats to be tortured. It puts you in mind of
second-graders calling each other out to the teacher—“Did you hear what Jimmy said? He said the T-word!”—though the point here is really to stoke a sense of outrage rather than to demand justice. It’s purely for the benefit of partisans, as a demonstration that in these games of asshole and anti-asshole, catching the other side out takes precedence not just over truth but over plausibility. The rhetoric of assholism gives us license not just to pretend to believe whatever we need to, and even to flaunt the fact.
Anyway, even if you do manage to draw the line at rhetoric that actually evokes violent action, you’ll let in much too much of the vilification, venom, and snideness that debases the political process. In the wake of the Arizona shootings, the editors of the New Republic tried to distinguish incivility (acceptable) from indecency (unacceptable), and found fault with both sides: “The sermonizing left is failing to acknowledge that political debate ought to be intense, tempestuous, and even rude,” they said, while “the complacent right . . . is refusing to take any responsibility for rhetoric that goes perilously far into the realm of insult and innuendo.” Like many others, they denounced the “personification” (“personalization” might be the better word) of political differences:Demonize opinions but not the people who hold them. The rhetoric of personification leads inevitably to the rhetoric of personal destruction. So despise the beliefs, but not the believers.
But politics has been personal since the time of the Greeks, and often there’s good reason for it. Do we want to say that Joseph Welch was out of line in asking Senator McCarthy, “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last”? And aren’t there collective attitudes, like racism, that deserve to be addressed in the same way? The true breaches of civility involve what we describe as “getting personal” or “making it personal,” where you disparage someone’s character when other arguments should apply. In fact, “making it personal” could stand pretty well as a definition of political assholism, which is a matter of turning ideological differences into intimate antipathies. But when it comes to cases, it isn’t easy to draw that line, particularly when people are at pains to blur it. When Dick Gephardt said during a 2004 Democratic primary debate that George W. Bush was a “miserable failure,” the former chairman of the Republican National Committee charged him with “political hate speech.” But the challenger who says the incumbent is doing a terrible job isn’t implying he detests him—and even if he were, it wouldn’t merit the moral opprobrium implicit in “hate speech,” which involves hatred of a very different order. Who was really being the asshole here?
There’s no simple algorithm for defining incivility. You can’t get there just by looking at the content of what’s said. That’s partly because of the inherent vagueness of the word, along with others like toxic and indecent. And incivility is particularly easy for people to overextend, unchecked by the homey moral intuitions that guide us in using nasty or rude. Still, we don’t have to pin down the meaning of incivility to answer the more basic question: whatever was said, can you defend it as furthering healthy political discussion?
This much at least is clear: no serious political purpose is ever served by acting like an asshole. Assholism by definition can’t contribute to a “healthy vigorous debate,” since it’s designed to deny that very possibility: its modus operandi is to unite one faction in its contempt for the assholes in the other. You’re acting like an asshole, for example, if you accuse someone of incivility knowing full well that no neutral observer would interpret his behavior that way. Nobody for a moment hears any “violent rhetoric” when Obama says he’s itching for a fight with the Republicans or when Michele Bachmann describes Washington as “enemy lines.” The only purpose of a charge like that is to give your own partisans the enjoyment of imagining the irritation it will engender, all the more because it’s so transparently phony. It’s assholism, too, when you take a bigoted or nasty remark by some random partisan as evidence for the pathological incivility of the other side. (The more inconsequential or marginal the speaker, the greater the implication that “they’re all like that.”) And lists of random examples of “conservative incivility” and “liberal hate” are generally assholism, too. It’s assholism to make a point of Barack Obama’s saying, “I’ve been in fifty-seven states, [with] I think one left to go” or of George W. Bush’s “Is our children learning?” Nobody really thinks Obama has forgotten how many states there are or that Bush doesn’t know the difference between a singular and plural verb. (What kind of idiot would you have to be to dump a company’s stock because the CEO made either of those errors?)
It was assholism for Sarah Palin to charge that Obama was “pallin’ around with terrorists”—assuming that she said it in order to arouse her supporters, rather than to convince them it was true. (Bringing up “death panels” wasn’t assholism; saying something with the intent of deceiving someone is covered by another moral principle of more venerable lineage.) Nazi comparisons are almost always assholism, but not because they actually taint their target with the paragon of absolute evil. They’re usually so patently inapt that only flakes and wingnuts take them literally. When Roger Ailes said that NPR executives were “the left wing of Nazism,” he wasn’t trying to tar NPR as evil in the eyes of the general public or the Congress, but to signal to others on his team that they owed NPR no courtesy or respect and had permission to be assholes about the organization. The multitude of liberals who found it easy to compare Bush to Hitler were playing a similar game. But bogus charges of making Nazi comparisons are assholism, too, as when David Axelrod describes a Romney campaign strategy as a “Mittskrieg” and the Republican Jewish Coalition drops the H-bomb to rebuke him for using “Holocaust imagery.” And while the ubiquitous terrorist comparisons often fall under the Nazi category, it’s pure assholism when James Bowman contends in the New Criterion that Paul Krugman engaged in “extreme and violent rhetoric” in using “hostage situation” and “blackmail” to describe the Republicans’ refusal to raise the debt ceiling in 2011, as if hostage and blackmail had only trickled into the American political vocabulary after 9/11.
The surge of patently phony indignation from all sides—is there anything more telling of the cheapening of public life, of partisans’ willingness to trash their credit as serious people? These aren’t really judgment calls. Assholism isn’t a vague, hard to validate notion like incivility. We know when somebody’s being an asshole, and we can usually recognize it in ourselves, at least after the fact, when we’ve been playing stupid or working our own crowd or stacking the rhetorical deck. We can tell ourselves that we were being assholes in the name of the Lord, but even so.
The items in that list hardly exhaust the forms of political assholism—and they certainly don’t represent all the forms of incivility that are abroad these days—but they underscore assholism’s destructive effects on public discourse, the license it gives to dishonesty and self-delusion. The problem isn’t with the moral logic of assholism itself, but with the way it has bubbled up into the public sphere. In the course of our daily rounds, we’re frequently reminded how useful it is to have the sentence “What an asshole!” available to us, whether or not we utter it aloud. I suppose someone could argue that the existence of the word itself creates a vicious circle of rudeness, and that faced with an asshole’s provocations, we’d be better people if we could resist the temptation to respond in kind. I think of what the Reverend Villars advises his ward in Fanny Burney’s Evelina, as she is about to visit an imperious relation: “The more forcibly you are struck with improprieties and misconduct in another, the greater should be your observance and diligence, to avoid even the shadow of similar errors.” That’s what I’d tell my ward, too, in those circumstances, but it’s hard to see this as a categorical moral requirement. There are times when being an asshole to someone who is being an asshole is not only a right but close to a moral duty, when you’re obliged to say, “Mind your manners, asshole.”
I think Kant would have agreed. Making allowances, he wou
ldn’t have objected to saying, “Mind your manners, asshole!” to someone who treats you disrespectfully. Faced with the “insulting attacks of a contemptuous adversary,” he wrote in The Metaphysics of Morals, you have the right to be derisive in reply, as “a legitimate defense of the respect one can demand from him.” If he fails to respect your dignity as a person, that is, you can repay him by disrespecting his, which is in a nutshell the logic of assholism. But he went on to qualify his remark: But when the object of his mockery is really no object for wit but one in which reason necessarily takes a moral interest, then no matter how much ridicule the adversary may have uttered . . . it is more befitting the dignity of the object and respect for humanity either to put up no defense against the attack or to conduct it with dignity and seriousness.
Or as we might put it, when somebody is being an asshole about a really important matter, then out of respect for the topic alone you ought to refrain from being an asshole back at him and answer instead with the seriousness the question requires. The important business of public life creates an obligation of self-restraint. That doesn’t mean you can’t be indignant, sarcastic, mocking, scorching, or scathing in response, and it certainly doesn’t preclude being entertaining. But you can’t play stupid, deliberately misreading what everybody knows are innocuous remarks. You can’t ridicule the other side for their cultural traits or consumer habits. And most important, you can’t say provocative things to the other side just to titillate your own; that is, just for the pleasure of being an asshole.
To be sure, I can’t really see people in general signing on for this, and I don’t think it would have a perceptibly uplifting effect on the state of public discourse even if they did. As I’ve tried to show, the assholism of public life isn’t an independent phenomenon or a passing phase. It’s an outgrowth of attitudes that first took root some decades ago and that run everywhere through the culture. It isn’t likely to be set right even by the concerted efforts of the foundations, school programs, institutes, conferences, and conclaves, and calls for national conversations aimed at addressing a perceived crisis of civility, though one of course wishes them well. Still, there’s a lot to be said for forbearance in the face of other people’s assholism in public life. For one thing, there isn’t actually much of a cost to it, and it may actually be a winning strategy. The surprising thing about political assholism is that it isn’t really a very effective political tactic over the long run. It’s a good way of creating a loyal media audience and a sense of community among like-minded people. But that isn’t the same thing as building an electoral majority, and in that regard assholism actually works against you. The demands that it makes—the necessity of viewing the people on the other side as assholes, the predilection for provocative rhetoric, the sectarian rigidness—are disconcerting to people who aren’t disposed to think in that way, even if they’re generally sympathetic to your point of view. Then, too, forbearance offers the austere satisfaction of demonstrating true civility, which when you come down to it is basically a matter of abstaining from being an asshole to someone who clearly has it coming. I say “austere,” because in my own experience, I have to say, the pleasure has generally proven more theoretical than visceral. But I can console myself that I have more latitude in everyday life, where no categorical moral principle forbids me from yelling Asshole! at the guy who cuts in front of me in the exit lane. Even Kant would be with me on that one.
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