Civility is the Problem

Last week I had a conversation on Substack.

It was in a thread (not mine) lamenting about the election and the very efficient and focused way the new president and his administration are taking apart our government systems. A lot of people who did not see this coming, and a lot who did, are very, very upset about it. Some are despairing; some are ready to take action but don't know what to do; some have plans.

Some of the plans don't take into account the reality of what is going on.

A particular man in the comments was very sure that what we needed in order to fix our country was for both sides - left and right - to be nicer to each other. The direct quote I responded to was "Building communities and reaching across the partizan divide and treating those we disagree with with respect and dignity, will go a long way to lifting us out of this quagmire."

This is a take that I'm seeing a lot lately in all kinds of media, and it is wrong.

Right now, the problem is not that we are not building communities across the aisle; it's that too many of us are trying to do just that. Right now big-D Democratic elected officials are being entirely too civil in the service of our government norms.

Government norms are all well and good, but right now Republicans are very quickly and efficiently stealing and breaking the government, and the most any Democrat has come up with is a strongly worded tweet from Chuck Schumer last night. And Amy Klobuchar gave an interview to the New York Times that said Americans want her to work with Republicans to build bridges or something. Oh, and I think AOC did a floor speech with a video.

Two weeks ago, Joe Biden met our new felon in chief at the door of the white house by saying "welcome home."

Joe Biden, in case you've been napping for the last 16 to 30 years, is a guy who's been in politics since 1970. He ran a presidential campaign last year mostly based on the idea that Donald J. Trump is a terrible person, a criminal, and a fascist, and he was planning to do a bunch of really terrible things to harm this country and the people who live here.

Donald J. Trump's campaign responded that of course that he was not a fascist, and that it's not fair to call someone a criminal just because they commit crimes, and what is Project 2025 anyway? He won for a lot of reasons like 'Christian Nationalism' and 'high egg prices' and 'tradmom influencers,' along with a great deal of global unrest, some of which seems to have been purposefully caused by Donald J. Trump's political friends in other countries. Historians will probably figure that out later.

Anyhow, we can see from this last week of news that Joe Biden either didn't believe anything he and his campaign said and he doesn't believe that the guy he lost to us a fascist, or that he's not interested in talking about it anymore. Joe Biden is quite old as these things go, so I suppose it's possible that he doesn't remember what his campaign said, but he did take the time to specially pardon his whole family before he left office, so I think he probably just wants to uphold democratic norms.

After 50 years of politics, I would assume that democratic norms are quite comfortable for good old Joe.

In the United States, we have two parties, the Democrats and the Republicans. The Democrats are almost completely devoted to democratic norms. They believe in working with their colleagues in government to make the country work the way it's always worked. They think that it would be nice if everyone was pleasant to each other. They believe in working across party lines. They believe in civility.

The Democrats as a party believe in civility more than they believe in accomplishing things. More than they believe in protecting people. Sometimes even more than they believe in democratic norms.

The Republicans as a party are totally devoted to taking and holding power. They haven't been interested in democratic norms in my lifetime, and they think civility is something that really only applies to other people.

You might know some Republicans personally who don't seem to think that way. If you want to find out how they really think, ask them whether they voted for Trump. When they say yes, ask them what their gay or black or disabled friends think about that.

The guy I talked to on Substack (remember Substack? We started on Substack) was under the impression that the best way to fight what he admitted was probably going to be an "authoritarian oligarchy" was by "Building communities and reaching across the partizan divide and treating those we disagree with with respect and dignity."

Now, that sounds really great. Treating people with respect and dignity sounds amazing. We should all want to be civil, and civic-minded, and fair and dignified.

But (and I mentioned this to my Substack friend) I'm a lesbian. I have a ton of trans people in my family and close friends groups, and most of the people I know are poor.

I wonder what the recommended method for “reaching across the partisan divide” is for someone in my situation.

There's not a lot of common ground between “My people and I would like to be alive and be able to afford food and shelter” and “trans people are illegitimate, women should not be able to vote or access health care, and gays should not be able to marry.”

Substack friend gave me back a long talk about JK Rowling and how it's really liberals who push people to be bigoted, so I don't need to give you any more of his argument. If you want to find it in the thread linked above, feel free.

He's hardly alone in thinking the best thing we can do is be polite to the new regime. One of the basic tenets of American civility, American niceness, is that it's really much worse to call out someone's bigotry than it is to be bigoted.

So to be clear, the plan to win hearts and minds – from my Substack friend and apparently from my government – is for me and my family and friends and tons of others like us to continually engage with people who at best dislike and fear us. And until we win hearts and minds, it's really better if the people we elected to keep us safe to work closely with and be civil to the people in the government who would like to kill us.

I think that converting the people who disagree with us, hate us, or fear us to be nice to us by politely reminding them of the plain fact that we are people is at best a tactic that's not been proven to make changes that benefit anyone who's not already on the top of the ladder and at worst a purposeful and Sisyphean red herring promulgated by the powerful (especially but not exclusively those on the right) to distract the compassionate and the energized and the vulnerable (especially those on the left) from trying to work with the like-minded to force real change.

As long as the goal is civility and the responsibility for keeping everyone civil is placed on the vulnerable, the powerful will be able to ignore or decry any push for societal change according to their preference.

The past 14 days since Donald Trump was inaugurated have been an impressive example of the drive for power. The new administration is working to tear down, tear up, and tear into anything it can reach to try to grab all the power and break the government while it can.

The old administration gave way gracefully.

The new administration is really just "doing what we voted for" even though eggs are $9 a dozen now and nobody voted for putting interns in charge.

But apparently, one thing we did vote for was civility. Or at least that's all we're getting from the Democrats. Which is a problem.

You see, when you're civil in the face of evil, you're just a collaborator.