Sometimes Civility is Overrated (cont.)

It seems that my previous post on this topic was premature. The issues of tone and tactics have come into the news this week with an intensity that Roseanne Barr, whatever her other talents, could not have caused. Two more recent events have come to symbolize the issue. First, a restaurant owner in Virginia asked White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders to leave her establishment, the Red Hen, after her workers expressed discomfort with Sanders' presence. Then, in the midst of an intense reaction to that event, Congresswoman Maxine Waters declared that more people who are party to certain egregious administration policies ought to receive the same treatment.

The reaction has been swift and predictable. Democratic House Leader Nancy Pelosi appeared to rebuke Waters by saying that Trump's "daily lack of civility has provoked responses that are predictable but unacceptable." Senate Leader Chuck Schumer concurred by saying that "harassment" of political figures is "un-American."

CNN's Chris Cillizza and The Washington Post seemed to agree, arguing in strikingly similar opinion pieces that Waters' comments and the Red Hen incident are pushing the envelope beyond appropriate political opposition into a direction that would lead to political violence. It may be understandable that the behavior of the president elicits such responses from the indignant, they say, but countering it in the way Waters suggests erodes the moral distinction between the two sides and promotes instability that cannot, beyond a certain point, be effectively contained.

Civility is presented in all of these arguments as some sort of categorical moral imperative. While it certainly allows the speaker to come off as high-minded and above the fray in the fawning press coverage one gets for saying so, as a tactical policy it is ridiculous. We will be nice no matter how mean you are is certainly a pleasant sentiment, but it is not a path to victory.

The simple fact of the matter is that if we do not treat egregious policy as egregious, we are tacitly accepting it. The methods of opposing an unwise tax cut or  arcane budgetary issue must be fundamentally different from those used to oppose the forced separation of families, indefinite detention of migrants, and the utterly cynical web of lies the administration has purposefully spun around those policies and others like them.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders, since she took over for Sean Spicer as White House Press Secretary, has repeatedly spouted the line of the administration even when it was obviously at variance with widely known facts. She insisted to a room of dozens of people, all of whom knew she was lying, that the president wasn't responsible for the separation policy and had no power to alter it, right up to the moment that the national outcry against the policy forced him to. In the wake of Waters' comments, Sanders claimed that Waters was inciting violence (she wasn't) and even had the temerity to contrast Waters with President Trump, who according to her has never encouraged violence in any capacity (he has).

Sanders may well be "just doing her job," but when that job regularly involves purposefully lying to the public because that is the line the President has taken, choosing to accept and continue in it is craven and degrading. When that job involves disingenuously defending the taking of children from their parents and housing them in prison camps, doing so for access to power, prestige, or a paycheck is contemptible.

People who behave this way are not entitled to the respect of anyone. I certainly don't blame the employees of the Red Hen, many of whom belong to communities adversely affected by administration policies, for being uncomfortable serving someone they regularly see lying through her teeth to defend those policies.

The President has already taken us several steps down a very dark path. He has used words like "invade" and "infest" to describe immigration. After permitting the imprisonment of children taken from their parents,  he has openly denied their fundamental innocence, framing them as complicit in a plot to take advantage of hard working regular (read white) Americans. He has expressed the desire to be able to deport people without giving them any legal recourse. He has associated immigrants in general with aggressive criminality, invoking deep seated racial fears among whites by repeatedly calling attention to them as rapists and gang members.

Responding to all this with calls for everybody to just calm down is asinine. We know what happens to societies that continue to embrace such rhetoric and the actions that follow it. This isn't a case of everybody getting overheated. Making the people in power feel the consequences of indefensible actions is the only rational way to fight back, because they've made it exceedingly clear that power is the only argument they respect.

Hand-wringing about civility and the Effects on the Discourse is built on the fantasy that civil discourse still exists under this administration. It does not. Trump himself responded to Waters by calling her a "very low IQ person" and claiming, falsely, that she was inciting violence - adding as a scarcely concealed threat "be careful what you wish for." Insisting on nicety, unity, and compromise in the face of an administration determined to deny the humanity of a large class of people is dangerously close to enabling it. Firm, loud, and yes sometimes uncivil action is the only effective counterattack.

The War on Immigrants

The government's policy of separating the children of immigrants and asylum seekers from their parents during detention has rocketed into the national discussion this month. While I briefly addressed it when it was announced last month, recent press access to facilities where children have been "housed"- read imprisoned - and the heartbreaking personal stories of parents separated from their children have fueled a moral outcry against the policy.

One thing I have found lacking in the reporting on the new policy is how it is part of a much larger campaign of persecution targeted at immigrants of all kinds. Before the child separation policy, the administration stopped or sharply curtailed the numbers of refugees the country was taking in. Many of those who managed to get here were sent back because of small problems in their paperwork.

Meanwhile, people who had been granted asylum and have been here for years or even decades are finding their protected status  has been revoked for no apparent reason. Hondurans who sought refuge here after a debilitating natural disaster there in 1999 found that this year, after they have spent twenty years building lives here, their protected status will no longer apply and they must find alternative protections or leave. There are 86,000 of them. They are not the only large class of refugees to face this treatment.

Moreover, the administration has increasingly used its authority to deport "criminal aliens" to round up residents who got here and have stayed here using entirely legal means because they committed misdemeanors, some resolved and forgotten years or decades ago. They have families and children here, and they face deportation. There have been multiple reports of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) claiming that legal immigrants are involved in gang activity on flimsy or nonexistent grounds to justify deportations.

Yet the demonization does not end there. The use of public assistance is being very strictly construed by the administration to justify maltreatment of immigrants - again, with all the appropriate paperwork to be here. While immigration law states that a person being a "public charge" is cause for denial of entry or deportation, this administration is choosing to interpret that provision to provide heightened scrutiny to immigrants who use any form of public assistance for any period of time. In some cases, sponsors will receive bills for the cost of the assistance provided.

There are two common threads in each of these examples that I would like to point out. First of all, these measures are all directed against people living here legally. People following the legal process to seek asylum are separated from their children. Green card holders are being deported for petty crimes that wouldn't even earn a (white) teenager an overnight stay in jail. Talk from the administration about wanting to encourage legal immigration is entirely and purposefully misleading. Immigrants without documentation continue to live in constant fear that they or those they know will be targeted by increasing enforcement actions by ICE, and that they will as a result be ripped from their lives to be returned to a place that is no longer their home.

The second commonality I would like to point out is that all of these policy changes have the specific effect of stigmatizing and dehumanizing the individuals involved. The deportation of legal immigrants for petty or victimless crime has nothing to do with enforcing the law and everything to do with associating immigrants with criminality. The same holds for those on public assistance. No serious statistical study has concluded that immigration, legal or otherwise, is a net drain on national resources, but more severe enforcement action is meant to associate immigrants with negative stereotypes about public assistance.

This process is extremely important to understand, because it is how we become numb to moral catastrophes like systematically separating parents from their children, or the worse that I fear is yet to come. The administration protests repeatedly that they are simply enforcing the law, which may in some cases be technically correct, but the point is that they have chosen to enforce it more severely than is necessary on people they don't like. Associating people with criminality is meant to reduce sympathy for them. It is a process with which people of color in this country, particularly black Americans, are all too familiar. I remember watching several hours of media coverage of the discovery that Michael Brown had smoked cannabis, as though that had any relevance to the fact that he was shot half a dozen times while unarmed.

Systematic dehumanization as a policy is, unfortunately, extremely effective. Just today audio was released from one of the detention facilities where migrant children are being - again, there is no other word for it - imprisoned. Over the din of dozens of wailing children, crying for their parents, a guard comments drily "well, we have an orchestra here." This is what associating people with criminality and turning them into threats does. Cracking jokes about the anguish of children who don't know when or if they will see their parents again is revolting. It isn't something that a stable, healthy human being does.

The hostility of the administration toward all kinds of immigrants is open and gratuitous. The administration has and will continue to devise increasingly creative ways to establish a pretext to punish or deport them. It makes every single one of us ridiculous when we dare to utter the words "the land of the free and the home of the brave." The brave are, apparently, so frightened of immigrants seeking to build a life here that we are willing to treat them as unfree. The separation of parents from children is sadistic, and the glee with which it is being defended as legal, moral, even Biblical, is nauseating.

A friend of mine, as he reposted some of the stories of the frightening changes we've seen in the last few years, frequently asked "why aren't we in the streets?" I admit, that question haunts me when I think about terrified crying children by the hundreds supervised by impassive, unmoved guards. Why am I not in the streets? Why aren't all of us? While the roots of this administration's behavior lie in a past many of us still aren't comfortable criticizing, its increasing heavy-handedness and depravity demand action. It isn't enough to make our opinions known. We need to organize aggressively to make our power felt.

Sometimes Civility is Overrated

I have watched in the last two weeks as a bizarre saga unfolded in our national media. Roseanne Barr, known best for an extremely successful and recently-rebooted 90s sitcom as well as her imaginative variety of backward opinions, lost her show after comparing a woman of color - Obama confidant Valerie Jarrett - to an ape. Barr has recently been in the news as her show returned because of her embrace of President Trump, both in character and out. As a result of her firing, right-wing media and commentators have highlighted a number of popular figures who have given edgy assessments of the president and his family, as if doing so is somehow equivalent to overt racism in its odiousness and thus reveals an anti-Trump double standard in entertainment.

Late night comic Samantha Bee stepped directly into that cycle by airing a monologue which referred to the president's daughter Ivanka using a rather strong pejorative term. The media firestorm that ensued was brief, vapid and furnished with wall-to-wall false equivalences, but it was illustrative of a problem that is becoming increasingly acute as the Trump administration progresses.

The problem is the undue veneration of political decorum. Democrats, ironically, are mostly to blame for it. The Democratic Party in general and the Clinton campaign in particular decided to attack Trump on the basis of his unorthodox behavior, seeking to paint him as a threat to normalcy, and thus someone high-minded Republicans, moderate and conservative, should reject. In so doing, they enshrined normalcy, politeness, and standard methods of political operation as goods in and of themselves. That position was out of touch with the state of the country and handed the president a weapon with which he could bludgeon them at his leisure.

I say that the defense of decorum for its own sake is out of touch because decorum is, at bottom, a form of political mutual disarmament. If elites from disagreeing political groups are to continue to interact in good faith, it is necessary to establish certain boundaries to acceptable conduct or the struggle for power will descend inevitably into violence. There is of course nothing at all wrong with such tacit agreements in the abstract.

We do not, however, live in the abstract. At a time when the hostility of the ruling party to its opponents is so utterly open and the slow undermining of the political and economic rights of working people and people of color is so systematic, to focus on the language over the message of opposition seems willfully obtuse. One might as well protest to the captain about poor crowd control on the sinking Titanic.

Rules of political conduct exist to provide stability to a process of changing power dynamics that is itself inherently unstable. But in order for them to be effective all relevant parties have to subscribe to them to some minimum degree. For decades, the Republican Party has shown a continuously decreasing respect for such unwritten rules in its relentless, intelligent, and largely successful bid for power. President Trump would no doubt do away with them entirely if he could, and the party under his control has increasingly adopted his inclination in this regard.

The fact that the Democrats are correct when they point out the president's determined norm-busting makes their commitment to maintaining norms rather than beating Trump all the more bewildering. If the parties involved no longer agree about how to conduct political conflicts, then adhering to unwritten rules is utterly pointless, and amounts to unilateral disarmament.

As things stand, he can and does use three years' worth of Democratic pearl clutching about his impoliteness to deflect sharp criticism and play the persecuted hero. If decency really matters to them, why don't they denounce these people attacking me so harshly?

The Barr-Bee media frenzy is a crisp case in point. Trump allies have taken to the airwaves to wonder why Barr has lost her show and Bee has not. It is patently absurd to compare open racism to a personal insult, but be that as it may Trump supporters see validation and are correspondingly motivated to defend their man.

None of this is to say that politeness and decency are not valuable, or that they don't have an important place in civil society. They do. But we also need to wake up. When the people in power don't really care about those things, trying to kill them with kindness only makes you look weak and hypocritical. Obscene actions deserve obscene responses. It is only when we stop pretending that everything is fine and take the problems in our society seriously that we will be able to confront them effectively.