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.