THE DECLINE IN CIVILITY THREATENS AMERICAN DEMOCRACY
BY
ALLAN C. BROWNFELD
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A recent “Civility in America” survey found that 75% of Americans thought that incivility had reached crisis levels, and 56% expected it to increase. Members of the Supreme Court in 2011 described civil discourse as “robust, honest, frank and constructive dialogue and deliberation that seeks to advance the public interest.” In civil discourse, arguments are grounded in reason and evidence, adhering to stringent guidelines for the appropriate behavior to be practiced. In contrast, uncivil discourse contains direct insults, unwarranted attributions of motive, and open contempt.
One of the most influential works on civil discourse comes from John Stuart Mill in his 1859 essay “On Liberty.” He wrote: “If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.” ; Mill introduced the concept of “the marketplace of ideas” which suggests that free and open debate allows for the best ideas to be used while discrediting harmful ideas. He believed that discrediting viewpoints stifles moral progress.
The Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanity at Bard College argues that, “Civility does not mean niceness. Civility derives from the Latin cives meaning the city or public place; it means the practice of civility is the practice of being a citizen. Someone is civil who exists not only as a private person but also as a public person with rights in the world. The importance of civility is not that it upholds morals or a culture of order. Rather, civility is a political virtue that upholds the political ideal that amidst our differences and plurality, we can still engage with each other as citizens of a common world. Roman politics was a blood sport,but it was always civil in that it was a contest over the republic, the public thing. To enter politics takes courage, the courage to risk oneself in public, which is why Hannah Arendt called courage the first virtue of politics.
Sadly, we could fill pages of examples of uncivil discourse in today’s political arena. Consider former President Donald Trump, during a speech in Fort Dodge, Iowa, calling one Republican rival a “son of a bitch,” referred to another as “birdbrain,” and referred to Rep.Adam Schiff (D-CA) as “pencil neck” before asking, “How does he hold up that fat, ugly face?” In another appearance in Iowa, Trump referred to his political adversaries as “vermin.” He called one of his Republican opponents, Nikki Haley “birdbrain.”
Increasingly, rhetoric of this kind is being challenged. But social media eagerly spreads the insulting language which increasingly characterized too much of our political life. One critic is the Republican Governor of Utah,Spencer Cox, the new chair of the National Governors Association. The focus he has chosen for the organization’s coming year is “Disagree Better.”
In the view of Gov.Cox, the most serious impediment to confronting the real problems we face is the hostile and insulting rhetoric that inhibit those with opposing viewpoints from producing real results. He states that, “Our country is deeply divided. We are facing a toxic debate unlike anything that we’ve seen since the Civil War…I think many of us believe that this division can’t continue and that we have to find a way to disagree better.”
Cox has rejected negative advertising in his campaigns. When he ran for governor, he said he would not attack his opponents directly: “We would attack their ideas and their record, but not their personality or their person…I just believe that at our core that Americans are good people and they want to see the good in others, and we have to order an alternative.”
A phrase once commonly heard in Washington—-and elsewhere—-was that we should be able to disagree without being disagreeable. I worked in both the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives for a number of years. Democrats and Republicans did not view one another as enemies. They worked together and formed coalitions. Working together, they won the Cold War and advanced civil rights.
In one position, I worked as assistant to the research director of the House Republican Conference. On our steering committee were two members of Congress who went on to become president,Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush. I don’t remember them speaking ill of Democrats. Their goal was to convince at least some Democrats to support legislation they were proposing, which they believed was good for the country. In another position, I worked with a Democrat, Sen. Thomas Dodd of Connecticut. This was during the Vietnam War. Sen.Dodd, who had been a prosecutor at the Nuremburg trials of Nazi war criminals, was a strong opponent of Communism and worked closely with Republicans in support of defeating Communism in Vietnam.
During the Vietnam War, I traveled around the country debating critics of the war. One of these was Prof. Howard Zinn, the radical historian. In our debate at Babson College in Boston, he actually denied that the Viet Cong were Communists. Most of those with whom I debated were honest opponents of the war. (In retrospect,I now agree with many of the points they made). After many heated debates—-in which there was never an insult of any kind on either side— we would often go out for a drink and continue the discussion. We did not view one another as “enemies,” although we sharply disagreed.
American politics has worked because our political adversaries did not view one another as “enemies” because they disagreed on policy questions. The idea of ,compromise” was not anathema, but a regular political practice. Remember the friendship of Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill. Let us try to return to an era when American politics worked——something it does not do now.
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