Civility

Lanny Davis, who you may recall from his brilliant work with the Clinton campaign in 2008, has come out with a "Civility Pledge" that he would really like everyone to sign. While I couldn't give a shit about Lanny Davis, who is so far removed from relevancy at the moment that this is the first I've heard about him this year, I do think the very idea of a civility pledge demonstrates one of the most frustrating and confusing aspects of American political discourse that I'm aware of.

The topic was admirably and thoroughly laid out here a few years back, which you should all read, but if the purple prose turns you off the summary is simple: in all sorts of discussions on all sorts of topics political, there is an element that attacks incivility on a verbal level while ignoring immorality on a much more concrete level. There are a number of reasons for it, the biggest in my mind is that because we are evolved to respond negatively to hostile social cues, it's easy to attack or delegitimize someone because they're talking shit. There's also a DC social element to all this. A lot of the people who run and cover Washington for a living know each other, spend time with each other, and for personal and professional reasons don't want to offend or be affiliated with an offense, so they strive to keep everything "civil". When protesters said mean things about Bush, they may have been right, but they weren't being civil, and so still to this day the anti-war voices of 2002-2003 are looked at like kooks, as this Politico article on right-wing antics aptly points out:

Nor are Democrats strangers to having their crazy uncles take center stage. During the run-up to the Iraq war, for example, Reps. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.), Mike Thompson (D-Calif.) and David Bonior (D-Mich.) famously flew to Baghdad, where McDermott asserted that he believed the president would “mislead the American public” to justify the war. The trip made it a cakewalk for critics to describe the Democratic Party as chockablock with traitorous radicals.

Of course, that was an entirely accurate prediction on McDermott's part, but who cares? He was being uncivil.

Now, I fully understand that uncivil speech can, especially towards the extremes, lead to uncivil actions, and those actions are precisely not the goal of this argument. I'm not saying that violent or excessively hyperbolic speech should be given equal weighting with calmer and cooler prose. My problem here is just that accusations of rudeness are very effective tools at marginalizing unpleasant facts in American political debate. Bush was and still is as far as I know an asshole, and saying that about him shouldn't disqualify other points I'm trying to make. And it runs both ways. I think Joe Wilson's a southern-fried idiot and all but I was much more interested in genuine dissections of the wrongness of his statement than the wrongness of the way he stated it. This civility pledge nonsense and the larger losing-the-monocle act of the last few weeks is all reminiscent of asking someone to wear a frilly glove while they're slapping you.