Posted on 06/29/2018 2:57:13 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
The left-leaning commentariat didn't hesitate to backstop the restaurant owner who asked White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders to leave her establishment on Friday.
The issue is democracy, not civility, New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg wrote. Civility has only marginal value in the current political moment, Tom Scocca argued in The Washington Post.
When Trump supporters say they care about civility, they don't really mean it, Vox's Matt Yglesias suggested. Liberals are in fighting trim, and they're spoiling for a showdown with the president's minions.
But that's a bad strategy. Abandoning civility and escalating the outrage cycle -- running Cabinet secretaries out of D.C. eateries and members of Congress calling for public confrontation of administration officials -- isn't going to work for Democrats.
Rather, a world in which President Donald Trump has managed to identify civility with weakness and nuance with fecklessness is tailor-made for his most dedicated supporters and his enablers in the GOP. Rhetorical excess -- describing the press as an "enemy of the American people," bluntly warning Harley-Davidson that it will be "taxed like never before!" and calling senators, even in his own party, names like "Liddle' Bob Corker" -- is the president's preferred game. If Democrats try to play their own version of it, that will only rebound to the benefit of Trump and the Republican Party.
To note this is to invite the inevitable argument about who started it: Liberals point, with some justification, to former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich and the aggressive methods he used to demonize opponents. Conservatives, with similar justification, will argue that Gingrich was a byproduct of a nasty cycle of political tit-for-tat that started with a Democratic Senate voting down Ronald Reagan's Supreme Court nominee, Judge Robert Bork, in 1987. Liberals will respond that Bork did Richard Nixon's bidding during the infamous 1973 "Saturday Night Massacre," and so on, until we all plow backward through a history of political vitriol in search of the author of our Original Sin of incivility.
This is a mostly pointless exercise, not least since so many Americans are either too young or too politically disengaged to know much about our history of political infighting before the early 21st century. In the high-speed Twitter age, the Bork battle is as distant a memory as the Teapot Dome scandal. The problem right now is that Trump and his followers are setting up a fight that Democrats and other anti-Trump partisans can't win.
Superheating the debate -- "triggering the libs" in the gleeful parlance of Trump adviser Stephen Miller -- really works only in one direction in American politics, and for some fairly obvious reasons.
For one, the dominance of liberal themes and personalities in popular culture has allowed the Republican base to continue thinking of itself as an embattled minority, even as they've captured most political offices in the country. They remain primed to fight the nebulous "establishment," even though the party they voted for controls the White House and both houses of Congress. GOP leaders and conservative media manipulate these voters by stoking a narrative of grievance and victimhood among them, even if, by any reasonable measure, their party is the establishment. This constant state of perceived injury and deprivation requires regular injections of panic and anger, which the conservative outlets who serve Trump are happy to provide.
Worse, the most faithful Trump supporters have been rendered almost incapable of rational thought about complicated issues. If you think that's overstatement, watch Fox News's prime-time lineup, which is clearly designed to leave viewers less informed, not more informed, by the end of each evening. As longtime, former Fox News commentator Ralph Peters lamented after departing the network, Fox "preaches paranoia, attacking processes and institutions vital to our republic and challenging the rule of law." They prefer shouting and sloganeering because it short-circuits the cognitive dissonance that would bring most people to their senses.
To see this in action, watch Trump surrogates on other network news programs. Their goal is not to argue in favor of Trump's policies. It is to suck the oxygen out of every segment, drown out every other panelist and repeat mindless talking points so that viewers hear only the chant of grievance and never get around to absorbing any meaningful dissection of the subject at hand. Normal human beings find this annoying and exasperating -- that's why the Trump surrogates do it. It drags their counterparts into an aimless shouting match, or frustrates them into silence and disengagement.
No version of this approach -- neither shout-downs nor shunnings -- will work for Democrats, because while conservatives want to limit government action, liberals want to expand the role of government, and by default, obstruction is easier than legislation.
More vexing for liberals (and for a fair number of conservatives) is that Trump supporters don't really care about policy because the president doesn't, either. On any given matter, they'll change their minds at the drop of a hat, and debating them is like flailing in a quicksand of incoherence. That's why there's no way for liberals to match Trump's defenders in tone or style: When someone is filling the air with a fusillade of monotonous denials and often outright lies, there is no equivalent way to respond. You cannot shame Sanders out of her outlandish tendency to gaslight, because that's exactly what she's there to do.
As we saw in 2016, opponents, from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Republican Sens. Marco Rubio of Florida and Ted Cruz of Texas, just weren't equipped for Trump's sustained psychological warfare. He trashes everything thrown at him as irrelevant or boring, then punctuates it with an insult du jour. Debating him is like arguing with an air-raid siren. If Democrats now try to stoop to that level, rhetorically tar-and-feathering Trump's staff wherever they pop up in Washington, it will backfire for one simple reason: No one is as committed to incivility as Trump, and no one enjoys these antics more than his base.
As a matter of political strategy, it's important to bear in mind that the GOP won the last presidential election by generating raw anger to mine every last angry white vote they could find. Whenever they move into more extreme territory, they're not risking very much; rather, they're trying to squeeze just a few more drops from that very sour lemon.
But anger is not a universal antidote for election problems. Democrats, by contrast, do best by convincing their fellow Americans that they are not, in fact, rabid totalitarians. (And do not, for a moment, think that this is not an image with some power; it is a concern I feel keenly as a #NeverTrump conservative who deeply distrusts the far left wing of the Democratic Party.) When Democrats call for haranguing public servants, as California Rep. Maxine Waters did this week, they give power to the argument that both sides, given the chance, would be equally oppressive. It should be no surprise that Trump has already fundraised off the Sanders incident, emphasizing, in particular Waters's tirade. GOP strategists know good video when they see it.
What, then, to do? As Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin noted recently, "there is a vast gray area between chasing Trump aides down the street with pitchforks and pretending as though nothing they have done in public life warrants scorn." She doesn't think politely asking Sanders to leave the Red Hen was out of bounds. Maybe, maybe not. But it drags Democrats into a brawl they have no chance of winning.
A better approach would be demanding that the media stop giving voice to Trump defenders who exist in the public sphere only to be Trump defenders. No outlet should forego an opportunity to interview a White House official like Kellyanne Conway, no matter how tedious she is, because she is, in fact, a senior member of the government that serves the president. But do we ever need to see talking heads such as Paris Dennard or Ben Ferguson on television again? Is there no point at which we can say that people who argue in bad faith are not welcome in the studio or in our living rooms?
Likewise, we need not shout at our neighbors who supported Trump, but we can refuse to engage with them about politics if they are clearly not interested in anything but venting. Too many Trump supporters, in public as well as in private, are interested only in trying to draw a foul, to bait the other person into descending into the murk. A polite refusal speaks more than shouting in their face.
Shame can work, but only when paired with an insistence on virtue. This, to take one example, is how Judge Roy Moore was defeated in heavily Trump-supporting Alabama.
But ratcheting up the stakes, including efforts to drum Trump's most visible lieutenants out of polite society, will only convince his base that they are, in fact, besieged by liberals and that only Trump can protect them. That's how Trump's enablers will keep drawing us into a vortex that suffocates our moral sense, and why the real political courage and steadfastness -- the real "resistance" -- is to refuse to drink with them from that poisoned chalice, no matter how tempting the offer.
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Tom Nichols is a professor at the Naval War College and the Harvard Extension School, and the author of “The Death of Expertise.” He wrote this for the Washington Post.
For decades now, “civility” in politics meant nothing more than for the right to surrender fully and completely to every whim and want of the left.
When denied any whim or want, the left immediately resorts to disruption and violence. Civility only applies to the right.
The days of moral cowards demanding we always lose “with honor and dignity” and such is over.
Meet force with greater force. That’s how wars are won. We are in a war.
Well said.
what? So this guy is on our side?
I kind of like this. He’s saying the equivalent of “We’re above all that” to dems. That’s got to set their teeth grinding.
“President Donald Trump has managed to identify civility with weakness and nuance with fecklessness”
Correction: he exposes weakness hiding behind the skirts of civility, and rejects fecklessness masked in nuance.
Points for referring to him as “President Donald Trump”.
For those who have forgotten, the damage from losing Bork was severe. Swing-vote Justice Anthony Kennedy ended up taking that seat!
I don't know what planet this guy is from, but in my world the only unhinged people are libs. We Trump supporters just want to be left alone, and prefer to do our talking in the voting booth.
They already have abandoned any pretense of having civility.
Has this Nichols guy ever been beat up by Democrat union thugs? Does he remember future Democrats setting off bombs all over the US in the 70’s? Is he really endorsing the Clinton/Obama federal crime wave of the last 2 decades?
” Trump’s enablers”
I think not
This guy teaches at Naval War College?
Wonder if he ever served
Sorry, sunshine, but you can't hide, or lie, about who you are anymore.
The democrats abandoned civility long ago Now they have become violent and it is their violence against the civil order that is backfiring.
Nope
No military time
Strictly an armchair strategist
http://tomnichols.net/blog/about-tom/
Likewise, we need not shout at our neighbors who supported Trump, but we can refuse to engage with them about politics if they are clearly not interested in anything but venting. Too many Trump supporters, in public as well as in private, are interested only in trying to draw a foul, to bait the other person into descending into the murk. A polite refusal speaks more than shouting in their face.
I think most Trump supporters only want to get up and let America work the way it was designed. I think they expect and trust that will happen. I think the left is the one pushing the envelope on politics, as they always have. Little Miss Red Hen was the one who engaged politics with Sarah Sanders and Miss Sanders was the one who politely refused. However, that was not good enough as Little Miss Red Hen further engaged Sarah’s relative’s at the next restaurant. All the Left and the Swamp had to say was, “ Good on you Trump, we will be ready for the next election.” Instead they have tried every low ball maneuver since 2015 to make an example of anyone who is not them to never try this again. It is only for us elites. Now it is too late for them to disengage and get back to civility. They couldn’t if they wanted to.
There is no confusion about how this started. Alinsky and his radical acolytes, like one HRC, Sidvicious, Podesta and that ilk
Mr. Nichols.
Stop trying to help them. Leave them alone, I like them better this way.
This self-avowed Nevertrumper is an idiot ignoramous apologist for the deep state. He is an example of the nuanced fecklessness that got us messes such as NK. Some problems aren’t complex. They are just tough.
Aw heck...it's easier than this entire column to sum up. Democrats aren't used to anyone fighting back when they relentlessly attack.
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