The Washington Post this morning has a story about how school board members are resigning in parts of the US where they and their families have been targeted by death threats, online abuse, intense mobbing at meetings and so on. This follows on many local public health officials and election officials resigning over the past year. Those who remain have learned to be circumspect about what they say, careful about what they decide or support, and in some cases, have likely gone along with policies or actions they might otherwise have contested or revised.
In the meantime, a member of the House of Representatives, Paul Gosar, posted an edited version of the anime Attack on Titan that puts his face over a character who kills one of the titans of the title and the face of his fellow Congressional representative, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, over the titan being killed.
Anyone studying American political and social history knows that neither of these are unprecedented events. Joanne Freeman’s history The Field of Blood documents both threatened and real violence within Congress in the years leading up to the Civil War. The end of Reconstruction in the South was marked by white mobs actively attacking voters, election precincts, local government boards, and any other source of authority the mobs felt could be intimidated or driven away. Lynch mobs broke into jails, mayor’s offices, and anywhere else they wanted to exert power for much of the first half of the 20th Century.
There’s another history to consider too, more narrowly and more carefully, which is the tactical experiments of non-violent protesters and left-liberal mass movements since the 1950s. Starting from a position of severe structural disadvantage, representing people excluded from voting, oppressed by law or unprotected by it, targeted by public policy, subject to systematic bias throughout their economic lives, exposed to both public and private violence, movements seeking equity and justice have had to think about ways to leverage their assets. They had a large group of people on their side: the many people looking for a better deal and the many people who believe in equity and justice even if they’re benefitting from inequity and injustice. They had some of the potential embedded inside the legal framework of a constitutional republic founded with the aspiration for “liberty and justice for all”. They had something of the possibility of a moral awakening among people with religious, spiritual or philosophical traditions that might call them to the pursuit of justice—or might shame them for their failure to pursue it.
In that mix, one of the most complicated objects to consider is what lies under the banner of “civility”, both formal procedural codes and rules that make some statements and actions out of order in governance or deliberation and informal norms and expectations. Activists on the left all the way back to the 1950s have been only too aware that calls to civility are a weapon that can and has been used against social reform, against the struggle for equity and justice. A judge’s authority over civility and procedure in a courtroom can protect the weak and shelter fragile truths that a mob might otherwise destroy. But a judge can also be an arbitrary and authoritarian figure, or simply a cruelly incompetent one, siding with tyranny and lies. The powerful can hide behind walls of false civility, and as sovereigns often do, exempt themselves and only themselves from its constraints. The guilty can use procedural rules to hide what they’ve done and put their accusers on trial instead. The power to set agendas and convene meetings is often as much as way to pre-define some ideas and proposals as illegitimate before there is any deliberation as it is a way to admit into conversation the will of some substantial faction of people in a community. Who gets called out for being rude and who gets feted for being an honest truth-teller is frequently a matter of perspective—or is determined by who is powerful and who is not.
That said, it’s worth considering whether some version of civility is an asset worth strengthening and reshaping—and thus taking seriously as an idea rather than viewing in purely instrumental or tactical terms. To return to thinking about the tactical history of the last seventy years or so, what’s been striking since the mid-1990s is the quite conscious, deliberate and programmatic appropriation and then dramatic intensification of left-liberal movement tactics by the American right. Arguably that mirroring has deeper roots still: it is where caricatured figures like Dinesh D’Souza came from originally, it is the kind of stunt politics that figures like William F. Buckley delighted in as an answer to the counter-culture. Nominate Pigasus for President? Fine, we will pay for William Shockley to talk about eugenics. Find where the left had breached some norms, and brutally up the ante further, with vastly more money and the support of systems of power behind that escalation. Find where new procedures or tactics intended to create equity had been instituted and exploit them.
At the least, you could argue that progressive movements have in a peculiar way served almost as an accidental think-tank for movements on the right, testing moral tropes and tactical approaches. Show up outside the house of a reactionary figure? Sounds like a plan! Focus attention on a film, a celebrity, etc. because of their racist, sexist, etc. remarks or content? Cite evidence from sources that reject mainstream biomedicine or other dominant epistemic frameworks? We can do that too! (That’s an explicit point of bridging, in fact: a lot of alternative medicine that has countercultural roots has grown into anti-vaxx or anti-mask ideology.) Whatever the right thought it (inaccurately) saw in “postmodernism” it decided to adopt, exaggerate and intensify.
To some extent, those tactics have been especially appealing on the right because they have smaller numbers and are less diverse or heterogenous in their networks. They can’t flood the streets of American cities with genuinely huge crowds, but they’re just as capable of finding a hundred people to scream invective at a school board or a thousand people to picket movie theaters about The Last Temptation of Christ. They can’t really threaten most mass-market consumer producers with a meaningful boycott, but they’re just as capable of finding lawyers (albeit often incompetent Brand X graduates of Liberty University and so on) who will file motions and create legal nuisances that many large corporations and organizations will want to avoid. They can’t really mobilize enough people in most mainstream organizations or companies to threaten the legitimacy of leadership, but they can make a professor or a pastor or a school board member afraid for their life or weary from constant online abuse. Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman may have understood how to get the media’s attention with clever stunts, but it’s the rightward extremes of American life that have understood how to leverage the digital public sphere for endless amounts of attention—and they’ve had a masterclass in doing that even better since 2015.
The tactics of some progressives have been about leveraging small numbers because of the tendency of progressive politics to represent a relatively wide diversity of interests, issues, and philosophical perspectives, so that in some cases, particular groups or worldviews are trying to exert as much influence as possible from a relatively small numerical base. At its most extreme, that’s the kind of thing that Spartacists and other small party fractions and movements cut their eyeteeth on throughout the history of the modern left: you show up as uninvited guests at big-tent coalitions and you do your best to grab center stage when nobody’s looking, or at the least to burn the tent down so that next time you’ll get some respect (or fear) in advance.
The problem is that when the far right imitates these tactics and runs roughshod over all kinds of civility—both speech norms and procedural rules—progressives are in something of a bind, not the least because they actually tend to believe in fairness, honesty, evidence, equity, and democracy. (It’s a lot easier to trample those norms and procedures if you don’t believe in them propositionally at all, which is what most of the American right has come to recognize about itself.)
Trying to sharply lock in stronger procedural protections—and consequences for breaching them—closes the door to future progressive challenges to whatever decision-making body or leadership is being protected.
Reinscribing some norms requires some hard thought about exactly what the foundational moral or ethical underpinnings of those norms ought to be and then trying to stick hard to those. Americans on the left have never really abandoned or forgotten those underpinnings, no matter how skeptical they might be about certain kinds of appeals to “civility”, for good reason. The American right has no problem whatsoever screaming at progressives about breaching norms that the right could care less about: concern trolling is their speciality. They’re glad to see someone like Al Franken resign but have no intention of bringing that pressure to bear within their own party or movement. Norms of civility don’t protect people from the right, for the most part: they are for “sea lions” , for example, the kind of people who want to found a new university because of illiberal intolerance for diversity of viewpoints and who want to build their faculty and advisory board from a narrow band of scholars and artists who are intolerant of any views besides their own.
But it seems important to strengthen some normative propositions: threatening people with death or rape simply for saying something in public or for advocating a particular policy as a part of their public duties not only is something that should never be permissible, it’s something that should lead to consequences for the person doing the threatening. It seems important to say: one Congressional representative should never get anywhere near threatening another, whatever their political disagreements. It seems important to hold onto rules for deliberations that provide ironclad protections for elected and appointed officials.
And maybe it’s time to think twice about some tactics accordingly. For example, going to someone’s house to protest, no matter how untouchably powerful that person might be, because no matter how careful you are, it can’t help but feel like a threat not just to that individual but to anyone else in that individual’s home. Or deliberately and programmatically lying about an opponent—I still really flinch at the memory of a student at my own institution consciously lying about a proposed speaker and defending it as justified because the speaker was objectionable for some other less hot-button reason in the student’s view.
There are meanings—both possible and existing—of civility that are assets in the pursuit of a better world, both tactically and ethically. If we can’t find a way to defend public servants doing what they ought to do from threats and menace at this moment, if we can’t hold certain kinds of lines, then what comes next will be even worse than the situation we’re in now. We shouldn’t observe norms of civility in a stupid way, or in a way that just hands concern trolls and sea lions a tool to endlessly distract us with, but we should remember what lies underneath most of those norms and hold on to what matters in those foundations.
Image: Lee County Special School Board Meeting, August 30, 2021.