Steele is nothing but the repugs’ token “Niger-ian” and they think they’re fooling the people with their phony pc bs! Libtard’s philosophy—Quick, get as many people on the dole and dependent on the Federal Porkulus as we can, so they’ll need us for their daily fix. Then we can ignore the neanderthals who pay for it all and make them pay even more.
It’s hard to know who these people are, which needless to say is exactly what they’re counting on. Some of them are quite well informed; others are factually, not to mention orthographically, challenged.42 But the very fact of their participation suggests that their sense of political identity is touched with assholism; left and right, they’re among the people who take the “Offend a ” T-shirt slogans to heart.
It’s important that these people think of their adversaries specifically as assholes. That’s what gives the modern rhetoric of polarization its singular stamp and makes it different from the execrations of other ages. Seeing our antagonists as assholes means, for one thing, that the enmity is personal. But the attacks on Lincoln and FDR were personal, too; this is more specific. To regard somebody as an asshole is to diminish him—the metaphor itself contributes part of that—and to reduce him to an object of contempt rather than fear. It suggests familiarity, as contempt often does; it implies that you’ve seen under his skin to discern his inauthenticity, his self-delusion, his bogus entitlement, and in particular his pathetic unhappiness. It’s striking how important it is to both liberals and conservatives to see the other side as miserable and as envious of the happiness of others. Hence the T-shirt slogans “Annoy a Liberal—Work Hard and Be Happy” and “Annoy a Conservative. Think Hard. Do Good. Be Happy.” Unhappiness is the price of dishonesty and self-delusion, which are the hallmarks of the asshole. As one conservative puts it, “If you spend your life seething over a litany of grievances you’ve created from scratch in your own head, then you’re probably going to be an Eeyore instead of floating on Cloud 9.” And it implies by opposition that you yourself are happy, fulfilled, and authentic. To be sure, it isn’t usually made clear why one’s personal happiness should bear one way or the other on the correctness of one’s views on immigration or marginal tax rates. (Imagine appealing to a similar logic to demonstrate the truth of Christian Science—“they’re happier, aren’t they?”) But at this level ideologies are validated by one’s character: you’re wrong because you’re assholes, we’re right because we’re not.43
The great advantage of seeing the other guy as an asshole, in symbolic politics or in real life, is that you have permission to be an asshole yourself; you’re not bound by the ordinary courtesies and rules. Sometimes you can make the point simply by gesturing at that principle. You can array all the moves of assholism on a scale from snippy to snarky to shitty, depending on what’s said and by whom. As adolescent T-shirt slogans go, “I’d Rather Be Waterboarding” isn’t that high on the offensiveness list, whereas it’s more unsettling to hear congressmen at a hearing on the Geneva Conventions making wisecracks about hypothermia and sleep deprivation (“There is not an American mom that is guaranteed eight hours of sleep every night!”). You’re not an asshole just for defending the use of waterboarding or even torture, but you may be if you try to turn the controversy into a question of wimpiness rather than morality. That’s what makes assholism different from other kinds of personal attacks: you can’t assholize the other without in some way assholizing yourself.
Assholism Coordinated
Left and right may sound the same in the comments threads of blogs and news stories, but it’s only on the right that that same rhetoric is preserved across a range of media and spheres. What people wear on their T-shirts, see on cable news and on the Internet, and watch in congressional debates are threads of the same extended conversation. That testifies to the success of the partisan media like Fox and the talk radio shows and to the right’s skill at coordinating the old and new media, the political establishment, and think tanks. As Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williams note in The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism: [Fox News] fills only one niche in the ecosystem. Many outlets feed off one another, echoing the same messages day after day. American conservatives have a powerful capacity to cycle messages between national and local sources . . . Ideas and news stories often pop up on conservative talk radio or on influential websites such as the Drudge Report or Andrew Breitbart’s site before getting picked up by conservative newspapers and television . . . Once a story is up and running, hosts on local conservative radio talk shows play a pivotal role in keeping discussions going.
The focus and interconnectedness of that ecosystem is very clear on Twitter, where statistical analyses have shown that conservatives are more densely connected, retweet each other much more frequently, and stick to a narrower range of topics than those on the left do. And the uniformity across media isn’t just a matter of content but of tone and attitude. Wherever you find them, conservatives are talking about the same stories in the same way. You encounter the same themes and the same language in conservative blogs and tweets, from callers to conservative radio programs, from the commentators and politicians on Fox News. Take a sentence from any one of those settings out of context and it can be hard to tell which of them it came from.
That integration couldn’t have taken place without the advent of new media that have filled the space between the public and the private with a host of intermediate levels. The blogs and their comments, the social media, the tweets, the YouTube videos that people post—do they belong to private or public life? Neither, really; most of them inhabit an intermediate space that you could think of as “in public”—not common points of reference that everyone can presume as background but still out there for anybody to see and link to (and if enough people do, the places may become public themselves). What emerges is a single manner of talking about the political that threads its way through all of these settings and media. And unlike the political discourse of John Dewey’s time, it can percolate up as much as it flows down.
But on the left the conversations tend to be distinct and separate. Each variety of liberals and progressives has its characteristic voice and rhetoric and doesn’t give that much evidence of coordinating with the others—not surprising from a sector that can’t even agree on a single name for itself. You can pick out strains of political assholism here, but only in the plural. There’s what E.J. Dionne calls the aesthetic radicalism of the academic left, whose doctrinal purity precludes direct engagement with either politics or the English language. There’s the sanctimoniousness of the Pacifica Radio progressives that I feel descending on me whenever I cross the Bay Bridge to Berkeley. There’s the condescending wonkery of the think-tank progressives, the preciosity of the Portlandia vegan hipsters, and the dogged parochialism of the multiculturalists, which Todd Gitlin summed up in the title of a chapter of The Twilight of Common Dreams: “Marching on the English Department While the Right Took the White House.” There’s the fastidious evenhandedness of the So-Called-Liberal-Media, in Eric Alterman’s phrase. NPR would not be referring to American waterboarding of suspected terrorists as torture, their ombudsperson explained, “to avoid taking sides and using loaded language in a contentious debate,” though she conceded that they might permit the use of the T-word if Americans were being waterboarded by Iranians.
Some of this is true political assholism and some of it is just being an asshole tout court, the difference being that it’s only the former if it’s aimed at reinforcing the political identity of a group. But a lot of it is marginal to the mainstream discourse.44 And the rest is too fragmented, too dissonant, or too tepid to make for a single voice. There are conservative politicians, like Gingrich, who sound exactly like Rush Limbaugh, but it’s hard to find liberal politicians who sound like Bill Maher, if only because it’s hard to find politicians who will own up to the L-word in the first place. And even if you’re one of the many people who are convinced that NPR is merely a surreptitiously left-wing counterpart
of Fox News, you’re not going to confuse the voice of All Things Considered with Democracy Now!, even in the dark.
That may be one reason why the currents of political assholism seem to run much deeper on the right than on the left. If assholism is a way of staking out a political identity, then it’s going to be more prominent where that identity is stronger and more integrated. But it’s also linked to the way conservatives and liberals understand the object of politics. When people are asked whether it’s more important for a politician to compromise to get things done or to stand firm in support of principles, liberals opt by around two to one for compromise, whereas conservatives choose standing firm by as much as five to one. (Conservatives, too, are overwhelmingly more likely to say that it’s more important for politicians to do what is popular with the voters in their district than to do what they think is best for the nation, which reflects a premium on team loyalty.) You can describe the right’s position either as one of intransigence or resoluteness, but one way or the other it has been a dominant story in national politics in recent years. It’s an attitude with sectarian overtones, with its stress on Manichean divisions, a totalizing worldview, and an insistence on purity. It takes the modern right far from a traditional conservatism, where compromise and barter were seen as “the foundation of all government, indeed every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue, and every prudent act,” as Burke put it. But it isn’t essentially a political position; or rather it suggests a different picture of the nature of politics itself, as a theater of confrontation, a part of the larger spectacle of public assholism. Although you can find strains of that on the left, the genre belongs to the right. It’s a spectacle in which the representatives of the other side can only be ridiculed and humiliated, not reasoned with. That’s probably why almost all of the most successful rightwing talkers and commentators are belligerent, bullying, or overbearing. O’Reilly, Hannity, Limbaugh, Lou Dobbs, Mark Levin, Glenn Beck, and Michael Savage; they’re all very good at what they do, but they’re none of them people whom even their most devoted fans would welcome having as brothers-in-law. Meanwhile, conservatives like Dennis Miller and Tucker Carlson, who are more amiable and funnier than O’Reilly et al., have had their programs cancelled for lack of viewership.45
The 2011–2012 Republican primary campaign was the first time that the electoral politics of the right was fully absorbed into that spectacle. Some were calling it the Fox News primaries, not just because so many of the potential candidates had been on Fox payroll at one time or another, but because almost half of Republican voters said they got most of their information from the channel, which was also the venue where the candidates were obliged to appear to make their case. (Appearing on Fox & Friends, Dick Morris said, “You don’t win it in Iowa, you win it on this couch.”) In fact a lot of voters seemed to be interpreting the whole process as a Fox presentation. Conservatives may have had both ideological and personal reasons for their distrust of Romney, but they also found him wanting in the kind of moxie that the spectacle seemed to demand: “He’s too nice a guy. He’s too soft,” said Bill Lonardo, a retired jewelry company owner who attended an establishment GOP dinner Friday in Nashua. He prefers Gingrich, for the former House speaker’s edgier personality. “Abrasive! That’s what we need.”
What the base really seemed to be looking for was a candidate who was willing to be an asshole, someone who would go after Barack Obama, Democrats, and the media with unsparing bile. So long as a candidate did that with reckless intensity, voters were willing to overlook his other shortcomings, like Cain’s lack of experience and Gingrich’s surfeit of the wrong kind.
So Republican voters dallied with one implausible candidate after another, in search of a pit-bull champion. For a brief moment early in the campaign, they were even willing to embrace the arch-asshole Trump, not because they thought he had the right temperament, views, or values, but only because he seemed like someone who would take it to Obama relentlessly (“so fearless and does not give a damn about what people think or the names that people will call him,” as one supporter wrote). Taking up the birther issue was enough to briefly give Trump a nine-point lead in the polls. That horrified establishment Republicans who saw it as a sure loser in a general election; Karl Rove said it made Trump a “joke candidate,” who had put himself “off there in the nutty right.” But Republican voters didn’t simply want to see Obama challenged and defeated, but publicly arraigned for his otherness and illegitimacy. “Birtherism” wasn’t a matter of political principle in the way the debt ceiling was; it was a way to have Obama disgraced and nullified. That same desire subsequently led voters to briefly light on Gingrich, the fons et origo of American political assholism and a candidate whom only Trump could have exceeded in his propensity to go off the rails. Voters had no illusions about Gingrich’s character or stability, but they expected that the stream-of-consciousness vituperations that won him the cheers of the primary debate audiences would be equally effective in the general election and show Obama up for the extremist America-hating socialist he is:Gingrich is a real snake and he should be treated as a precious specimen able to handle things in a proper way among his fellow politicians, while Romney is just a good businessman. People in Washington are used to having Romneys for breakfast while Gingrich will definitely lunch you before you dine him.
Newt EVISCERATED the lib media last night. I hope he keeps it up. This election needs to be a back alley, no holds barred death match in order to save this country from the stain and his minions. Too much damage has already been done.
After that, Rick Santorum seemed downright mellow as a conservative champion. True, his charges were no less bizarre than Trump’s or Gingrich’s—calling Obama a snob for saying he wanted everyone to go to college, implying some uncertainty about the president’s religion (“He says he’s a Christian”), and claiming that none of the California State universities offered American history courses. It all came very close to assholism, though there was a creeping suspicion he might be saying them not to be outrageous but because he actually believed them.
Trump? Cain? Gingrich? Santorum?—really? True, the American people have on rare occasions chosen a new president whom they considered an asshole, though in modern times only Nixon comes to mind, and 1968 was an exceptional case. (A lot of people thought of George W Bush as an asshole by 2004, but he was an incumbent then, and just as many people considered Kerry an asshole, too.) But it’s hard to think of any previous campaign in which a large group of voters have sought a candidate with just that qualification.
Of course Republican voters abandoned those enthusiasms as quickly as they had taken them up, in the end settling grudgingly on Romney, whose rhetorical assholism is relatively subdued. But the process demonstrated how that clamorous style of political assholism has become the most audible strain in American politics, and helps to explain why people overwhelmingly judge that politics is the most uncivil area of American life. It may be that the most virulent and insistent forms of assholism are a minority phenomenon particular to the sunless thickets of the extreme right and left. There’s no question the media have exaggerated the extent of that behavior; it’s always the squeaky nail that gets the ink, particularly given the public’s appetite for spectacles of assholism. But the popular perception isn’t illusional, either. Whether we look at candidates, Congress, partisans, or the media, politics really has become more uncivil, and the rise of political assholism has played a big part in that.
The Politics of “Incivility”
There’s another reason why people see politics as such an uncivil domain: that’s what politicians and political commentators keep telling them. What gave the word incivility its singularly modern flavor when it was reinvented in the late sixties was its explicitly political character. From the outset, the word was designed to obscure distinctions between the insults of private and public life, so that the slovenliness and unmannerliness of the hippies, campus protesters, and “ultramilitant feminists�
�� discredited their claims to political participation; their incivility was “more than mere rudeness,” their critics stressed. (There was a weird reprise of that moment in 2011, when critics of Occupy Wall Street resurrected “dirty hippies,” a phrase that would have disappeared from the language thirty years ago if it hadn’t been kept on life support by South Park.) The remarkable elasticity of the word incivility made it easier to weave a jumble of unlike offenses into a grand narrative of social decline. Incivility isn’t a morally natural category like rudeness. The voice of conscience that tells us to refill the photocopier tray has a very different timbre from the one that urges us to refrain from burning crosses on people’s yards. But both can figure as incivility in the complaints about its rise.
Since then, the charge of incivility has become a standard weapon in political discourse, a way of delegitimating a person or group or denying their right to participate in debate, as in “Who can talk to people who behave like that?” And in the nature of things, taxing someone for incivility can also be a pretext for engaging in incivility oneself. Structurally, it’s just a more elliptical variation on the everyday rebuke “Mind your manners, asshole.” In fact the charges and countercharges of incivility that permeate public life have become one of the most acrimonious and disingenuous forms of political assholism. Given that crossfire, it’s no wonder that people find public life so uncivil. When A berates B for his incivility, it’s a virtual certainty that one or the other of them is being an asshole.
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