by Peter Wehner
The founders were imperfect men, and the Constitution an imperfect document. But all things considered, what happened at Independence Hall was little short of a miracle. And for a group of fiercely proud and independent individuals to rise above such deep difference for the sake of the public good, to compromise in order to advance justice and human dignity, was a rare and wonderful thing. It’s something worth aspiring to in our time, when excellence and high-mindedness in public life seem to be hidden away on distant hills.
THE DEMOCRATIC VIRTUE OF CIVILITY
We live in an era of growing incivility. We can see it and sense it all around us, from the rudeness we encounter while driving and shopping to social media posts and cyberbullying to cable television and talk radio to the behavior of the politicians and, preeminently, the president of the United States.
A 2017 survey found “a severe civility deficit in our nation”21—and there are no signs of it letting up. Among the findings: the belief that the US has a major civility problem has reached a record high (69 percent); three-quarters of Americans believe that incivility has risen to crisis levels; and the same proportion feels that the US is losing stature as a civil nation (73 percent).
Nearly nine in ten Americans say incivility leads to intimidation and threats, violence, cyberbullying, and harassment. Nearly 80 percent say that uncivil comments by political leaders encourage greater incivility in society, while nearly 60 percent say they quit paying attention to politics because of incivility.
“The feeling that politicians are at the root of our society’s spreading incivility runs deep,” according to the survey.
“Americans are worried about the consequences of the incivility that has infected all aspects of our society,” according to Jack Leslie, chairman of Weber Shandwick, one of the firms that conducted the research.
They’re right to worry. Incivility not only implies disrespect, discourteousness, and impoliteness; it derives from the Latin word incivilis, meaning “not of a citizen.” To be uncivil, then, is to act in ways that tend to put one at odds with what it means to be a responsible citizen.
The converse is also true: civility is central to citizenship. It is the precondition, not the product, of respect for others. When civility is stripped away, everything in life becomes a battlefield, an arena for conflict, an excuse for invective. Families, communities, our conversations, and our institutions break apart when basic civility is absent. Everyday life becomes nearly intolerable.
But like moderation and compromise, civility is a widely misunderstood virtue. In the eyes of many people, it’s synonymous with lack of conviction and passion. To be a civilized individual, according to this line of reasoning, means to be delicate and pliable, devoid of principles, unwilling to fight for great causes.
This is confusion of a high order. It takes but a moment’s consideration to realize that one can be a vigorous and forceful advocate for justice without being uncivil. Nor does civility mean we don’t speak the truth. It doesn’t mean we fail to call things by their rightful name or refuse to call out nonsense when we see it. A person can be both civil and angry at injustice; Martin Luther King Jr. showed that as well as anyone in recent American history. Yale professor Stephen L. Carter, in his book on civility, said that “the true genius of Martin Luther King, Jr. was not his ability to articulate the pain of an oppressed people—many other preachers did so, with as much passion and as much power—but in his ability to inspire those very people to be loving and civil in their dissent.”22
What civility makes possible is a certain mode of discourse, particularly when it comes to debates and disagreements with our fellow citizens. It assumes that in most cases—absent fairly extraordinary exceptions—basic good manners are what we owe others as fellow citizens and fellow human beings, even those with whom we have passionate disagreements. Undergirding this belief for many of us is the conviction that we’re all image-bearers of God—“a work of divine art” in the words of the theologian Richard Mouw—which demands that we respect human dignity.
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt,” Saint Paul wrote in his letter to the Colossians, “so that you may know how to answer everyone.” And to the Galatians, Paul describes the “fruits of the spirit” as love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.
Incivility is notably left off the list.
Civility helps inoculate us against the temptation to dehumanize those who hold views different from our own. Civility is, as Carter has written, a precondition of democratic dialogue. Finding common ground and reaching accommodation is hard enough when opposing worldviews collide; it’s impossible to achieve when the rhetoric each side uses against the other is laced with venom and contempt. The survival of a functioning parliamentary system, Sir William Harcourt said, depends on “constant dining with the opposition.”23
We often (and unfairly) assume our differences are the result of the other person’s moral failures or of them acting in bad faith. In reality, it’s more often a case of us placing different emphasis on values like authority and diversity, stability and change. That doesn’t mean we’ll agree on everything, but it does mean we might understand others a little better, see a little more clearly how they arrived at their position, and be a little less harsh in our assessment of those with whom we have deep differences.
As a lifelong conservative, I’m dismayed to see how certain figures in the American Right have turned conservatism into a cavalcade of insults and now denigrate civility. A few years ago Craig Shirley, a public affairs consultant and author of bestselling biographies of Ronald Reagan and an authorized biography of Newt Gingrich, wrote an essay, “In Defense of Incivility.” In it he insisted that civility is not only overrated but an outright threat to American democracy, “the last thing we need in American politics.”24 He argues that civility is a “way to control the citizenry, by shaming them into silence when focused anger would serve the Republic better.” Civility, he says, is unconservative and un-American, while American conservatism is “uncivil and intellectual.” Indeed, he adds, civility permits many great evils, while incivility is the source of many wonders for which we should be grateful. “Three cheers for American incivility,” is how Shirley put it. (It was no surprise that he praised Donald Trump’s incivility and anger as contributions to the 2016 presidential contest.) The popular radio talk show host Mark Levin eagerly echoed Shirley’s criticisms of civility.25
One need only contrast Shirley and Levin with two of the most important figures in conservatism in the latter half of the twentieth century, Ronald Reagan and William F. Buckley Jr., who were renowned for their grace, class, and good manners. They were remarkably and blessedly free of roiling resentments.
While often the target of vicious attacks, Reagan maintained a remarkably charitable view of his political adversaries. “Remember, we have no enemies, only opponents,” former Indiana governor Mitch Daniels, who worked as a political aide in the Reagan White House, quotes him as admonishing his staff. Even Mr. Reagan’s rare flashes of anger did not cross lines of decency or turn ad hominem.
As for Mr. Buckley: in a heated 1968 televised exchange with the left-wing writer Gore Vidal, Buckley defended the police in the aftermath of violent encounters with protesters during the Democratic Convention. Vidal called Buckley a “crypto-Nazi.” This enraged Buckley, who had served in World War II, and he referred to Vidal as a “queer.” Buckley said that if Vidal didn’t cease referring to him as a “crypto-Nazi,” “I’ll sock you in your goddamn face, and you’ll stay plastered.”26
This was a jarring, incongruous moment for a man renowned for his elegance and gentlemanliness. Andrew Ferguson, writing in the Weekly Standard, said that for the rest of his life, Buckley “admitted to being ashamed of the moment—not merely for the lapse in manners but for allowing so crude a provocation to produce exactly the effect Vidal intended.”27
But the great model to lo
ok to here, as he is in so many areas, is Lincoln. As a young man, it is said, his satirical inclination and self-confident polemical power provided him with the “power to hurt.” But as he matured, his biographer William Lee Miller has written, “one can almost observe him curbing that inclination and becoming scrupulous and respectful.”28 His personal and professional dealings—with clients, editors, supporters, and opponents—had a “distinct quality of tact, generosity, and civility.”29
But note well: the way to reclaim civility is not by having liberals lecture conservatives about their lack of civility and comity, and vice versa. This typically inflames passions rather than calming things down (“Who the hell are they to lecture me? Remove the mote in your own eye before complaining about the speck in mine”). Instead it has to start with self-reflection and looking within—first at ourselves as individuals, then at the parties and political movements we are part of.
All of us, but particularly our political leaders, need to challenge those with whom we share a common ideology to examine our own blind spots, to cease assuming that those who hold different views than we do have nothing to teach us, and to stop demonizing and degrading our political opponents. To put it another way: we need people within our own political tribe to point out the dangers of excessive political tribalism, one of which includes incivility.
The twentieth-century Scottish writer John Buchan, who had a career in politics, put it beautifully when he wrote:
While I believed in party government and in party loyalty, I never attained to the happy partisan zeal of many of my friends, being painfully aware of my own and my party’s defects, and uneasily conscious of the merits of my opponent. Like Montaigne I could forgive “neither the commendable qualities of my adversaries nor the reproachful of those I followed.”30
Now think about the times you’ve gotten into heated political debates with other people, including your friends. It might be on abortion or gay rights, immigration or gun violence. What’s often going on is that we’re frustrated to the point of anger because the other person won’t jettison their views and adopt ours. The feeling is, “I’m right, he’s wrong, and he’s being unreasonable in not conceding I’m right.” The point of debate, after all, is to convince others of the merits of my arguments and the weakness of theirs. If my argument isn’t working, my natural reflex is to repeat the same argument, this time increasing the volume, the vehemence, and the agitation.
It never works—in fact, it almost always backfires. We have to find a better way.
In May 2017, I had a series of email exchanges with a nationally recognized conservative commentator, someone I had known for several years and always gotten along well with. But there were inevitable tensions, given that I was a vocal Trump critic and he was a vocal Trump defender.
In this particular instance, he was unhappy with a column I had written that was critical of Donald Trump, and in the course of our exchange he leveled several charges against me. My initial impulse was to answer them with a blunt, point-by-point refutation. I thought, “I was born to respond to accusations like this.” But as I reflected on it, I decided doing so would be a mistake. No matter how strong the arguments I marshaled on behalf of my case—and they would probably not be as strong as I thought they were—they simply wouldn’t be heard by him. It was also bound to hurt the relationship, making him feel under assault and therefore defensive. So I tried a different approach.
I admitted to my interlocutor that my strong aversion to Donald Trump made me susceptible to being unfair in my judgment of him. And rather than answer his charges, I went on to explain, in as detached and fair-minded a manner as I could, our competing perspectives. After having done so, I said this:
What I think is happening with the two of us is we’re placing emphasis on different values/perceived virtues. You’re asking for loyalty, which keeps you from criticizing Trump (because, in part, you don’t want to be on the side of people on the Left/Trump haters for whom you have disdain); I’m asking for intellectual honesty, which means using the same standard on Trump you’d use on HRC [Hillary Rodham Clinton] or Obama, and giving voice to criticisms when you honestly believe the criticisms are warranted. This explains why you get frustrated with me for (in your eyes) being disloyal and being a willing participant in the anti-Trump mob; while I get frustrated with you for (in my eyes) not showing intellectual honesty when it comes to Trump, for not saying things that you privately know to be true.
What’s notable is his response, which was not angry but self-reflective. He expressed genuine gratitude for our friendship and said, “I received everything you said tonight fully. In fact, I read over your note a couple of times. And I’ve had one of those cathartic moments. I believe the disconnect you and I experience regarding Trump world is the difference between objectivity and subjectivity.”
“You endeavor to be objective,” he told me, adding, “it hit me like a ton of bricks: I have no desire to be objective. That’s my blind spot, I suppose. I’m not a journalist, I’m an opinion guy.” He felt like Donald Trump was being lacerated by the elite media on a daily basis, and he saw his job as defending Trump in every instance and giving Trump supporters a safe harbor in the form of his show.
“I don’t think that makes either of us right or wrong,” he wrote me. “I’m self-aware enough to know that just because I disagree with you doesn’t make me right or you wrong. We’re just approaching this wild ride quite differently from one another.”
He was right, and a decade or so earlier, I would likely have taken this exchange in a different and more negative direction. In this case, though, the tone was reasonably civil and respectful, and as a result, we have continued to stay engaged with each other. We’re able to understand each other’s perspective somewhat better, even if neither of us has been converted to the other side of the divide.
The following year, I heard his program while driving on the George Washington Memorial Parkway in Virginia, heading in to my office in Washington, DC. I noticed that he instructed his listeners—almost all of whom are pro-Trump and pro–Second Amendment—not to be personally harsh toward the students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, who were leading a gun control campaign in the aftermath of a massacre at their school. I sent him a note commending him.
“I was impressed with what you said,” I wrote, “about having sympathy and understanding for the students who were critical of the NRA without agreeing with them.” I added, “My guess is that there were more than a few people in your audience who felt like you were going ‘soft’ and sounding like a ‘RINO’ [Republican in name only].”
He wrote a gracious note back to me, which included this statement: “By the way, you should know that your voice has an impact on me.”
DEVELOPING SECOND FRIENDS
What too many of us have lost sight of—what from time to time I’ve lost sight of—is that the purpose of political discourse and debate shouldn’t be to score partisan points, to get in good shots and a clever put-down now and then, or even to be proven right. In fact, the purpose of debate is to better ascertain truth and reality—and that’s often done by refining and amending our views as a result of scrutiny, dialogue, and debate. It’s just a very different way of approaching things.
One excellent illustration of this is the friendship between Owen Barfield, a British philosopher and poet, and C. S. Lewis, the twentieth-century British medievalist, literary critic, and essayist, and author of the children’s series The Chronicles of Narnia.
Lewis and Barfield met at Oxford; they were close friends for more than forty years and members of the literary group the Inklings. Both men of the Christian faith, they exercised enormous influence on each other—Lewis dedicated his first scholarly book, The Allegory of Love, to Barfield, the “wisest and best of my unofficial teachers”—but their friendship was not based on seeing the world in exactly the same way. In fact, they engaged in some fairly intense disagreements, including on the re
lationship between imagination and truth (an epistolary exchange affectionately dubbed “the Great War”).
Lewis described what he called a “First Friend” and a “Second Friend.” The First Friend is your alter ego, the person who sees things as you do. You “join like raindrops on a window,” in Lewis’s words.
The Second Friend is not your alter ego but rather your anti-self. He shares your interests but approaches them at a different angle. “He has read all the right books but has got the wrong thing out of every one,” Lewis wrote. “How can he be so nearly right and yet, invariably, just not right?”
You go at it, hammer and tongs, far into the night, or walking through fine country that neither gives a glance to, each learning the weight of the other’s punches, and often more like mutually respectful enemies than friends. Actually (though it never seems so at the time) you modify one another’s thought; out of this perpetual dogfight a community of mind and a deep affection emerge.31
“In an argument,” Barfield said, “we always, both of us, were arguing for the truth, not for victory.”32
If we could move closer toward the spirit of the Lewis-Barfield model of dialogue and debate, we’d all be far better off. It would certainly help us think of our national politics as something other than a fight to the death.
These changes won’t happen easily or quickly, but it’s not beyond our capacity to achieve them. It’s a matter of being purposeful, of thinking about the good of the whole. And if you think about it, that’s really not too much to ask.
