Why Civility Fails
A tale of two headlines
We tend to think of civility as maintaining a courteous and calm demeanor in political debate. But that can’t be correct. Keeping your cool is good, but courtesy and calmness can also be patronizing. Moreover, fervor is sometimes called for in politics. So civility is better understood as the avoidance of gratuitous escalation and excessive hostility. This allows for political antagonism but recognizes its limits.
Civility, then, is a matter of our internal temperament rather than observable features of our behavior. In judging someone to be uncivil, we do not point simply to their aggravated manner. Instead, we assess the appropriateness of their behavior; we evaluate their motives.
This makes civility more difficult than it seems. In order to regard others as civil, we must ascribe to them the disposition to engage in good faith. However, when it comes to our political opponents, we systematically ascribe negative traits and motives such as closed-mindedness, untrustworthiness, and dishonesty. Behavior that we condemn when performed by political opponents nonetheless strikes us as excusable, or even admirable, when enacted by our allies. When forced to admit our side’s wrongdoing, we promptly forgive; we regard similar infractions from other side as unpardonable.
Add to this that civility is a two-way street. Just as children must keep their hands to themselves but are permitted to defend against aggressors, we owe civility only to those who respond in kind. When everything the other side does looks underhanded, we justifiably conclude that civility is no longer required of us. Our opponents assess things similarly. Each side sees itself as supporting civility, yet incivility escalates.
In short, civility depends on mutual trust among political opponents. Presently, such trust is lacking. Everyone already embraces civility but believes the other side is unwilling to reciprocate. Incivility is a symptom; the disease is distrust.
I presented this argument in an article titled “Civility in Politics is Harder Than You Think.” It appeared at The Conversation on the day following President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address, an occasion marked by Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s tearing up of the text of his speech.
This episode provided an apt setting for my claim that assessments of civility track partisanship.
Days later, The National Interest posted the article with a different headline: “Sorry, Donald Trump: Nancy Pelosi Didn’t Kill Civility.” They also switched the lead image from one showing Trump, Mike Pence, and Pelosi to one of only Pelosi.
Unlike the original, the revised title contains overt partisan triggers announcing a rebuke of Trump and a vindication of Pelosi. However, the article takes no stand on whether Pelosi’s behavior was uncivil. When this version appeared at Yahoo News, the comments section supplied a real-time confirmation of my thesis.
An informal analysis of the Yahoo comments suggests intriguing trends:
Of the nearly 1500 comments, 99 percent take the article to be anti-Trump and pro-Pelosi. Of them, 70 percent consist simply of insults directed at Pelosi, mainly focusing on her appearance and her allegedly malign character. Twenty percent insult me or The National Interest. Seven percent contain nothing but generic expressions of support for Trump.
Six percent of the comments take the piece to be anti-Trump and pro-Pelosi but support that messaging. Of those, 90 percent consist entirely of denunciations of Trump and his character. The remaining 10 percent include positive comments about Pelosi and her action.
Only roughly 1 percent of the comments refer to anything in the article’s content beyond its title. Of these few, 100 percent misconstrue the article as calling for less emotion in politics.
A standard assessment tool shows that the article is accessible to anyone reading at an eighth-grader’s level. However, the comments suggest negligible comprehension across the board. A charitable interpretation is that most commenters didn’t bother to read past the title, but nonetheless proceeded to comment.
These findings are too casual to count as scientific. However, they provide reason to suspect that the partisan triggers either obstructed or distorted comprehension, while also provoking partisan reactions. Apart from confirming that civility is in the eye of the partisan, the thread suggests a broader thought, explored in my Overdoing Democracy. When we encounter information that invokes our political identities, we tend to react by affirming our partisanship. Information that runs counter to our loyalties is experienced as a personal attack and a call for solidarity with co-partisans. This solidifies our partisan identity and entrenches distrust of those perceived to be different. In turn, that distrust drives us to see more of what they do as uncivil.
Is the lesson here that news providers should seek to avoid headlines containing partisan triggers? That’s probably a good idea, but it is no solution to escalating incivility.
Our partisan identities have become so central to our self-understanding that we experience nearly everything as summoning them. Once they are triggered, our interactions devolve into identity-affirmation campaigns where the contending sides abandon the project of addressing one another, each aiming instead to shout down the other.
It all feels like political engagement, but it is actually a diversion of the energies that should be devoted to the ongoing work of democratic citizenship into petty self-aggrandizement and tribal conformity.
Meanwhile, as we struggle online to “own” our partisan adversaries, the actual business of politics is conducted elsewhere.
