Saturday, July 1, 2023 | 2 am
Although Americans disagree on many things, it seems that one of the few things we do agree on, regardless of color, political affiliation, or socioeconomic status, is that civility is decline A recent survey conducted by the American Bar Association found that 85% of respondents said that civility in society today is worse than it was 10 years ago. A February 2022 Georgetown University poll found that 67% of respondents believed that politics has become more unpleasant since the pandemic began.
I also subscribe to the belief that civility, especially in the political sphere, has been in decline. I would probably attribute this decline to former President Donald Trump. I feel that from his campaign to his presidency, he broke many of the norms of civility among political candidates, and our political discourse has been worse ever since.
Interestingly, however, if we ask who killed civility, it is clear that there was a time when civility was the standard. I wonder: is it true that civility is in decline? Or is it possible that we all accept this truth without examining it critically?
An examination of the history of American politics suggests to me that our political discourse has never been civil. Far from it in fact. American politics has been a nasty, ugly, vile affair from the beginning.
In his 2007 book, Anything for a Vote, author Joseph Cummins detailed the dirty tactics used in every US presidential campaign. Cummins wrote that the idea for his book came after the 2004 presidential election, when political pundits lamented the tactics used to vilify both John Kerry and George W. Bush.
Cummins wrote that one of the most unpleasant presidential elections was the contest between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson in 1800 (only the third presidential election). Jefferson hired a writer, James Callender, to write that Adams was “a hideous hermaphrodite character who has neither the strength or firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.” Adams’ political party, the Federals, also attacked Jefferson, alleging that he was “a mean, low-life fellow, the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, begotten by a Virginia mulatto father.”
Just under 30 years later, the contest between Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams was just as ugly. Jackson’s supporters spread rumors about Adams’ “foreign wife,” who was English, and claimed that Adams bought “gaming furniture” when he bought an ivory chess set for the White House. Additionally, Adams was accused of offering his wife’s maid to Czar Alexander I of Russia as a concubine. Adams’s supporters accused Jackson of being an adulterer, a drunkard, a thief, a liar, and an immoderate. They also persecuted Jackson’s wife, accusing her of being a “whore” and given to “open and flagrant lewdness.” Jackson’s wife died shortly after his victory. He blamed his death on these personal attacks.
One hundred years later, in 1928, Herbert Hoover faced Al Smith. The Ku Klux Klan would meet Smith’s campaign train with burning crosses and explosions (Smith was Catholic). Protestant ministers claimed that Smith would annul all non-Catholic marriages if he became president. As you probably know, Hoover won that election.
In his 1964 campaign against Barry Goldwater, Lyndon Johnson formed a committee of 16 people, known as the Five O’Clock Club, with the sole purpose of disseminating Goldwater. The group developed a coloring book for children that contained images of Goldwater dressed in Ku Klux Klan clothing. They also secretly fed hostile questions to reporters about the Goldwater campaign and sent a CIA agent, E. Howard Hunt, later imprisoned in the Watergate affair, to infiltrate the Goldwater campaign.
The dirty tactic used by George HW Bush during his campaign for the presidency against Michael Dukakis in 1988 has become part of the education of any political science major. When Dukakis was governor of Massachusetts, 39-year-old convict Willie Horton raped a woman and stabbed her fiancé while participating in a weekend furlough program. Horton was black and his victims were white. Bush used this story to launch a series of racist attack ads. The ads included filling mailboxes with “Get Out of Jail Free Cards” that read: “Michael Dukakis is a murderer’s best friend and an honest and decent citizen’s worst enemy.”
Keep in mind that all of this uncivil behavior occurred before Rush Limbaugh’s show went into syndication in 1988, which some claim was the start of the decline. Given the above history (and there is much more, to be clear), can we really say that civility is in decline? It seems to me that incivility is as American as apple pie.
Stephen Jay Gould once wrote, “The most wrong stories are the ones we think we know best, and so we never examine or question them.” We’ve told ourselves this story that American politics was once a place where civility was the norm. We tell ourselves that there was a time when our politicians spent their time debating policy positions, rather than launching personal attacks.
Perhaps it is time we divorced this apparent myth. Maybe we need to start telling a new story. One that does not claim that civility is in decline. Instead, it recognizes a simple truth: we have never really been civil.
We blame others for the climate of incivility. We blame Trump. We blame Joe Biden. We blame the media. We blame social media. We blame everything and everyone but ourselves.
Refusing to accept responsibility for one’s actions is a hallmark of immaturity. Children blame others for their actions. Adults understand that they alone are ultimately responsible for what they do.
The proof is in the pudding. We politicians have been talking to ourselves since the beginning. They do it because it works. The media leads with articles that trigger our outrage because this formula catches the eyes and ears. Social media algorithms manage our feeds in a similar way because they keep us scrolling. Simply put, these things are not the causes of our incivility; they are the market’s responses to our incivility. Politicians, media and social media only prioritize giving us what we want.
It is laudable to wish for a more civil political climate. However, author James Baldwin once wrote, “Not everything you face can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” Until we face the truth that we have never really been civil, I fear we never will be.
Eric Foster is an attorney in private practice and a columnist for The Plain Dealer and cleveland.com.
