Godzilla Trudges Back and Forth

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When we last left off I was concerned about civil discord, and I wondered how far things would go. This subject is one where it’s hard to be objective. When speaking of the sort of protests we saw over the inauguration weekend it’s difficult to know if we’re seeing a peaceful protest with completely admirable goals or if we’re seeing the beginnings of some sort of lawless revolution. When you look back through previous examples of things getting out of hand, it quickly becomes apparent how gradual everything is. For example, during the French Revolution, it was four years between the calling of the Estates General and the Reign of Terror. Looking back that seems quick, but four years is forever when you’re living through it, as we may be about to discover. As another example, Hitler was Chancellor of Germany for five years before he started World War II, and was Time Magazine’s Man of the Year in 1938. In other words each step towards calamity may seem innocuous by itself, but you still end up with a boiled frog.  

All of this is to say that it would be super convenient if Trump turned into a demon on his first day in office or if the protests on inauguration day had immediately exploded in an orgy of violence. If any of those things happened, sensible people would immediately know who the bad guys are, and it would be easy to take sides and decide what to do, but as it was, just looking at the protests (I’ll leave other people to decide if Trump turned into a demon) we had some violence over the weekend, but not much. 217 people were arrested, a car or two got burned, some police officers were injured, etc. But I think most people probably feel like that’s fairly mild. And in fact, historically, we have had lots of interesting inauguration days though I imagine that this latest one had to set a record for something, maybe number of arrests?

All of this is to say, harkening back to an earlier post, I don’t know if everything is going to be okay. I don’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t know if the protests and violence and arrests are just the tip of the iceberg that is the Second Civil War or if they’re a marvelous expression of a healthy democracy. I don’t know if Trump is going to be the worst president ever, and I don’t know where the country is headed. There are some things (as I already mentioned) including the arrests over the weekend, that make me feel like this election might be different, but that doesn’t mean I’m predicting anything specific, just that it feels different. And I’m still not 100% sure why that is, but I have some theories and going forward we’ll have to see whether the data supports those theories or ends up disproving them.

Thus, in the absence of a desire or even an ability to say what’s going to happen I want to take this opportunity to remind you of how bad it is if certain things do happen, and point out some things that while not unambiguous, nevertheless cause me concern. Further I think we aren’t sufficiently afraid of violence and chaos. We often fool ourselves into thinking change of any sort will be easy and straightforward, when generally it is anything but.

As you can imagine I’m not the only one to worry about civil discord and the possibility that the current divisiveness will lead to something really bad. There have been several articles on the subject recently, some more alarming than others. I don’t agree with everything in these articles (as I’ve already said, I don’t know what’s going to happen) but there was an observation in one article in particular which encapsulated much of my concern. The author, David Hines, was not someone I was familiar with, but he kind of nailed it.

Political violence is like war, like violence in general: people have a fantasy about how it works.

This is the fantasy of how violence works: you smite your enemies in a grand and glorious cleansing because of course you’re better.

Grand and glorious smiting isn’t actually how violence works…

I think this is an important point. Regardless of what you think will happen, regardless of your preferred outcome, you generally have an overly optimistic view of how well your plan is going to work. And this isn’t just an issue with violence. Republican’s have an optimistic view of how easy it will be to replace Obamacare. Democrats had a rosy view of how effective Obamacare was going to be. The guy I mentioned in my last post who thought Obama was a Lightworker had a seriously exaggerated view of what Obama would be able to do, and there are going to be a lot of disappointed Trump voters in the very near future. But of course as bad as it is to be wrong about Obamacare or the effectiveness of a given president, being wrong about violence is a thousands times worse. Hines continues:

I’ve worked a few places that have had serious political violence. And I’m not sure how to really describe it so people get it.

This is a stupid comparison, but here: imagine that one day Godzilla walks through your town.

The next day, he does it again.

And he keeps doing it. Some days he steps on more people than others. That’s it. That’s all he does: trudging through your town, back and forth. Your town’s not your town now; it’s The Godzilla Trudging Zone.

That’s kind of what it’s like.

I’m reasonably sure that the people who were protesting last weekend do not want Godzilla to trudge back and forth through their town. I’m sure most of them think that if they can just educate people about how bad Trump is that the nation will come to its senses and he’ll be run out of town by February. And when that blessed day occurs everyone, old and young, Republican and Democrat, Clinton Supporter and Trump Voter will all dance in the street in celebration. Okay maybe that’s all an exaggeration, but in starting their protests so early and so violently, I’m not sure what they do expect to happen. In other words however minimal the violence was over the weekend, if this is the sort of protest caused by Trump’s mere existence, where else is there to go when Trump actually starts doing something objectionable?

Of course, as I’ve already mentioned there are only two paths available in this situation. You can attempt to legally remove Trump or you can use some manner of violence. Let’s look at the “legal means” option. Within that option there are a further two options for removing Trump legally: the 2020 election, and impeachment. I assume based on the enormous number of articles on the subject, that impeachment is the preferred option. The problem with that is the Republicans control both the House and Senate. To even get impeachment started you would need to have 24 Republican Representatives defect (and of course you’d still need 100% of the Democrats). Once you’ve done that, then to actually remove him from office you’d need to have 21 Republican Senators defect as well (that’s 40% of all the Republican Senators). Which is to say that while a lot of people might be mad right out of the gate, it’s unlikely that Republican members of congress are going to impeach their guy right after he’s sworn in, particularly after having the other side in control of the executive branch for the last eight years.

It is this extreme desire to get rid of Trump and the colossal gap between it and the extreme unlikelihood of it being done legally that makes me think that we are particularly vulnerable to the other option of removing Trump: the violent one. In other words I think a lot of people are getting ready to summon Godzilla.

Of course there is a third option, which is to accept that Trump won the election and to do the best you can to help him be successful or at least don’t actively attempt to remove him. Of course this means “normalizing” him which is something none of these protesters want to do, and is one more reason why I’m on the lookout for a giant atomic monster on the horizon.

Look, I don’t like Trump, given the choice I would have chosen someone else to be president. (Though as long as I have the ability to choose whomever I want, I wouldn’t choose Clinton either.) But this sort of what-if thinking is pointless, because I don’t have the option to magically decide that someone else is going to be president. I had one vote. I used it, and as expected it didn’t make much of a difference, which while unfortunate, was exactly the outcome I expected. And just like the protesters and everyone else in the country I can try to impeach him, I can try to overthrow the government violently, or I can normalize him. That’s the reality.

This is not to say that people who are protesting or marching aren’t dealing with reality. To be clear I am fine with peaceful demonstrations. It’s in the first amendment and, frankly, if Trump does certain things (in particular censorship) I’ll be right out there with them. Also, it’s possible that some or even most of the people out there just want to exercise influence on how Trump behaves, they don’t want to get rid of him, but insofar as they do want to get rid of him they are engaging in Godzilla blindness. The unwillingness to understand that if they really won’t compromise, and if they really want get rid of Trump before 2020, it may be that their only path is a violent one.

Of course as Hines points out, when the protestors (and other Trump opponents) imagine violence, they imagine that it will be quick, painless, and that if there is any smiting it will only involve their opponents. In this fantasy the vast majority of the Trump supporters will be converted to this righteous vision and those who don’t will be dealt with speedily. Of course additionally the protestors are convinced they’re on the right side of history, and perhaps they are, but that doesn’t mean the Trump supporters are just going to roll over and play dead, particularly, since, on this occasion, they have the law on their side. They followed the rules and got their guy elected.

I know that to many people this is going to appear alarmist. “People are just protesting. That’s completely legal. Read the First Amendment. Any talk of a Second Civil War is ridiculous.” I hope they’re right. And if I were betting, I certainly wouldn’t bet on civil war. In order of probability here’s how I would rank it:

1. Trump serves out his entire four years, it’s chaotic, but nothing crazy happens.
2. Trump is removed from office, in some way that may look like impeachment if you squint, but is fundamentally outside of the law.
3. Trump does something genuinely worthy of impeachment and gets removed.
4. Outbreak of serious violence (100+ dead) or some manner of secession crisis.

You may wonder why I am so worried about possibility number four if I also think it’s the least likely to happen. Once again, as I’ve said over and over, some things are so bad that if you’re wrong about them, it doesn’t matter what you were right about, and having Godzilla trudge through your town is one of those things. But I’ve already covered that possibility at some length. I think we need to look at possibility number two, Trump is removed from office by some process of vague legality. You may not be 100% clear what I mean by this. I have talked about their only being two options (if you reject normalization) law and violence. But of course there’s a continuum in between those two ends. Which is to say there’s violence and then there’s VIOLENCE!

As an example imagine if there were riotous demonstrations in every major city for months. And by riotous I mean some people get arrested, some windows are broken, people frequently receive minor injuries, but no one dies. First off, does this scenario seem impossible? Not to me, in fact in some respects I’m surprised it isn’t already happening (and it did happen in the immediate aftermath of the election). Second is it possible that if it went on long enough that Trump might resign? That I’m not so clear about, he is pretty stubborn. But if he did, would it be legal? Technically, perhaps, but legal how? Yes, a president can resign, we saw that with Nixon. But this is different. This is someone resigning not because it’s obvious he’s going to be impeached this is someone resigning because of pressure. Pressure of what? The pressure of violence.

Now perhaps this veiled threat of violence is fine, certainly it’s better than actual violence, but I would opine that the rule of law is not nearly as elastic as most people want to believe. When people abuse the law, it weakens its perceived fairness and makes people less likely buy into the entire system. And without this implied social contract it’s difficult for the rule of law to continue. Which means that possibility number two, the pseudo-legal removal of Trump, is better than violence, but it’s still bad. You’ve still fundamentally rewritten the rules of the game in a way that makes future violence far more likely. If all the Trump supporters suddenly feel like their vote was valueless because six months into Trump’s term he’s forced out by the continual protests, how does that affect their desire to vote and participate in the future? Does this scenario make violence more or less likely? Does it make the secession of Texas more or less likely? To repeat my point, there’s violence or the rule of law, there’s not some better, secret third option. Any conceivable scenario for getting rid of Trump which doesn’t involve actually following the rules and standards for an impeachment would have to rely on violence. It may only be the threat of violence, it may be only implied violence, but it still involves violence.

Perhaps you remain unconvinced. Perhaps you think that Trump is bad enough that it doesn’t matter what you end up resorting to to get rid of him, it was worth it. First I would caution you against Godzilla blindness, and thinking that it’s going to be easy. Second I think you may be underestimating the fragility of our institutions. I have talked before about how fragile the US system of government seemed when it was first created, up to as late as the Civil War. I would say that it is still fragile and getting more fragile with each year. You can blame it all on Trump if you want, but it’s actually been growing more divisive and consequently more fragile, for a long time now and Trump is only the latest victim, or perhaps America is the victim, it’s hard to say, If you’re conservative you might point to the resignation of Nixon as starting the whole thing off. Or perhaps the Clarence Thomas or Robert Bork hearings. If you’re a liberal you’d probably point to the impeachment of Bill Clinton, or maybe you want to go all the way back to McCarthyism. In all of these cases the rule of law was weakened, perhaps imperceptibly, but it all accumulates, and someday it will break. I don’t know that this is when it will break, but I do know that the trend is accelerating.

To pull everything together, I think there are three reasons to be concerned about escalating violence. The first is the strength of the reaction against Trump right from the start. If it’s already this bad on day one, how bad is it going to be on day 50 or day 500? The second is the gap between how strongly people want to get rid of Trump and how difficult it will be to accomplish legally. The third is the general increase in divisiveness, which has been going on in the background over the last several decades.  To these three I’d like to add one final point. The increased acceptance of violence, particularly if it’s committed by people on the left.

Over the inauguration weekend Richard Spencer was sucker punched. If you don’t know who Richard Spencer is, he’s variously described as a white nationalist, a white supremacist, even a literal Nazi. In the wake of that punch columnist, Alex Griswold decided to tweet:

I wonder how many people cheering the Nazi Punch realize that a punch to the head can kill or permanently disable a man.

The reaction to this tweet was overwhelming. And I’ll let him describe it:

The tweet took off, and not in a good way. Literally hundreds of people responded, all saying that they would have loved if the attacker had killed Spencer. Some went further, calling for the extrajudicial killing of all Nazis.

It was an eye-opening reaction. The reason I penned the tweet was because I thought the liberal consensus that serves as the bedrock of the American society was intact. I had this whole spiel planned about how if we as a society endorse violence against one Nazi, we’re responsible if it leads to worse violence, maybe even murder, where do you draw the line, blah blah blah. I thought it was more or less self-evident that you don’t murder people on the street for expressing views you don’t like. I thought we were all the same page, and I was wrong.

You may disagree that this represents an increase in the acceptance of violence from just the left. You may argue that this just represents an increase in the acceptance of violence period. Perhaps, but if so that’s almost as bad, and maybe even worse. Still I’m of the opinion that this acceptance is far more pronounced when violence is practiced by the left.

I actually try to avoid just talking about the left (or the right) as this giant monolith. Though it’s more difficult than you might imagine, and I can’t always devote an entire blog post to explaining in detail what I mean by a specific term. For now let’s just say that I am using left in a fairly narrow sense. I am not claiming that any person who ever voted for a democrat is a violence obsessed fiend. But as to why I think it’s more a feature of the left...

Imagine if someone had walked up to a prominent female black activist (Sherri Shepard? Leslie Jones? Michelle Obama? Obviously I’m out of my wheelhouse here) and sucker punched them in the head? Imagine the response in the media, and ask yourself whether that response would have been more negative, more positive or about the same? Ideally it would have been about the same, but I’m 100% confident that it would not have been. Specifically I’m 100% sure that the New York Times would not have run an article the next day asking if it was okay to punch black female activists.

In the end while it would be nice if you agreed with all four of my reasons for expecting, or rather fearing an increase in violence, that’s really not the central goal of this post. Rather my central goal is illustrate that if you decide to do things outside of the law, that you are implicitly choosing violence and that the choice of violence is much worse than you imagine. In the end Godzilla doesn’t care about the righteousness of your cause or the awfulness of Trump. He just keeps trudging back and forth… back and forth...

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I would tell you to donate to this blog as a form of Godzilla insurance, but who am I kidding. I can't beat Godzilla. No one can! (Okay maybe Mothra.)

The Founders, Civility, and Godzilla

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Last Friday (the 20th) I went to the 2018 Moral & Ethical Leadership Conference, put on by the BYU Management Society. They had a pretty impressive lineup of speakers, including Senator Jeff Flake from Arizona, or as he liked to joke, the “other senator” from Arizona, given that he has been overshadowed by John McCain the entire time he’s been in the Senate. And as it turns out, this is unlikely to change since Senator Flake has decided not to run for re-election (also McCain died recently.) He didn’t get into his reasons during his speech, but most people agree the biggest was that he was unlikely to win the Republican primary. And why was that? Well despite both of them, in theory, being Republicans, Flake and Trump do not get along, at all. And for good or bad (probably bad) these days it’s difficult to win a Republican primary if you’re anti-Trump. Which Flake definitely is, and, unlike most Republicans, has not been shy about expressing, going so far as to write a book, Conscience of a Conservative, where he declares Trump to be a domestic and international menace.

I picked up a copy of Flake’s book while I was at the conference, though I haven’t a chance to read it yet, so I can only speak to what I heard him say, and his primary theme seemed to boil down to a call for greater civility. In fact I would hazard to say that the need for greater civility was the unofficial theme for the conference as a whole. Given the nation’s current political climate and leadership, this is not exactly surprising. Of course, if Flake’s call for civility was entirely unobjectionable he wouldn’t need to give a speech defending it, let alone write a whole book on the subject. But lately, even this principal is controversial, and under attack. I thought that looking into why might make a good topic for a post.

To start, let’s look at the area Senator Flake presumably knows the most about, congress. What does civility look like in congress? Is it just people saying things like, “I graciously yield my time to the Honorable Senator from Kentucky”? I suppose that this sort of etiquette is a small part of it, but only a very small part. No, I think civility in congress, as Senator Flake described it, is more about people calmly working together despite having very different ideologies.

That does seem to be an admirable goal, but unless all members of congress are saints (which clearly isn’t the case), then in order for this type of civility to be present it has to provide some benefit. In the past it may have been enough that it made them look noble and statesman like. But these days, at least among the base, it does the exact opposite, and makes them look traitorous and cowardly. In the past it might also have been driven by a sense of duty, a duty to put aside differences and work together for the good of the country, but the general concept of duty has been on a long slow decline since the early 1800’s (at least according to the Google Ngram Viewer.)

No, getting members of the two parties to work together, no longer makes them look good, and it’s definitely going to require something a lot more concrete than the fading idea of duty. It’s going to require something like money, money for something they want, something that will make the people back home happy, and which will, in turn, help them get elected. Maybe something in a bill? Something set aside specifically to this purpose? Something... “earmarked”?

This history of earmarks is interesting. You can find things which fit the basic criteria going all the way back to 1789, though initially such things were definitely rare. By the end of the 1800’s the practice was common enough that it started to be called pork-barrel politics, but apparently things really took off between 1994 and 2005 (the most memorable example being the Bridge to Nowhere). As you might imagine some people took issue with the practice and in 2010 they were banned (though not for non-profits). And who lead the charge on that? Who was the most ferocious opponent of earmarks? As it turns out, it was Senator Flake. Here’s the relevant section from Wikipedia:

Flake is "known for his ardent opposition to earmarks."He has been called an "anti-earmark crusader," and frequently challenges earmarks proposed by other members of Congress. Since May 2006, he has become prominent with the "Flake Hour," a tradition at the end of spending bill debates in which he asks earmark sponsors to come to the house floor and justify why taxpayers should pay for their "pet projects." He is credited with prompting House rule changes to require earmark sponsors to identify themselves.

Until September 2010, Flake issued a press release listing an "egregious earmark of the week" every Friday. Usually the earmark will be followed by Flake making a humorous comment; as an example, Rep. Flake once said of Congressman Jose Serrano's $150,000 earmark to fix plumbing in Italian restaurants, "I would argue this is one cannoli the taxpayer doesn't want to take a bite of." The "earmark of the week" releases were ended and replaced with the "So Just How Broke Are We?" series of releases. In March 2010, the House Appropriations Committee implemented rules to ban earmarks to for-profit corporations, a change Flake supported. "This is the best day we've had in a while," he said to the New York Times, which reported that approximately 1,000 such earmarks were authorized in the previous year, worth $1.7 billion.

Senator Flake’s opposition to earmarks is not only easy to understand, it’s laudable. But in retrospect, some people have started wondering whether it might be part of the reason why congress has become so “uncivil”. Their theory is straightforward: Earmarks were one more thing that could be offered as part of the negotiation for a congress member’s vote. One that’s particularly useful when you’re crossing party lines and the member is otherwise opposed to or at least unsure about the bill. You overcome their reluctance by, in essence, offering to “pay” them if it passed. It’s a basic law of economics that you get more of what you pay for and so naturally you ended up with more bipartisan support for bills which contained earmarks. Eliminate earmarks and you have less bipartisan support. And if civility means working together across party lines, that means you have less civility.

Now, I’m not here to say that earmarks are actually good. Or that banning them is solely responsible for the breakdown in civility and working across the aisle. Or to make any insinuation that Flake is a hypocrite, or that he screwed up. Rather, what I want to do is point out how complicated even a simple call for civility ends up being.

As I said, civility seemed to be the unofficial theme of the conference, so what did other people have to say on the subject? Well I just got done asserting that it was complicated, so I guess I should move to the speaker who offered a very simple definition of civility. This was Eric Dowdle, an artist who specializes in drawing very interesting landscapes and cityscapes and then selling them as puzzles. He defined civility as character plus diversity.

You may wonder what qualifies him to make such a definitive proclamation. (Though as a blogger with no especial qualifications myself, I don’t.) Or at least you may wonder what prompted the invitation to speak from BYU Management Society. Well Dowdle, in addition to being an artist, is the founder and chairman of the board for the proposed George Washington Museum of American History. This is an effort to assemble an exhibition of the 250 “Greatest Moments in American History” and then take them on tour of all 50 states in 2026 (the 250th year anniversary of the Declaration of Independence). After which it will have a permanent home in Utah. As you can imagine the Museum has many goals from increasing historical literacy, to a celebration of the Founders, but included in there is a goal to educate people on, what Dowdle feels, are the twin pillars of America: character and diversity. Which, when combined, create civility.

As you can imagine he is also worried about the ills of the nation and the increasing polarization. And he hopes that by educating people about these twin pillars that he will help bring about a return to civility, much like Senator Flake. And, once again, this is another clearly laudable goal, though I’m not sure that his definition entirely captures the full nuance of what civility is. That said, I nevertheless think that it captures something important about what civility means at the present political moment.

I’m a big fan of “character”, but I think it’s place in the equation leads to some weird conclusions. Would he say that people who push diversity, while ignoring civility, must therefore lack character? If so that would be a fairly incendiary claim, and if true would immediately lead to a question of what sort of character do they lack? What aspect of character is not present in their advocacy for diversity? Does character equal a respect for a certain set of ethics? Could it be extended to mean respect for the rule of law? On the other hand, and probably even more inflammatory, are we meant to conclude that people who civilly rail against diversity do it because they have a lot of character? It is interesting to ask what ramifications this equation has if taken to its extreme, but, unfortunately, I think it breaks down pretty quickly.

If we leave aside character, then I still think he makes an important point about the connection between diversity and civility, and the need for increasing civility as society becomes increasingly diverse. (In fact, if we hold character constant then this is certainly one way to read his formula.) And it’s also interesting to draw inspiration, as he clearly is, from the founding of the country. So much of what made it into the Constitution and the Bill of Rights was designed to create civility among diverse groups. In that vein, allow me to offer another equation, one that might have been on the minds of the founders: diversity minus civility equals violence. Before the American Revolution there was a lot of violence generated by ideological diversity, something which would have been on the minds of the founders. I refer you to the European Wars of Religion:

The conflicts began with the Knights' Revolt (1522), a minor war in the Holy Roman Empire. Warfare intensified after the Catholic Church began the Counter-Reformation in 1545 to counter the growth of Protestantism. The conflicts culminated in the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648), which devastated Germany and killed one-third of its population. The Peace of Westphalia (1648) put an end to the war by recognising three separate Christian traditions in the Holy Roman Empire: Roman Catholicism, Lutheranism, and Calvinism. Although many European leaders were 'sickened' by the religious bloodshed by 1648, religious wars continued to be waged in the post-Westphalian period until the 1710s.

I understand the explicitly religious wars were over by the time of the Revolution, but if you draw a graph from “killing one third of the population”, through continued bloodshed up until 1710, and zero it out at the election of JFK, who won despite people wondering if he was going to take orders from the Pope you’ll see that in 1776, things were still pretty heated, and the founders knew that the only way to avoid violence in the diverse republic they were creating was to bake a lot of rules for civility right into the Constitution.

This is not to say that we’ve always been civil, or that there hasn’t been violence, for example you may have heard of a little thing called the Civil War (which, despite its title was very uncivil). Further, this doesn’t mean that the rules the Founders added were perfect, or that they were were always followed. And it most especially doesn’t mean that there weren’t any trade-offs. A subject I’ll be returning to shortly. But, I think if you look back on things, especially relative to other nations at the same point in history. The US did pretty well at accommodating a diversity of nations and peoples and ideologies with a minimum of violence. In fact, it may be argued, we did so well that people no longer see the need for some of the rules the Founders came up with, in particular Freedom of Speech.

I’ve talked about free speech a lot in this space, and while I tend to be pretty vigorous in it’s defense, I can also acknowledge that much like the other two endeavors we’ve considered, defending free speech is laudable, but, particularly in this day and age, can be complicated as well. This also takes me to another of the speakers from the conference, McKay Coppins, a columnist for the Atlantic. I also picked up his book, The Wilderness: Deep Inside the Republican Party's Combative, Contentious, Chaotic Quest to Take Back the White House, and even had him sign it, though, once again, I haven’t had time to read it.

As a columnist you might imagine he is a strong supporter of free speech and opened his talk with a Thomas Jefferson quote that’s a favorite of journalists everywhere. (Back to the Founders!)

The way to prevent these irregular interpositions of the people is to give them full information of their affairs thro’ the channel of the public papers, & to contrive that those papers should penetrate the whole mass of the people. The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.

As I recall he only recited the last bit, but I think it’s worth quoting the first part, since one of the things which has definitely changed since the time of Jefferson is what “full information” means, what “channel” they get that through, and the way it “penetrates”. Which is to say, would Jefferson be as confident in saying, “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without social media or social media without government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” I suspect he might not.

As I said things have become more complicated, and Coppins did acknowledge that in his speech. In particular he talked about fake news, and the waning power of the larger media outlets. To combat this he urged us all to be individual media outlets. To civilly work to combat misinformation when we see it, and help move the national conversation in the direction of the truth. The Jeffersonian idea that more speech is preferable to less speech and that if we encourage as many people as possible to speak that this will create the “full information” necessary for truth to triumph.

I currently agree with Coppins that this strategy is probably the best way forward, but I also know that when presented with this strategy many people argue that it’s largely a continuation of the status quo and as such will allow those with the biggest microphone to continue to dominate the discussion, and that whatever power imbalance which currently exists will continue to exist. Given the overlap in our proposed strategy I was curious to get Coppins take on it, and asked him about it during the question and answer period. He pointed out that when you’re encouraging more speech you’re also encouraging those who haven’t had much of a voice. In fact, you may even offer them more encouragement, and that hopefully as this process continues it won’t be the same individuals and organizations doing all the talking.

All of this finally takes us to the arguments against civility. As I already mentioned, there are those, traditionally on the left, who feel that civility is just an excuse to continue to silence and oppress those who are already powerless. For example this quote my friend Stuart Parker, who’s running for office in British Columbia:

I read a post by a fellow socialist running for office today and I feel I need to make a point about calls for civility: liberalism is about civility. Socialism is not. Socialism is about meeting people who are being screwed-over by the system and hearing them out. And a crucial part of hearing them out is hearing their anger.

And we, as socialists, should share that anger. A full debate, a debate that encompasses the global extinction event, the affordability crisis and the opioid epidemic is a debate that confronts pain, death and loss. It confronts injustice. Our discourse today should not seek to suppress people's justified rage but to channel it, to hone it, to express it with precision without losing one iota of the urgency and conviction it contains.

British Columbians are outraged. And they are seeking candidates to articulate their rage for them. Let's not let them down.

Instinctively you’ve got to have sympathy for this position. But as he points out, liberalism, particularly classical liberalism, the liberalism of the Founders, does place a high degree of importance on civility, and I don’t think we should casually toss that aside. It’s been a long time since we’ve experienced true incivility, and as I pointed out in a previous post, we imagine that we can tolerate small amounts of incivility, and censorship and it won’t lead to violence or repression. Or that if it does it will be righteous violence and repression of only evil people. But that’s not how it works. Rather once things start it’s less like a righteous cleansing and more like Godzilla trudging back and forth through your city. In other words, once those norms get broken it becomes difficult to draw a line. I think this is the lesson the founders had learned from the several hundred years before the revolution, and it’s the lesson they tried to impart to us.

To be fair, it is not only people on the left that have turned against civility. It’s also happening on the right, particularly the alt-right, who insofar as they have a point, believe that conservatives have very civilly and very politely lost every single battle in the culture war. Whether or not this is true (though I’ve already written about how it’s basically true) it doesn’t necessarily mean that we should abandon civility. (Though, i guess, there’s always a chance it might mean that…) In fact if it means anything I would opine that it means we need to be more civil and less censorious, especially with respect to the typical Trump supporter, lest we inadvertently confirm this exact belief, the idea that there is no point in being civil. Of course, as far as I can tell this is the exact opposite of the direction we’re headed. In fact, I just barely saw that apparently James Woods has been locked out of Twitter. (Though, as usual with stuff that just happened this may turn out later to be incorrect.)

Putting everything I’ve said together I suppose my central point is that the current situation is more complicated than it may at first appear, and that a simple return to civility may be more difficult and less effective than people think. But, that we should push for it anyway, because the alternative has the potential to be much, much worse.

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Every week I try to civilly and with humor ask for donations, but perhaps the week I write about civility should be the one week I abandon all that and just say, “GIVE ME MONEY!” Or maybe not.