Restaurants and civility

I'm of two minds about the matter of the Red Hen rejection of the awful Sarah Sanders' group.

I am sympathetic to the views of David Roberts and others that establishment media like the Washington Post editorialising that this is a unwarranted breakdown of civility is rich hypocrisy when she works for a President who not only trashed civility and the norms of American democracy during the campaign, but continues to encourage his cult base to an authoritarian mindset.   The media has allowed the normalisation of Trump's mindset that is so obviously dangerous to nation's politics that getting uptight about a restaurant's rejection of one of the key Trump enablers is to have a distorted set of priorities.  

Zack Beauchamp runs a similar argument, but based more on Trump's trashing of the very concept of truth as the danger.   Here's his argument:

Incivility in the Trump era isn’t about rude tweets. It’s about lies. 

To understand what Sanders’s defenders are getting wrong about the dinner incident, let’s get straight on the difference between “incivility” in politics and simple rudeness. Our guide here will be John Rawls, by all accounts the greatest American political philosopher of the 20th century.

A major topic of Rawls’s work was the problem of political disagreement: How is it possible to have a democracy, a government allegedly for and by the people, when people disagree so much among themselves? Rawls attempted to answer this question in one of his major works, an extremely long tome titled Political Liberalism. 

The core of his answer, to simplify it dramatically, is that democracy depends on a certain set of principles that almost everyone agrees with. These are principles that only “reasonable” people (not Nazis, for example) can accept — ideas like “all citizens deserve to be treated equally” and “it’s wrong to imprison people on the basis of faith.”

For this system to work, Rawls argued, public debate must be free and open for people to clearly explain how their policy convictions can be justified according to the shared beliefs at the heart of a democratic society. Rawls called the obligation to adhere to these rules of discourse “the duty of civility”: If citizens in general, and politicians especially, hide and obfuscate their arguments, then people’s ability to give their informed consent to the administration disappears.

Our foremost political philosopher, in short, didn’t see “civility” in politics as identical to politeness in everyday conversation. Rather, political civility is about treating members of the opposition like reasonable people. It seems more “civil,” in this view, to honestly state disagreements with individuals, even impolitely, than to try to trick them.

Rawls never really engaged with the possibility that a democratic government might make dishonesty one of its core political principles. But as my colleague Matt Yglesias has argued at length, that is what President Donald Trump has done — using a complete disregard for the truth as a tactic for advancing his agenda and keeping his base loyal. 

The sheer breadth of this assault is jaw-dropping; according to the Toronto Star’s database of Trump lies, since becoming president Trump has made at least 1,726 verifiably false statements, a clip of more than three a day. The New York Times compared Trump’s record to Obama’s, and found a huge discrepancy: “In his first 10 months, Trump told nearly six times as many falsehoods as Obama did during his entire presidency.”

Sarah Sanders’s job as White House press secretary makes her especially complicit in this agenda.

Because the president lies constantly, a major part of her job is defending those lies — either covering for them, deflecting them, or lying herself to cover for them. Merely doing her job makes Sanders (because of her boss’s uniquely hostile approach to the truth) uncivil according to Rawls’s terms. 

The Trump administration is attacking the very heart of a democratic political system. And Sanders, by aggressively repeating and defending Trump’s lies, is a vital part of this machine.

On the other hand:   it seems a given that in private, most Republican politicians know that Trump is an idiot and is terrible for the nation long term, but they are too cowered to argue with his base that they are wrong.

If the hope for the nation is for a Republican revolt against their nominal leader, encouraging a mass uprising of harassment of all Trump administration figures regardless of whether they are engaged in private life or not may well make dealing with the idiot base harder, not easier.

I mean, look - the base already thinks that the Left must be destroyed for the sake of civilisation - and that's just from watching the news, let alone seeing a protest on the street that inconveniences them.

It's a bit of a conundrum really - are Trump supporters so self deluded that telling them in public that they are offensive, self deluded nuts will make their condition worse?    They are dangerous too, what with their love of guns and desire amongst a significant number to see actual civil war as a way of winning the culture war that they have really already lost.

I don't know.    Certainly I don't want to see riots - they routinely play into the hands of the Right.

But I do hate the normalisation of Trump rhetoric too. 

I'll have to think about it some more....

Update:  from David Corn: