Philippa Kaur

The website of the America First Secretary of State Coalition (“America First SOS”) doesn’t include the word “democracy” anywhere. It goes hard on “integrity”, mentioning “voter” and “election” integrity four times in about 800 words. But the Coalition isn’t interested in democracy.

America First SOS aims to get “America First” (that is, Trumpian Make America Great Again) Republicans elected as secretaries of state across key battleground states like Arizona and Nevada, precisely so they can influence or even change election processes and outcomes in the lead-up to the 2024 presidential elections.

The America First candidates will, if elected, “counter and reverse electoral fraud”. Their openly stated objective, in other words, is for state-level election officials to both reverse-engineer Trump’s election loss in 2020 (never mind that this is impossible) and ensure that he (or his favoured candidate) takes out the next one.

Across the United States, at every level of politics, democracy is under attack. America First SOS is just one example. While the November midterm elections are being treated by political analysts largely as a standard horse race, they are nothing of the sort. What happens in November will be a critical indicator of the strength of the United States’ political institutions. And the signs are not good.

Review: The Unfolding – A.M. Homes (Granta)

“Democracy,” as one of the characters in A.M. Homes’ brilliant new novel puts it, “is fragile, more fragile than any of us are comfortable admitting”.

The Unfolding is fiction: a made-up story of American politics. But just like in the real United States, the lines between truth and fantasy are perilously thin.

Homes’ main character, the “Big Guy”, is a businessman and lifelong Republican – not unlike Jim Marchant, the Republican candidate for secretary of state in Nevada and cofounder of America First SOS.

Both Marchant and Homes’ Big Guy came of age in Ronald Reagan’s America. They lived through the triumph of the end of the Cold War, the blip of the Clinton years, then the Republican glory of the 2000 election and the George W. Bush years. So they are accustomed to wielding power, and they do not take well to having that power threatened.

Read more:
American exceptionalism: the poison that cannot protect its children from violent death

Rich Republicans, ‘saving democracy’

The Unfolding begins on election night, 2008. The Big Guy is in Phoenix, Arizona, attending John McCain’s election night party. In the book, it’s always “Phoenix” – not the election, not the fact that

a Black man just got elected president of the United States. Oh my fucking god.

It’s “Phoenix” that was “the tipping point”. Because in the book – as in so much of real politics – the experiences of rich, old white men are almost always centred.

The book follows the Big Guy from the night of November 4 2008, until January 20, 2009 – President Obama’s inauguration day – as he and his network of other rich Republican men construct intricate and secretive plans to, as they see it, save American democracy.

The Unfolding begins in Phoenix, with Republican presidential candidate John McCain losing the 2008 election.
Chris Carlson/AP

The Big Guy and his network never really explain how it is that “democracy” is under threat, because they know that it isn’t, not really (not in 2008, anyway). What is under threat is power – specifically, the power of rich men to control American politics. As one of the Big Guy’s interlocutors puts it to him: “That’s the part that makes you really anxious, the idea that old white men will be obsolete.” The Big Guy replies, “You’re not wrong.”

Outside the context of the novel, this dialogue might seem a little ham-fisted, and it is. But therein lies its genius. Homes’ ability to tap into the language of American politics, history and culture – its simultaneous complexity and embarrassing simplicity – is astounding in its brilliance.

Homes’ capture, through fiction, of the backlash to the election of Barack Obama and its continuing reverberations, is the greatest strength of this book. That backlash (or, more accurately, “whitelash”) is responsible for Trump and so many white Americans’ embrace of, in President Biden’s real-life words, “semi-fascism”.

To Homes’ characters, living in the period between Bush’s election loss and the inauguration of the first Black president, “It’s not just that Obama won, it’s as though the founding fathers were assassinated.” They felt (and perhaps still feel) they’d watched

a generation of hard work flushed down the toilet. That’s what it is – it’s not four years, it’s not nothing, it’s an entire generation of men who worked to build this country and now it’s flushed, that’s what happened.

The Big Guy can hardly bear it; he’s watching his worlds, political and personal, collapse around him. To his like-minded friends, he insists that “each of us has worked too hard to leave this earth without having made a lasting impression”.

The Big Guy and his network are distraught, too, because “there is no succession plan – there is nothing in place to say who will run the world after they are gone”. They don’t have any sons.

A.M. Homes’ novel ends at Barack Obama’s presidential inauguration.
Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA

Read more:
Jared Kushner’s memoir is a self-serving account of a hero’s triumphs but contains a great deal of fascinating detail

Personal and political crises

This mingling of the personal and the political finds life in one of the book’s best characters, the Big Guy’s teenage daughter, Meghan. She, too, is shaken by the events of November 2008, as everything she thought she knew – about her country, and her own life – begins to fall down around her.

Meghan’s navigation of these dual crises, and her own changing identity, often finds its own expression in historical thinking. Both she and the Big Guy love American history; they’re obsessed by it.

One of their favourite games is exchanging obscure facts about the Big Guy’s favourite president, George Washington. They have made a family tradition of visiting historical landmarks. But it’s in these places where Meghan’s uncertainty grows. Driving past the site of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Meghan wonders if

the grassy knoll is less of a hill or a mound, and more of a bump, or at this point in time – a blip? Is that true or has the scale of things changed? Does a place compact and get smaller over time? Does history shrink?

Meghan’s complex musings on the nature of history, her “fear that truth is an elusive thing, that history is not fixed in time and space but subject to fluctuation and interpretation and to the possibility that there are other stories”, stands in stark contrast to her father’s more insistent, one-dimensional view of the past and the present. While Meghan wants “to make history, to live in history, and to be the history of the future”, her father is more interested in controlling it.

Musing on the very first president, and his decision to step down after two terms, the Big Guy waxes lyrical on Washington’s selflessness, his patriotism, and his refusal to be “a king”. “What did America not want to be?” asks the Big Guy. “A kingdom.”

The Big Guy, consciously or not, exposes the contradiction at the heart of American power. The Big Guy and his friends don’t want a king, but they do want to be kingmakers. They don’t want democracy, not really. Or perhaps they do, but they want the version George Washington lived – a democracy reserved for rich, white men. The way, as they see it, American democracy was originally conceived.

Horrified by Obama’s election, The Big Guy wants a George Washington democracy – one reserved for rich, white men.
Lewis Whyld/AP

If this sounds familiar, that’s because it is. The Unfolding cuts to the heart of a broken American politics. It’s billed as a “black comedy”, but I never once found the book funny. It was far too real, and too brilliant in its fictional diagnosis of American malaise. Homes captures the horror and the stupidity of American power.

Throughout the book, we’re never really sure if the Big Guy and his network can be taken seriously. When they say meaningless things like, “Our plan will be organized around the concept of rings of power and authority with an inner circle”, are we to believe that this is a brilliant organisational strategy? Are these men executing a supremely complex game of three-dimensional chess? Or are they just rich, mediocre-but-entitled white men exploiting a system that was always rigged in their favour? Maybe it’s both.

Will the Big Guy’s network succeed in their plans? Will America First SOS succeed? Will Trump come back? Will American democracy collapse? Has it already?

The Unfolding opens with the oft-repeated line, “It can’t happen here.” (“It”, in this case, being the fall of the United States to fascism, riffing off another work of fiction, Sinclair Lewis’s titular 1935 novel.) As the lines between fantasy and reality increasingly blur, A.M. Homes offers us a brilliant, frightening reminder that “it” just might happen. Or that either way, “there’s shit on the horizon.” More

Regardless of whether they live in a red state or a blue state, identify as Democrats or Republicans, or claim to be ideologically liberal or conservative, Americans have one thing in common.

They are angry – especially about this year’s midterm elections.

Americans’ anger is driven by contemporary political events.

Republicans are enraged by troubling economic indicators and perceived spikes in crime. Democrats, meanwhile, are angry about the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned abortion rights enshrined by Roe v. Wade.

Politicians on both the left and the right are eager to capitalize on this anger. In fact, Democratic and Republican politicians alike deliberately and repeatedly seek to elicit voters’ anger. And, predictably, this anger leaves voters in a sour mood.

Recent polls reflect this reality.

Whipped into an emotional frenzy, Americans are likely to believe that things in the country have pretty seriously gotten off on the wrong track. So, too, do Americans believe that their preferred political party loses more often than not in legislative disputes.

Why, then, do politicians provoke anger if this emotional state leads to such pessimism? As a scholar who studies American politics and the author of “American Rage: How Anger Shapes Our Politics,” I believe the reason for this is quite simple: Anger provides ample benefits to those politicians who are able to use it most skillfully.

Angry voters, loyal voters

To begin, anger encourages Americans to vote.

Across a range of political settings, angry people are more likely to participate than those who are not angry. With elections increasingly being determined by which side can best motivate its base into showing up to vote, anger has become a powerful tool in a politician’s arsenal.

Former U.S. President Donald Trump attends a ‘Save America’ rally on Oct. 22, 2022, in Robstown, Texas.
Brandon Bell/Getty Images

In addition to its propensity to boost participation, anger has been shown to play a role in shaping individuals’ decisions at the ballot box.

The angrier voters are at the opposing political party, the more likely they are to vote for their own party. Guided by the mantra that an angry voter is a loyal voter, politicians have a strong incentive to agitate the American public – incumbents and challengers alike.

Anger and negativity, rather than adoration and optimism, drive contemporary American political behavior.

Political anger and social consequences

Though politicians’ strategy of appealing to the public’s anger brings them electoral benefits, this anger is not without costs. In fact, anger can cause Americans to lose trust in the government and alter their views about the opposing political party’s legitimacy.

Alarmingly, political anger has consequences that extend beyond how Americans view their governing institutions or the opposing political party.

When American voters are angry about politics, they are inclined to avoid social interactions or social events where they are likely to come into contact with those whose political leanings differ from their own.

I have found that anger leads Americans to avoid assisting neighbors with various chores, such as watering houseplants or watching over property when the neighbor is out of town, if the neighbor supports the opposing political party.

In this illustration, two angry politicians from opposing sides are screaming at each other.
Alashi

Political anger also can lead Americans to refuse requests to go on a date with those whose political leanings are opposed to their own.

Most concerning, political anger has the ability to alter Americans’ friendships and familial ties.

When angry about politics, Americans are more likely to express a desire to end friendships with those who support the other political party. So, too, do angry individuals express a desire to reduce – or completely eliminate – contact with family members whose political preferences deviate from their own.

Wither democracy?

Anger’s ability to cause individuals to socially polarize has potentially drastic ramifications for the health of American democracy. Crucially, social polarization precludes opportunities to form ties and build relationships with people from diverse backgrounds.

In societies divided along many lines, these interactions and relationships are essential to a healthy and functioning democracy. Among other things, such relationships forge bonds of mutual understanding and facilitate a climate in which good-faith cooperation is possible.

As American politics becomes increasingly fragmented along racial, religious and ideological lines, the need to form these cross-partisan social ties will become more pressing.

Anger’s ability to induce social polarization, combined with politicians’ overwhelming incentives to appeal to our emotional fury, means that this will be no easy task.

This story incorporates material from a story originally published on Sept. 10, 2020. More

Donald Trump has been colonising the world’s attention for years, via television, on social media and in books. Ironically, given Trump likes books about as much as he does germs, more than 100 books about him are listed on Wikipedia, ranging from biographies and exposés to paeans of praise (think his former campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski) and scathing analyses of his presidency.

One work, Plaintiff in Chief, concerns the gob-smacking number of lawsuits Trump and his businesses have engaged in – 3500 – and is already well out of date, having been published in 2019. There is even a book about all the Trump books. Its nicely punning title, What were we thinking?, might also be said to apply to the publishers of Carlos Lozada’s book although that would undervalue his insights, and those of the authors whose work he examines.

Review: Confidence Man: The making of Donald Trump and the breaking of America –Maggie Haberman (HarperCollins)

With the application of all this intellectual muscle, though, what do we still need – or want – to know about Donald Trump? All of us probably do need to know the likelihood Trump will run again for president and, worse, win. On that hinges the future of democracy in a global superpower along with prospects for real action combating the effects of climate change.

Read more:
US elections: November ballot will test whether Trump is ready to bounce back

The answer to this need-to-know question is undeniably important, but I still want to know whether Trump actually believes the 2020 presidential election was stolen. Is there some psychological wound from his childhood that renders him unable to bear loss? Or is his unblinking refusal to accept the election result yet another example of his lifelong habit of lying and grifting to get his own way?

If the answer is the former, I care less about what might have happened to Donald as a toddler than that he has managed to persuade about two thirds of Republican voters to his view, according to polls analysed by Politifact.

If the answer is the latter, which bespeaks a truly chilling level of cynical disregard for the consequences of his actions, it immediately raises another question. Exactly how has Trump been able to persuade so many Republicans to believe his lies, despite all evidence to the contrary, including Trump’s legal team losing 64 out of 65 cases brought contesting the result?

I ask these questions following publication of Maggie Haberman’s Confidence Man: the making of Donald Trump and the breaking of America. Since the mid-1990s, Haberman has reported on Trump, first for the Murdoch-owned tabloid, The New York Post, then for its rival, The New York Daily News, and, since 2015, for The New York Times.

The driving argument of her book is that to understand Trump you need to understand the New York real-estate and property development world in the 1960s, 70s and 80s. What he learnt there, she argues, about business, politics and people, was the template of behaviour he took into the White House.

Trump, real estate mogul, in 1985.
Marty Lederhandler/AP

‘False’, ‘Totally false’, ‘Fake News’

During two campaigns and four years in office, writes Haberman, Trump treated the country like a version of New York City’s five boroughs. His aides soon realised he had imagined a presidency that functioned like one of the once-powerful Democratic Party machines in those boroughs. A single boss controlled everything in this kingdom and knew his support alone could ensure electoral success for others. This was an “us” versus “them” realm where racial dynamics changed from one block to the next.

The argument has explanatory power. But so too, to take one example, does James Poniewozik’s view, in his 2019 book, Audience of One, that the key to Trump’s worldview is his symbiotic relationship with television. Trump did seem to govern in much the same way as he behaved in The Apprentice, the reality TV program he starred in – making contestants beholden to his every whim and impulse.

As Poniewozik puts it, the Trump administration soon became a “dogpile of competitors, cronies and relatives throttling one another daily for survival”.

Trump greets contestants on The Apprentice in 2004.
Jennifer Szymaszek/AAP

Haberman tells readers that on top of her daily reporting, she conducted 250 interviews for the book, including three with Trump, either in person or in writing. For the latter, Trump annotated her list of questions in his customary black “Sharpie” pen with comments like “False”, “Totally false” and “Fake News”.

Because Haberman has known Trump for so long she has been derided as a schill. Because she enjoyed good access to him on the campaign trail and during his presidency she has been called a “Trump whisperer”. She may at times have been both, but like almost any journalist who has reported on Trump her work has been labelled “fake news”.

She has borne, too, Trump’s seemingly casual but calibrated barbs: “Did you ever notice that her glasses are always smudged?” he said to his aides.

More precisely, she reports him saying this to aides, but there is no source for the comment in the book’s end-notes. Does that mean he didn’t say it? Does Haberman take the same insouciant approach here to sourcing as the authors of Plagued, political journalists Simon Benson and Geoff Chambers, did in their recent book about the Morrison government’s response to the pandemic?

Like the authors of Plagued too, Haberman has fielded criticism for withholding information from her newspaper readers and saving it for her book. (Benson and Chambers knew about Morrison’s multiple ministerial portfolios but held onto that information for up to two years before it became public.)

Read more:
In Plagued, journalists have traded their independence for access, resulting in a kind of political pornography

In Confidence Man Haberman recounts Trump telling one aide days after the 2020 presidential election, “I’m just not going to leave”, and another, “We’re never leaving. How can you leave when you won an election?” (She also reports him in other conversations seeming to accept he had lost but does not probe the contradiction further.) Should she have reported those comments at the time rather than saving them for her book?

The information gathered by Haberman was clearly important and could, perhaps should, have been published in The New York Times contemporaneously but we don’t know the circumstances in which it was obtained. Perhaps the information was only revealed on condition it would not be published immediately. There is little doubt that people being interviewed for a book published well after the news cycle has pedalled on are willing to speak more candidly. If the aim of a book is to provide context and nuance about contested current events, then the trade-off between news now and understanding later may be worth it.

Responding to the criticism that she had witheld vital information from the public, a spokesman for The New York Times said,

Maggie Haberman took leave from The Times to write her book. In the course of reporting the book, she shared considerable newsworthy information with The Times. Editors decided what news was best suited for our news report.

Devastating observations

Returning to the “smudged glasses” barb, we know Trump has publicly insulted women and journalists countless times. The comment has the ring of truth, so it is probably not as important that this quote was unattributed. The end-notes of Confidence Man do run to 63 pages (providing a good deal more information than the sparse end-notes in Plagued.)

At several points Haberman also tells us about news stories she has written, how they were received, those whose accuracy was later vindicated and, occasionally, those that contained errors of fact or context. In other words, she is reflective and concerned to be as fair as possible in her reporting and judgements.

When Haberman’s book was released in early October, New York magazine listed 22 revelations from it while acknowledging they “feel less like bombshells and more like laundry lists of erratic presidential behaviour”.

For many readers the coverage of New York City’s property world will be unfamiliar, but the bulk of the book covers Trump’s political career and is very familiar: the 2016 campaign, the presidency, the unceasing stream of controversies – large, small or confected – the impeachment trials, the pandemic response, the 2020 campaign and the January 6 riots at the Capitol.

President Donald Trump as he returns to the Oval Office after speaking on the Ellipse on January 6, 2021.
House Select Committee/AP

Familiar though these events are, their sheer volume means they are not discussed in any great depth and what discussion there is does not venture beyond the political journalist’s inside-the-Beltway frame of reference. This can be frustrating but the value of reading Confidence Man, in my view, is not in the explosive revelations or the private, never-seen-before details. It is how Haberman uses anecdotes to build up a devastating picture of character.

It is true there is some extraordinary material in the book but Haberman does not badge it up Bob Woodward-style. Instead, she quietly but frequently enough for it to look like a deliberate strategy, drops in eye-popping anecdotes and devastating observations about Trump’s behaviour.

You have to be on the lookout for them because they are nestled within 597 pages of detailed coverage of his life and career. Some come from her own reporting while others are drawn from earlier journalists’ and authors’ work.

Trump as a child.
Photo: Confidence Man

Haberman spends little space on Trump’s childhood but enough to show his bullying began early: a neighbour in Queens, New York, was horrified when her baby sitting in a playpen in the backyard was pelted with rocks over the fence from a five-year-old Trump. Later, Trump proudly recalled gluing together his brother Robert’s blocks to build his own tower.

That Trump is profligate with others’ money but tight with his own is well known but Haberman reminds us that one of his early antagonists, the satirical magazine, Spy, used to mail cheques to his office for steadily diminishing amounts to see whether he would keep cashing them; he did, down to one for 13 cents.

When the Trumps moved into the White House in 2017, Donald loved being able to press a button on his desk to order a valet to bring him a Diet Coke. He remade the White House to suit his tastes, installing plenty of television sets, even in the bathroom, and telling guests he had renovated the entire area, including the toilet.

“You understand what I mean,” he said to one visitor, who interpreted it to mean he did not want to use the same bathroom as his African-American predecessor. Apart from the apparent racism, Trump’s statement was also untrue as officials told Haberman it was customary for toilet seats in the White House to be replaced between one administration and the next.

Trump may not be a book reader but, Haberman reports, he has near perfect recall of anything written about him in the media. He knew little and cared less about policies or how government actually operated but staff noticed he absorbed policies far better from television coverage than from their briefings.

Trump, pictured here on Air Force One in 2018, absorbed information better from television than from briefings.
Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP

They noticed his “singular interest” in whether those representing him on television appeared persuasive, and on their appearance full stop. He would comment on the lighting, the make-up, the women’s dresses, their hair. Trump had always been preternaturally aware of the appearance of things. Sleeping over at a friend’s house during primary school, he earnestly commented on the “wonderful” quality of the bed-sheets.

Extra ice cream and special glassware

Trump himself noticed how he could say almost anything and supporters at his MAGA rallies would forgive him. Haberman compares this revelation – and two others – to the scene in Jurassic Park when the velociraptors learn how to open doors.

Similar penny-dropping moments happened when Trump learned how to communicate by Twitter unburdened of staff controls and when he discovered presidential pardons. “For Trump, who never really accepted the fact that Congress was a separate and equal branch of government, the ability to deliver ‘justice’ on a case-by-case basis hit like a revelation,” writes Haberman.

The Faustian pact Trump appeared to strike with his MAGA base, though, was that just as they would forgive him if he shot someone on Fifth Avenue, as he infamously remarked, so he would shape his administration to suit their every demand, no matter how misconceived, extreme or counter-productive they might be.

Trump’s callousness and cruelty is well documented. (Haberman reports that one of the very few times Trump has cried was in private after his father, Fred, died.)
When he began building the notorious wall on the southern border of the US to keep out Latino immigrants and asylum seekers, he urged officials to put spikes on top and to paint it black so as to burn the skin of those trying to climb the wall.

John Kelly, one of the revolving door of chiefs of staff who tried and failed to bring order to the Trump administration, had a son in the military who died while on duty in Afghanistan, and Kelly had been a general himself. Once, when he and Trump were standing together at the Arlington National Cemetery grave site where Kelly’s son was buried, Trump wondered aloud why anyone would want to join the military.

Kelly, left, and Trump in 2017.
Evan Vucci/AP

Trump’s petty, venal behaviour has also been well documented, but the details Haberman has marshalled can still surprise. After winning the 2016 election, he invited a group of moderate Democrats to join him for dinner to discuss various pieces of legislation, but he couldn’t help needling them throughout. For dessert, he made sure he received one more scoop of ice cream than any of his guests.

More importantly, as early as 23 February 2020 Trump was not only aware of the dangers of COVID-19 but was taking precautions against it. On a trip to India Trump was reluctant to eat, pushing food around his plate and drinking only from “special glassware that he said Melania [Trump] had the White House staff pack for the trip, primarily for fear of contracting the coronavirus”.

During the pandemic he sometimes acknowledged the seriousness of COVID but mostly he downplayed or denied its impact on public health, with catastrophic results.

A deeper malaise?

Carlos Lozada, in his survey of all those Trump books, identifies many that seek to explain the Trump phenomenon through a single overriding cause, and he finds that limiting. Haberman tacitly acknowledges this when she quotes Trump saying he always aimed to “put some show business into the real estate business”. When he did, she writes, Trump learnt that “he could win as much press for projects he never completed as those he did”.

Poniewozik, from his vantage point as a television critic, makes the same observation: namely, that Trump enjoyed more success playing the role of a business titan on television than actually being one, before citing Fran Leibowitz’s acid line that Trump is “a poor person’s idea of a rich person”.

Closing Haberman’s book, I do think Trump knew he had lost the election quite soon after the results came in. Just how much his years in New York’s property development world shaped that decision is hard to say. It seems part of the explanation but only part.

In my mind her book jostles alongside Poniewozik’s work and for that matter, James Zirin’s Plaintiff in Chief, which underscores how Trump sees the law not as a “system of rules to be obeyed” but “as a potent weapon to be used against his adversaries”. We’re still seeing this play out in Trump’s unremitting efforts to stave off multiple investigations of his business and his behaviour.

Lozada prefers explanations of Trump as a symptom of longer term problems in American politics and society, an approach exemplified in BBC correspondent and historian Nick Bryant’s excellent book, When America Stopped Being Great.
Surely both explanatory approaches need to be deployed.

Trump may be a symptom of a deeper malaise afflicting American democracy but has there ever been a symptom quite like him? In 2020 the majority of voters opted to be cured of their Trump symptoms, but the treatment failed and the bacillus rages on. More

When former Vice President Mike Pence declared, in a speech to a conservative group, that “democracy depends on heavy doses of civility,” several attendees stood up and walked out of the Georgetown University auditorium.

That speech came just three weeks before the midterm elections as commentators and candidates around the country were calling for greater civility in politics.

This is no surprise.

Civility is popular with the American people. Across the political spectrum, citizens agree that politics has become dangerously toxic, and they think the problem is worsening.

That is one political issue we all agree on – democracy needs to regain civility. If it’s going to, the effort has to start with each of us individually, rather than waiting for someone else to make the first move.

Bipartisan hypocrisy

This unanimity that more civility is needed in politics may be an illusion.

Citizens tend to lay the blame for political incivility solely on their political opponents. They want civility in politics, but say they think compromise is a one-way street.

They want politicians to work together, but also want the opposition to capitulate.

Former Vice President Mike Pence visits Fox News on Oct. 19, 2022.
Shannon Finney/Getty Images

They value civility, but hold that their partisan rivals are uniformly immoral, dishonest and close-minded.

Pence reflected these us-versus-them attitudes himself during his Georgetown speech when he claimed that powerful institutions have “locked arms to advance a woke agenda designed to advance the policies and beliefs of the American left.”

Defining civility

Despite the multiple pleas for civility, little is said about what civility is.

That probably explains why civility is so popular.

Each citizen gets to define the term in their own way, and no one believes their own side to be uncivil. But if we believe that the U.S. needs to restore civility, we must define it.

It cannot be the demand to always remain calm in political debate. It’s generally good to keep one’s cool, of course. But when engaging in political disagreement, it’s not always possible to do so.

Our political opinions typically reflect deeply held values and commitments about justice. We tend to regard those who disagree with us about such matters as not merely on the other side of the issue, but on the wrong side. We should expect disagreements about important matters to get heated.

Civility might be better understood as the avoidance of undue hostility and gratuitous animosity in political debate. This could be something as simple as calling out inflated rhetoric, as John McCain famously did during his presidential campaign when his supporters claimed that Barack Obama was untrustworthy and not an American.

This idea acknowledges that heated debates can be appropriate within reason. It allows for some degree of antagonism, while at the same time prohibiting unnecessary vitriol.

In a sense, this makes civility a matter of judging whether our subject’s behavior calls for an escalation of hostility. The problem is that, when it comes to evaluating the behavior of our opponents, we are remarkably poor judges.

Partisan civility

Americans’ assessment of political behavior tightly tracks our partisan allegiances.

We cut our allies slack while holding our opponents to very high standards. When our allies engage in objectionable behavior, we excuse them. But when members of the opposition engage in the same behavior, we condemn them. In one experiment, when partisans were told of an ally stealing an opposing candidate’s campaign signs off neighborhood lawns, they chalked it up to political integrity. But when those same partisans were told that an opponent had stolen their signs, they condemned the act as undemocratic.

We over-ascribe hostility, dishonesty and untrustworthiness to our political opponents. Consequently, we will almost always see fit to escalate hostility when interacting with our opposition. When civility is understood as the avoidance of unnecessary rancor, it fails.

I’ve argued in my recent book “Sustaining Democracy” that civility isn’t really about how we conduct disagreements with political opponents.

Instead, civility has to do with how people formulate their own political ideas.

The GOP elephant and Democratic donkey are going toe-to-toe on Election Day.
Getty Images

We are uncivil when our political opinions do not take due account of the perspectives, priorities and concerns of our fellow citizens.

To better understand this idea, consider that in a democratic society, citizens share political power as political equals. As democratic citizens, we have the responsibility to act in ways that respect the equality of our fellow citizens, even when we disagree with their politics.

In my view, one way to respect their equality is to give due consideration to their values and preferences.

Of course, this does not require that we water down our own political commitments – or always try to meet our opponents halfway.

It calls only for a sincere attempt to consider their perspectives when devising our own.

People are civil when we can explain our political opinions to our political opponents in ways that are responsive to their rival ideas.

A civility test

Here is a simple three-part test for civility:

First, take one of your strongest political views, and then try to figure out what your smartest partisan opponent might say about it.

Second, identify a political idea that is key to your opponent and then develop a lucid argument that supports it.

Third, identify a major policy favored by the other side that you could regard as permissible for government – despite your opposition.

If you struggle to perform those tasks, that means one has a feeble grasp on the range of responsible political opinion.

When we cannot even imagine a cogent political perspective that stands in opposition to our own, we can’t engage civilly with our fellow citizens. More