Philippa Kaur

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

In January 2017, Donald Trump’s advisor Kellyanne Conway was quizzed on White House press secretary Sean Spicer’s false claims about the number of attendees at the president’s inauguration. When pressed on why Spicer would “utter a provable falsehood”, Conway said that Spicer was offering “alternative facts”.

Her wording was widely characterised as “Orwellian”. Everywhere from Slate to the New York Times to USA Today, journalists were linking the new administration to George Orwell’s dystopian fiction. Less than a week after Conway’s claim, the sales of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four had gone up an estimated 9,500%.

In a serious case of “I know you are but what am I?”, Republicans have gotten in on the act, accusing the left of being the fulfilment of Orwell’s dark prophesy. In April this year, for instance, Donald Trump Jr. tweeted: “Historically, was there ever a despotic regime that didn’t have the equivalent of a Ministry of Truth?”

Almost everyone in every quarter sees Orwellian undertones in the manoeuvrings of their opponents. Like Elvis, Orwell has been spotted everywhere.

But we should be suspicious, not simply because the designation is thrown around so freely and is plastic enough to fit almost all political phenomena indifferently, but because one of the legacies of Nineteen Eighty-Four itself is to leave us with a more finely tuned sense of what such propaganda looks like. Orwellian strategies are harder to propagate because of, well, the overwhelming success of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The Orwellian paradox

Some historical nuance is required. Orwell was responding to mid-twentieth century political regimes – Stalinist Russia, in particular. He was ringing the alarm bells on a new phenomenon: state control had moved beyond speech to thought and perception. Winston Smith, the protagonist of Nineteen Eighty-Four, reflects:

The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.

There is a paradox here.

Propaganda is a mode of communication – pervasive, insistent, controlled. Orwell shows it flooding the airwaves, invading every workspace and living room through the screens on which the image of Big Brother is ever-present. Yet the goal of this kind of propaganda is to move beyond the phase of control through language to a regime of thought control where such communication has become redundant.

The world of Big Brother is austere in every way – colourless, devoid of all entertainments and sensory pleasures – so language itself is subject to the principle of reduction and elimination. The Party officials in charge of Newspeak are in the business of “cutting language down to the bone”. They are destroying scores of words every day so that “thoughtcrime” will ultimately become impossible, because there will be no means of articulating it, even inside the confines of your own mind.

Thought is already being suppressed in the novel through an embargo on logic and evidence, which starts with a simple reversal of anything that might be regarded as an established truth. This means, conversely, that the regime of Big Brother is threatened by any and every expression of reality-based knowledge. And so:

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two makes four. If that is granted, all else follows.

Big Brother’s propaganda is thus a self-eliminating program, working constantly and assiduously to make itself redundant. Eventually, there will be no words to protest with, or even to think with; there will be no perceptions to express and no realities to intrude upon the counterfactual world the Party is creating.

The counter-Orwellian paradox

The principles of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring), which began to take hold in Soviet culture from the end of the “real” year 1984, served to dismantle the regime that prevailed in the USSR for much of the 20th century. Alternatives became possible again; enquiry and conjecture were licensed; inventiveness was set free.

And here is the counter-Orwellian paradox. Under the new policy of openness, propaganda could thrive again. For what is propaganda if not a system of alternatives, as Kellyanne Conway so astutely grasped?

The principle here is not to force one alternative on a population. By rendering any alternative as a priori plausible, this form of propaganda casts doubt on “official” accounts. All they can offer is a version of truth, one that will necessarily reflect their own agendas.

In February this year, Dmitri Kiselev, a fast-talking Russian version of Fox News commentator Sean Hannity and a prime-time host with the Kremlin’s official media outlet Rossiya Segonya, stated this outright:

Objectivity is a myth that is proposed and imposed on us.

Similarly, in 2017, Fox News’ version of Dmitri Kiselev, Sean Hannity, went on CBS and told Ted Koppel:

I don’t pretend that I’m fair and balanced and objective. You do.

When the program went to air, Hannity blasted CBS and called it “fake news”.

Russian theorist Alexander Dugin, author of The Fourth Political Theory.
Mehdi Bolourian/Wikimedia Commons

If we want to understand what is going on here, Orwell is not our guide. We would do better to turn to the writings of Russian political theorist Alexander Dugin.

Dugin is an ideologue who aligns himself with Vladimir Putin’s visionary sense of Russian destiny. While he dismisses the suggestion that he is “Putin’s brain”, he is the most influential analyst of the cultural environment Putin has sought to create.

In his book The Fourth Political Theory, Dugin makes the case for a new political direction, one that moves away from the modernist regimes of Marxism and fascism, whose extremes of ideological conformity he calls “uninteresting” and “worthless”. The literalism of such regimes of control, he says, makes them “entirely useless”.

Without making direct reference to Nineteen Eighty-Four, Dugin’s critique at times echoes the debates at the core of Orwell’s novel. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the Party official O’Brien makes an extended doctrinal statement. He foresees a world with no need for art, literature or science, a world where curiosity and all forms of “enjoyment of the process of life” are eliminated. Such a world would never endure, protests Winston Smith:

It would have no vitality. It would disintegrate. It would commit suicide.

Dugin would no doubt take Winston’s side in this exchange. He proposes a cultural model that is much more flexible, cunning and resourceful than anything O’Brien and his masters might envisage.

The Fourth Political Theory draws its “dark inspiration” from postmodernism, an ethos Dugin despises, but uses as a Trojan horse to penetrate the defences of the world of liberalism (Dugin’s anathema). All the pleasures and enjoyments banished from the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four come surging back.

“I do not really understand why certain people, when confronted with the concept of the Fourth Political Theory,” Dugin writes,

do not immediately rush to open a bottle of champagne, and do not start dancing and rejoicing, celebrating the discovery of new possibilities. After all, this is a kind of a philosophical New Year – an exciting leap into the unknown.

In this brave new world – which is not Aldous Huxley’s any more than it is Orwell’s – “nothing is true and everything is possible”.

The journalist Peter Pomerantsev, a more congenial guide for those who find Dugin’s new ideology hard to stomach, uses this phrase as the title of his book on the propaganda culture surrounding Russian television, where “Everything is PR” is a declared principle.

The “postmodern” influence here is, more specifically, the influence of French theorist Jean Baudrillard, who proposed that the “real” was no longer accessible in a world where layers of image replication – “simulacra” – had evolved into an autonomous pseudo-reality. This is the world in which a television celebrity becomes president and the presidency becomes a celebrity media game.

In such a world, propaganda thrives and manipulation is rife. With no shared or objective reality, the individual subject of liberalism can gain no traction. According to Dugin,

If we lose our identity, we will also lose alterity, the capacity for “otherness”, and the ability to distinguish between self and not-self, and consequently to assume the existence of any alternative viewpoint.

The image here is not one of a strong difference being asserted, but of a fragile and slender one under threat; and the threat is real. As alterity is lost, the obsession with creating antagonists increases, as if it were a mode of survival.

Jean Baudrillard lecturing at European Graduate School, Saas-Fee, Switzerland, June 2004.
Wikimedia commons

Mirroring

One of the key insights of the French-American cultural theorist René Girard is that adversaries are often involved in an intense and escalating mirroring. They increasingly come to reflect each others’ logics, strategies, and rationales. That this state of affairs can invariably only be seen outside the viewpoint of antagonists (who see between themselves all sorts of radical differences) is of little import.

In the parallel cases of the US and Russia, we should look beyond the trivialities and psychopathologies of two men who have had toilets made out of gold for them, who brag about their wealth but evade questions about it, who view women as ornaments, who obsess over the smallest criticisms, and whose “strong man” bluster is always in the service of some nostalgia about a mythical era.

Putin and Trump have lavished each other with praise: Putin has described Trump as a “brilliant, talented person”; Trump has called Putin “a strong leader […] a powerful leader”. But the sincerest flattery, as we know, appears as imitation.

As Russian television has embraced the world of images, with all its extravagance and glamour and duplicity, it has become more like Fox News, and vice versa. When Russia launched its military operation in Ukraine, the news on Russian state media was editorially committed to official Kremlin positions. One of its methods was to echo Fox News. In February, a prime-time overview of the news of the week – presented by Kiselev – featured an opening monologue from Tucker Carlson’s Fox program.

The situation in America since Trump was voted out of office has, if anything, become more dire. As evidence unfolds of his involvement in the January 6 coup attempt and his appropriation of top secret documents as his private property, the legal case against him is fraught with obstacles created by the propaganda enterprise he continues to lead.

What should be clear cases of right and wrong under the US Constitution, and of guilt under law, have become a contest over truth in a hall of mirrors. Every accusation prompts an equal and equivalent counter-accusation. The confusion thickens with the strategy of the pre-emptive strike: whatever Trump has done wrong, he has already accused his opponents of doing just that.

With the prospects of a MAGA dominated election looming, no one can predict the consequences, but it is clear that American democracy is fighting for its life in a political environment that may be damaged beyond hope of recovery.

We need to entertain the idea that Orwell’s success in recognising the propaganda of his day might have incurred a cost – namely, that we are now too confident that we know what propaganda is. Good propaganda is precisely that because it is hard to pick; it rarely wears a neon sign around its neck. Enforced subscription to the Party’s messages has been replaced by voluntary consumption of the Kool Aid. The French philosopher Simone Weil once said that “truth is a need of the soul”. But we are often now satisfied with a more Trumpian, Twitterian logic: “A lot of people agree with me […] a lot of people are saying”.

It is not that nothing of the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four remains, or that the novel does not serve as a reminder of what a certain kind of political control can look like. There are, no doubt, statements by Trump and Putin that are, in some sense, “Orwellian”. Regimes with Orwellian characteristics still exist – like Bashar al-Assad’s Syria, for example, which is known for its compulsory slogans (“Assad or we Burn the Country”) and for torturing those who subvert them.

But large parts of the world now have fewer uses for the kinds of ideological strong-arming depicted in Orwell’s novel. And this is one of the reasons propaganda is harder to track. If our capacity to detect propaganda only surfaces in relation to what we oppose, we are all the more likely to respond in kind. In a post-Orwellian world, we are producers as well as consumers of the inflated rhetoric, sensational imagery and crazed dramaturgies promoted by those who are all too conscious of what they are doing.

As the philosopher Bernard Williams contended 20 years ago, we live in an uncomfortable era. On the one hand, we have a heightened sensitivity about being fooled; on the other hand, we are living with a general scepticism of whether anything at all might answer to “the truth”. We are deeply committed to something we don’t even know whether we believe.

How this tension will – or might – be sorted out is not something that will be resolved by philosophers or social theorists. It will be taken up and lived out in that increasingly murky domain that we still call, with less confidence than ever, “politics”. More