Incivility is what undermines civil society, making elite campaigns threat #1
Who could oppose motherhood, apple pie, or civility?  I sometimes wonder, however, if civility is the wrong solution, based on a misdiagnosis of the problem today.  Yes, elite political ads and speeches are often personal attacks that make us uncomfortable.  And, yes, incivility can be an obstacle to communication and makes us uncomfortable.  But when I observe our situation today, I do not see these as the same thing or same type of discomfort.  

If we assume they are the same, then the solution is some sort of grammar police, pretending we can separate form from substance contrary to what any skilled teacher of writing would tell us. The image in my mind is my grade school nun beating the heck of me for speaking my mind in a way that annoyed her, on the grounds that I used a dangling modifier.

If, however, we separate these two problems and focus on the most immediate associated with elite ads...I am not sure the most important thing for us to address in response to these is civility, unless we think of civility in a way that focuses on both form and content, style and substance.

Maybe a cultural reference will help here.  Keep in mind, from the movie Pleasantville (analyzed in Chapter Three of Punishing Schools) where the leadership worked hard to make ‘being pleasant’ the core value in order to silence disagreement, and in particular silence what the elite consider disagreeable positions.  Like the civility police today, these elites observed popular discontent and frustration and responded by choosing to direct the attentions of ordinary citizens on the ways other citizens get emotional, speak with passion about the stifling sense of suffocation they feel, in order to distract them from focusing on elite behavior causing far deeper and more disturbing harms.  Disruptive subjects were reframed as uncivil; virtuous elites reframed as defenders of the ‘common sense’ notion of order captured in being pleasant.

Or perhaps a comparative perspective will help.  As China modernizes they are confronting a wide range of real and potential threats to social order.  Threats based on the fact that more and more citizens live without a safety net, in poverty and with little hope.  One part of the response from Chinese leadership has been to embrace the Confucian value of harmony (和为贵,he wei gui, or Harmony is the Prime Directive) and many have noted that making this the new prime directive makes it a lot easier to mobilize citizens against those articulated disagreeable positions.

Maybe an illustration from crime and punishment will help.  Jeffrey Reiman, in his classic analysis called The Rich GetRicher and the Poor Get Prison, reminds us in that the forms of disruptive behavior common among the elite are generally not crimes (but regulatory issues or market externalities), while those more common among the communities you and I live in are targeted in Wars on Crime, elite campaigns that enlist our support for punishing ourselves to distract our attentions from elite failure. 

Incivility on Steroids: Branded Information

It seems much more important today for us to find ways to hold elites accountable for repeatedly and systematically misleading us, sometimes outright lying to us...and, if it helps us accomplish this then we need to see their behavior as incivility on steroids.  Remember, in these elite campaigns they hold their audience is such low regard that they feel free to act in ways that are fundamentally disrespectful and dismissive... far more damaging that any passionate statement from a regular citizen that might include a well-chosen curse word or two...and this is the kind of incivility that is undermining political communication today. 

 

 

Incivility on steroids is an approach to political communication that centers on hiring the highest paid PR firms to create messages that are misleading by design and then use their enormous financial advantages to saturate communication channels with these messages.  It is the school yard bull shit artist as intellectual mercenary selling his skills to elites who only care about civility to the degree that his silences citizens interested in making decisions based on the best available data.

It is important for citizens to learn to speak with passion and civility, because we will be more effective that way, but we should avoid using civility as a way to distract us from focusing on holding elites accountable for actually creating the distorted information system we suffer within today and acting as if the problem is regular citizens using language most of us hear every day.