Never question the resilience of the political class. Deep as we are now in the muck and guts of the Trump era, its dedication to managing appearances and propping up an obviously broken status quo endures.
The so-called “civility debate” is the newest front in a wider conflict that has less to do with manners, or ensuring a polite discourse, than in protecting the powerful from being forced to engage with politics on someone else’s terms.
At its heart is a unique form of cultural illiteracy and status anxiety. The ability to hand-pick when and in what context to face the consequences of your work is a privilege, deep-seated and treasured by those who possess it. Dinnertime interlopers who challenge this expectation are protesting more than a government official or policy – they are fundamentally rejecting it.
Consider the case of legal scholar Alan Dershowitz. He informed readers of The Hill this week that his frequent defenses of President Donald Trump, on CNN and in other venues, have made him persona non grata at a favorite summertime vacation spot. Appalled by his behavior, Dershowitz writes, liberal friends “are shunning me and trying to ban me from their social life on Martha’s Vineyard.”
The piece is worth noting because Dershowitz casts his treatment alongside the purported indignity suffered by White House press secretary Sarah Sanders, who was denied service at a Virginia restaurant last month by an owner whose staff decided it could not, in good conscience, accept her business. He goes on to cite “other administration officials and employees” who have been confronted during their off-hours.
“(T)hese rude extremists are a symptom of the times,” Dershowitz writes, calling out California Rep. Maxine Waters’ suggestion that Trump opponents “push back” more directly at administration officials. “The divisions have gotten so bad that many on both sides refuse to speak or listen to those on the other side.”
As you might expect, his lament has been ridiculed by both his liberal sparring partners and more dedicated leftist critics, who view it as some combination of frivolous and absurd. In fact, his grievances are a kind of gift – a juicy, center-cut example of what the bipartisan, civility-at-all-costs crowd fails to apprehend about the tone and tactics of recent protests and public stand-offs.
Simply put, the most powerful among us – elected officials, their benefactors and high-ranking staffers, allied consultants, and some heavyweight analysts – have traditionally enjoyed a certain self-enforced privilege: the freedom to actively seek out and in most cases find a break from politics.
For a select few, that means popping up to Martha’s Vineyard for a long weekend. For others, it means dining at a Mexican restaurant while the agency under your control is at work helping to enforce a policy that calls for the separation of migrant families at the Mexican border. For erstwhile EPA administrator Scott Pruitt, scourge of Obama-era environmental regulations, it could mean sitting down at a downtown Washington tea shop without a woman and her daughter lobbying for clean air.
Naturally, when Pruitt resigned amid an almost incomprehensible volume of scandal on Thursday, he said the decision rested in part on “the unrelenting attacks on me personally, my family,” calling them “unprecedented” while also noting their “sizable toll on all of us.”
These folks, the reasoning goes, are simply doing their jobs and, like anyone else, deserve their time away from the incumbent stresses. Vacations, off-the-clock activities and even something like a working dinner with colleagues are strictly off-limits. It’s a norm as fiercely guarded as any other.
And it’s important to understand why.
In Washington, New York City and other centers of influence, people from “both sides of the aisle” tend to run in, if not the same circles, then concentric ones. It’s simple economics. When people make about the same money, there’s a decent enough chance they’ll cross paths with competitors or opponents (peers, really) at bars, restaurants, parks, and even more intimate places, like a PTA meeting or doctor’s office.
Political clashes and calls to action, given the close quarters of those contesting them, are cordoned off to what professionals might describe as the “appropriate” times and places. Scheduled debates, editorial and op-ed pages, speeches and cable news panels are in bounds. Most anywhere else is not.
Lately, though, these usually unmarked boundaries are being defied more often – and increasingly by people, unlike Dershowitz and his island frenemies, who are never invited into the conversation, even when their fate is the subject. Now, with cell phones to record the confrontations and a few easy channels to make them go viral, there is an easy way in.
These instances, in the context of the “civility debate,” are being grouped in by the scolds with the administration’s nearly-daily flouting of more serious norms. Where’s the civility then in spending tens of thousands of dollars of public money to sponsor first-class or private travel, or in the President using his own hotel in Washington as a venue for fundraisers?
The false equivalence here is ultimately staked in a desire to preserve a comfortable status quo. For that reason alone, the current impasse is unlikely to be broken anytime soon. The Trump era is here to stay, whether the President leaves office in 2021, 2025, or anytime before or in between.
This redrawn reality has been difficult for many, Democrats and Republicans alike, to accept. That there is no turning back the page or drawing a line around what’s happened – and what Americans have learned about their government, their neighbors and themselves – can be a difficult thing to get your head around.
But that doesn’t change the facts of the matter. Those who ignore it – or train their focus solely on the narrow, symptomatic backlash – are only fooling themselves.