On the topic of the day — “Should President Barack Obama criticize Jimmy Hoffa, Jr., for his “son of a bitches” remarks on Labor Day?” — the answer is: Yes, of course he should.
Here’s why: The problem of incivility is not that people think it’s OK to be uncivil. It’s that people don’t really grasp — at least, not in an impartial way — what counts as incivility. That is, they recognize it when their opponents call them names, but it doesn’t register on their radar when their opponents are the victims of name-calling. In other words, Republicans don’t notice it when Democrats are being demonized, and Democrats don’t notice it when Republicans are being unfairly caricatured.
This being the case, it doesn’t help to say, “be civil”. People need more than that, they need an education on how to be civil. They need concrete examples of incivility to be pointed out by someone who says, “Look, that right there, that’s exactly the kind of thing we need to stop doing!” We need to establish in people’s minds what counts as a violation of civil debate.
Unfortunately, per White House Press Secretary Jay Carney and communications director Daniel Pfeiffer (appearing on WMAL’s Morning Majority show), President Barack Obama has completely abandoned any responsibility for doing that.
This isn’t that much of a surprise. Naturally, Obama complains when other people call him names, but that’s about it. He has a long record of name-calling (e.g., saying that Republicans are Social Darwinists with no sense of community or neighborliness), and is resiliently silent when it comes to fellow Democrats who also resort to name-calling.
But he’s consistently posed as someone who will set a higher standard of political discourse and set an example of civil debate for the country. In particular, in his speech on civility following the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and others, he mentioned one of those killed: Nine-year-old Christina Taylor Green. He said:
“I want our democracy to be as good as Christina imagined it. I want America to be as good as she imagined it. All of us — we should do everything we can to make sure this country lives up to our children’s expectations.”
Notice that: “All of us — we should do everything we can” to uphold civil debate. Either “all of us” doesn’t include the president, or “everything” doesn’t include saying something like, “Hey, Jimmy, criticize our opponents without calling them S.O.B.s and without the violent rhetoric. What you said is exactly the sort of thing we need to stop doing.”
Pfeiffer, in the interview with Morning Majority, made it sound like criticizing Hoffa would be an oppressive burden, because then the president would have to criticize everyone. Now, of course, I don’t expect the president — or anyone else, for that matter — to specifically denounce every last act of incivility. That’s simply impossible. In my blog, I’ve tried to track down, document, and denounce a bunch of them, and believe me I don’t manage to get even a fraction of them.
However, just because we can’t stop all murders doesn’t mean we don’t do our best to stop them wherever we can, right? Obama doesn’t have to put that much effort into being the “speech police”; a president obviously has lots of other important things to do. But, as president, Obama is in a unique position of leadership to raise up our national discourse — the proverbial “bully pulpit”. If he just mentioned the occasional act of incivility — say, one a week, maybe during the president’s weekly address — named who said it and explained why what they said is wrong, he would be showing the country specifically what sorts of remarks are out of bounds. He wouldn’t even have to hunt them down himself, he could always — oh, I don’t know — have a staff member get the details for him.
And, once he starts doing that, see how quickly people would begin to watch their words. If Obama (or any other president) were to do this even-handedly, people from both parties would know that one slip of the tongue could make them this week’s focus for incivility. As a result, uncivil rhetoric would drop.
But, unfortunately, nobody wants to take on that job of impartially denouncing political invective. Not Obama, or any of our other presidents in recent memory. (And not, amazingly, The National Institute for Civil Discourse.)
As I’ve said before, incivility is not some deep, inscrutable problem. It is a problem with a simple solution: Our leaders need to impartially denounce name-calling and other invective. But they won’t do that. And, when people won’t enact the obvious solution, problems that are easily solvable become intractable.
Obama is playing his part in making incivility intractable. Rather than standing against blatant invective, he is refusing to defy the usual political rhetoric, which is aimed — as ever — at inciting us to believe the worst about those with whom we disagree.
All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.