Saturday, July 1, 2023 | 2 a.m.
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While Americans disagree on a great many things, it seems that one of the few things we all agree on — regardless of color, political affiliation or socioeconomic status — is that civility is on the decline. A recent poll conducted by the American Bar Association found that 85% of respondents said that civility in today’s society is worse than 10 years ago. A February 2022 Georgetown University poll found that 67% of respondents believed politics have gotten nastier since the pandemic began.
I, too, ascribe to the belief that civility, particularly in the political arena, has been on the decline. I would probably attribute this decline to former President Donald Trump. I feel like, from his campaign through his presidency, he broke many of the norms for civility among political candidates, and our political discourse has been worse off for it since.
Interestingly, though, if we’re asking who killed civility, it is a given that there was a point in time where civility was the standard. I wonder: Is it really true that civility is on the decline? Or is it possible that we all simply accepted this truth without examining it critically?
An examination of the history of American politics suggests to me that our political discourse has never been civil. Far from it in fact. American politics has been a nasty, ugly and vile affair since the very beginning.
In his 2007 book, “Anything for a Vote,” author Joseph Cummins detailed the dirty tactics utilized in every U.S. presidential campaign. Cummins wrote that the idea for his book came after the 2004 presidential election, when political pundits lamented the tactics used to vilify both John Kerry and George W. Bush.
Cummins wrote that one of the nastiest presidential elections was the contest between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson in 1800 (only the third presidential election). Jefferson hired a writer, James Callender, to write that Adams was “a hideous hermaphroditical character which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.” Adams’ political party, the Federalists, attacked Jefferson, as well, claiming that he was “a mean-spirited, low-lived fellow, the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father.”
Just under 30 years later, the contest between Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams was similarly ugly. Jackson’s supporters spread rumors about Adams’ “foreign wife,” who was English, and claimed that Adams purchased “gambling furniture” when he purchased an ivory chessman set for the White House. Further, Adams was accused of offering his wife’s maid to Czar Alexander I of Russia as a concubine. Adams’ supporters accused Jackson of being an adulterer, a drunkard, a thief, a liar and intemperate. They also went after Jackson’s wife, accusing her of being a “whore” and given to “open and notorious lewdness.” Jackson’s wife died shortly after his victory. He blamed her death on these personal attacks.
One hundred years later, in 1928, Herbert Hoover faced off against Al Smith. The Ku Klux Klan would meet Smith’s campaign train with burning crosses and explosions (Smith was Catholic). Protestant ministers claimed that Smith would annul all non-Catholic marriages if he became president. As you probably know, Hoover won that election.
In his 1964 campaign against Barry Goldwater, Lyndon Johnson formed a 16-man committee — known as the Five O’Clock Club — for the sole purpose of smearing Goldwater. The group developed a children’s coloring book that contained pictures of Goldwater dressed in Ku Klux Klan clothes. They also secretly fed hostile questions to reporters on the Goldwater campaign and sent a CIA agent, E. Howard Hunt, later imprisoned in the Watergate affair, to infiltrate Goldwater’s campaign.
The dirty tactic used by George H. W. Bush during his campaign for the presidency against Michael Dukakis in 1988 has become part of any political science major’s education. When Dukakis was governor of Massachusetts, 39-year-old convict Willie Horton raped a woman and stabbed her fiancé while taking part in a weekend furlough program. Horton was Black and his victims were white. Bush used this story to launch a series of racist attack ads. Ads included stuffing mailboxes with “Get out of Jail Free Cards” stating, “Michael Dukakis is the killer’s best friend and the decent honest citizen’s worst enemy.”
Note that all this uncivil behavior occurred before the syndication of Rush Limbaugh’s show in 1988, which some claim was the beginning of the decline. Given the above history (and there is much more, to be clear), can we really say that civility is on the decline? It looks to me like incivility is as American as apple pie.
Stephen Jay Gould once wrote, “The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best — and therefore never scrutinize or question.” We have told ourselves this story that American politics was once a place where civility was the norm. We tell ourselves that there was a time when our politicians would spend their time debating policy positions, as opposed to lobbing personal attacks.
Perhaps it is time that we divorce ourselves from that apparent myth. Perhaps we need to start telling a new story. One that doesn’t claim that civility is on the decline. Instead, it acknowledges a simple truth: We have never truly been civil.
We blame others for the climate of incivility. We blame Trump. We blame Joe Biden. We blame the media. We blame social media. We blame everything and everyone but ourselves.
Refusing to accept responsibility for one’s actions is a hallmark of immaturity. Children blame others for their actions. Adults understand that they alone are ultimately responsible for what they do.
The proof is in the pudding. Politicians have been speaking to our basest selves since the beginning. They do it because it works. The media leads with articles that trigger our outrage because that formula captures eyes and ears. Social media algorithms curate our feeds in a similar way because they keep us scrolling. Said simply, these things are not the causes of our incivility; they are the market responses to our incivility. Politicians, media and social media merely prioritize giving us what we want.
It is commendable to desire a more civil political climate. However, the author James Baldwin once wrote, “Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” Until we face the truth that we have never really been civil, I fear that we never truly will be.
Eric Foster is a lawyer in private practice and columnist for The Plain Dealer and cleveland.com.
