The Folly of Civility in The Trump Era
In the immediate aftermath of two Trump administration officials being forced out of DMV area restaurants by protesters from the D.C. chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America and “Red Hen” ownership respectively, voices from the political right and center have risen harmonically calling for civility from those on the left, or whoever else decides to resist the Trump administration directly.
While figures on the right demanding “civility” from their political rivals is nearly comical, pleas for “civility” from the center and center-left are infuriating. Senate and House minority leaders Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi recently threw their colleague Maxine Waters under the bus, classifying her comments that Trump administration officials should come to expect being the target of direct action in public as “unamerican” and “unacceptable”.
Pelosi and Schumer, who were all too willing to help Trump build his xenophobic and wasteful border wall are not even able to pay lip service to those of us can see that this administration needs be fought tooth and nail, decorum be damned. With each fascistic measure the administration proposes and/or implements, they test the waters to see how far they can actually go before they receive push-back from the public and their supposed rivals in the democratic party, and the leadership of the party has capitulated and ceded ground to the administration at far too many turns.
For the House and Senate minority leaders, as well as those in the pundit class that have so loudly echoed their sentiments, when they call for civility towards the Trump administration, they are ultimately calling for civility towards themselves as well. The elite of the democratic establishment finds itself more capable of relating to and empathizing with neo-fascist operatives like Kirstjen Nielsen and Sarah Sanders than they can with migrant children locked in kiddie concentration camps or the vulnerable “unamerican” Americans who rightly view our political landscape as a pitched life-and-death battle between two diametrically opposed forces. This group of privileged and well-to-do people who have masqueraded as “The Resistance” have through their own words and actions shown themselves to be collaborators, especially since they did not object to similar policies that were implemented while they were in power themselves.
Political commentators such as former White House official David Gergen have even went as far as whitewashing the Civil Rights movement as being “much more civil in tone” than our current political predicament. While people going on T.V. in modern day America or posting online asserting the person-hood of migrant families and other targets of the administration surely would be much more “civil in tone” than shouting down Kirstjen Nielsen while she was trying to enjoy a delicious Mexican dinner, the absence of context in this example both mindlessly tramples on the spirit of the Civil Rights Movement and serves to weaken the “civility” argument.
Black people asserting their person-hood in the bloodthirsty, fascist apartheid state known as the Jim Crow south was about as far as one could conceivably get from “civil”, in fact, it was so “uncivil” that these assertions were often met with lynchings, assassinations, pogroms and many other unspeakable horrors. The Civil Rights Movement could not have been successful without making white people immensely uncomfortable through fearless direct action, and it could not have been successful without the violence and immense pain that resonates throughout the generations.
Those who have no true stake in the battle at hand find it easy to call for civility, because if everyone were “civil”, that would mean that things would be easy. If everyone were “civil” it would be easy to ignore the crying children locked away in concentration camps, unsure if they would ever see their parents again. If everyone were simply “civil” it would be easy to ignore the black boys, girls, men and women that are murdered and poisoned by the state, it would be easy to ignore all of the women who experience sexual violence at the hands of abusive men and so on and so forth.
If these “civility” fetishists could close the circle of privilege and no longer have to even be aware of the violence that the state inflicts on people, they could, but because the “uncivil” among us happen to remind them of the horrors of our world and country, we are scolded for not making nice with fascists and accepting the status quo. The truth of the matter is that if the Trump administration is as bad as the democratic establishment says they are, and they are even worse than that, then there is no option but a total abandonment of this contrived idea of civility. Trump and the cabal of demons that form his inner circle are waging a war against everyone who many of those calling for civility purport themselves as advocating for. If we do not at least make them uncomfortable and fearful of being in public, then we would not be fighting back in any meaningful way.
The fight against the Trump administration and its ardent supporters will not be a peaceful one, nor will it be a bloodless one, and each and every one of us will have to explicitly choose a side. For those that make calls for civility, it is clear what side they have chosen, because “civility” only works to serve the side that is in power, while serving as a detriment to those determined to resist and ultimately upend them. The Trump administration has the power of state violence at its disposal which is codified in law, making their violence “civil” by legal standards and by the philosophical standards of the majority of the American political class.
Being proudly “uncivil” towards the administration and its fascistic abuses of power is the morally correct thing to do, just as Martin Luther King Jr. being uncivil towards the Jim Crow power structure and activists like Sophie Scholl being uncivil towards the Nazi party were the morally correct things to do. We face a grave threat in the Trump administration, and those who seem to be in the best position to directly meet and repel that threat would rather make peace with it because they have enough privilege to withstand and thrive under whatever terrors are inflicted upon the rest of us.
