An uncivil union: Can America break its addiction to violent rhetoric?
As presidential elections go, the United States was shocked by the new lows in coarse rhetoric. The news cycle could barely keep up with the insults between the candidates. Like that time when the sitting president, who lost the election, was called a “hideous hermaphrodite.” The incoming president was accused of being a populist hollowed out by his ambition.
Joe Biden versus Donald Trump? No, John Adams versus Thomas Jefferson.
The two Founding Fathers, who had collaborated on the Declaration of Independence, each felt so wounded by the other’s jabs in the 1800 election that they didn’t talk for a decade. Yet even the bitterest enmities can be put aside. The two men, who died on the same day in 1826, mended their friendship through correspondence.
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Is it possible to move the balance of discourse – in the halls of power, on social media, and at dinner tables – back toward some semblance of civility and respect?
The annals of political history are rife with examples of politicians and pundits going full ad hominem on opposing candidates. (Although insults such as “nutmeg dealer” and “puzzlewit” – leveled at Abraham Lincoln and William Howard Taft, respectively – seem to have made way for endless cries of “fascist” and “groomer.”)
As anyone who has seen a political ad in the past decade knows, increasingly vulgar attacks seem to have become the new normal. Coarse, accusatory, and threatening language are now standard features of presidential campaigns.
The Monitor reached out to several thinkers to ask how we got here. Many, perhaps not surprisingly, looked to history for answers to our current degraded dialogue. Others peeled back the dynamics at work in 21st-century politics. The Monitor asked whether it is possible to move the balance of discourse – in the halls of power, on social media, and at dinner tables – back toward some semblance of civility and respect.
What does history have to tell us?
For one thing, multiple sources interviewed pointed out, the Founding Fathers distrusted political parties. They never envisioned the current sportslike atmosphere, with the country divided into two teams whose rivalry has turned increasingly bitter.
“I think the founders would just go, ‘That is not what we wanted. We designed a kind of federalism where it would be OK for different parts of the country to do things differently. It doesn’t have to be an existential crisis for everybody else,’” says Mónica Guzmán, author of “I Never Thought of It That Way: How To Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times.”
Representatives, including a couple of congresswomen recently, have offered to engage their fellows in fisticuffs. This is an exercise in grandstanding compared with the Aaron Burr-Alexander Hamilton duel, which ended in Hamilton’s death. And 19th-century politicians still remain unrivaled when it comes to personal violence, says Glenn Altschuler, co-author of “Rude Republic: Americans and Their Politics in the Nineteenth Century.”
“As the debate over the Civil War grew, representatives carried knives and guns onto the floor and sometimes brandished them. The rhetoric could be pretty ugly,” he explains.
One day in 1856, Charles Sumner, an outspoken abolitionist from Massachusetts, was sitting at his desk on the floor of the Senate. Preston Brooks, a South Carolina representative and planter, “crept up behind Sumner and beat him so senselessly that Sumner was unable to recover for at least two years,” says Dr. Altschuler, comparing that with a 2023 incident when ousted Speaker Kevin McCarthy allegedly struck fellow Republican Tim Burchett in the Halls of Congress. (Mr. McCarthy denied the accusation.) “It pales in comparison.”
So, does this mean what’s happening now is no big deal?
Today’s level of violent political rhetoric is worrisome. Dr. Altschuler and others point out that violent words and violent action are often linked. “They are mutually supportive of one another. And we saw that, of course, on Jan. 6, 2021,” he says. “Whatever you think about that event, it’s very difficult to dispute that it occurred in no small measure because of rhetoric that preceded it – about what might happen, and what should happen – as the Congress was deciding about the certification of the reports from the Electoral College.”
How did we get to where it’s common to accuse someone you disagree with of pedophilia?
There’s a tension in our political culture of “velvet-rope bouncers” on the left versus “trolls” on the right, says Matt Welch, editor at large at Reason magazine. In his view, the bouncers trying to police speech – for instance, trying to make “Latinx” happen – irritate ordinary Americans, who then turn to the trolls to throw rocks on their behalf.
“We live in this kind of vulgar moment. It’s hard to stop it, particularly because the institutions in the media – in particular over the last nine years – have really kind of traveled to a more partisan, ideological, more uniform place,” he says. “And so every time Trump does something, or someone who is similar to Trump, does something outrageous, then you can guarantee that a huge pile – this sort of media group over here – is going to pounce and express outrage. The late night comics are all going to sputter with rage and try to make a joke. The cycle continues.”
The rise of populism in an age of celebrification also plays into the coarsening of discourse. Circuses have been invoked, and the word “vulgar” has come up frequently. It is all, those interviewed say, by design.
“If you look at somebody like Javier Milei in Argentina, for example, … he is very foul-mouthed when he talks and yells and he screams,” says Martin Gurri, author of “The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium.” “This is not a personal eccentricity. This is a political posture. [He is] saying, ‘I am not them.’ … There’s a sort of differentiating element that the populists bring with their rhetoric.”
He points to polls that found President Trump’s first election coalition was disparate and voted for him for different reasons. But “One running thread was they all thought, ‘He talks like me,’” he adds.
Why do populists connect to the public using coarse language?
“There’s been so much of a shift of the center of gravity toward where attention is. Communications technologies, social media, the media in and of itself – with its own economic incentives – it’s all come together to really reward the politicians who can get the attention. The easiest way to get attention is through emotions like fear and outrage. Fear is highly mobilizing, because fear stays with you,” says Ms. Guzmán, a senior fellow at Braver Angels, a nationwide organization that facilitates civil conversations between Democrat and Republican voters. “‘If the other side wins, we’re going to lose our country.’ It may not be true or particularly responsible, but who cares? Politicians are very motivated to stay in their jobs, and the incentives for that are very strong. And sometimes they collide with the incentives we might prefer that would result in good governance.”
Is there any light at the end of this very dark tunnel?
“It will take a different kind of rhetoric to replace this rhetoric. Not the older rhetoric of politeness and faux deference to someone else, but a rhetoric that more approximates, just to cite an example, a Jon Stewart,” says Dr. Altschuler. “A more satirical rhetoric that is in fact also more substantive than the vulgarity and sexual imagery that we’re seeing now. I think it will take skilled orators.”
How do state governments compare to the atmosphere in Washington?
“The reason we started studying civility in the first place is because it could have implications for the broader issue of governance. Is it affecting the legislature’s ability to do its important work in legislating on the important matters of the day?” says William Schreckhise, chair of the department of political science at the University of Arkansas.
“The weird thing about state legislatures today is they’re not as polarized as you would think,” says Professor Schrekhise, who conducted a 2024 study that measures the degree of civility and decorum across state legislatures. That’s because they aren’t mini-Washingtons. “So in Arkansas, we’re all conservative. In Washington state, they’re all liberal. There is some polarization, but you don’t have that broad range of ideology quite so much.”
“Some highly polarized legislators tend to be a little less civil, but the most uncivil legislatures aren’t necessarily the most polarized ones. So what that does is it allows this independent explanation for legislative productivity. In just about every model I ran … what we found is, yes, the more civil a state legislature is, the more likely they’re going to pass a larger volume of bills,” he says. “A higher percentage of bills that are introduced will get passed, they’re more likely to pass more important legislation, and they’re more likely to pass a budget on time.”
Joel Martinez/The Monitor/AP
What can people do to spread more civility rather than feeling helpless?
“I’m a big fan of starting small,” says Ms. Guzmán, of beginning the work of dialogue in one’s own neighborhoods and schools and families. “If you can’t take steps in your own life, how do you expect the entire country to suddenly turn the ship around?”
She says that change begins with questioning your own thinking, not with trying to change someone else’s mind: “It starts with how I respond to the person I’ve met who believes this different thing about abortion, about immigration. ‘What ideas come to mind for me? What do I assume? What do I believe without asking?’” she says to ask yourself. “And how does that contribute to this vicious cycle that’s tearing us apart, where we’re engaging each other less across political differences, while we judge each other more over time?
“We’re not seeing the real debates, and we’re certainly not seeing the real people. If we’re not seeing the real people, we’re not going to have a democratic republic. It goes right back to the founders. They knew division is part of the game. But not disengagement. You have to engage with the division.”
On the state government front, Professor Schreckhise says work has already begun to teach the importance of civility to getting laws passed and, thus, the job of government done.
“There actually is some work being done on the ground by an organization [the National Institute for Civil Discourse] that holds trainings for state legislators. They did one here in Arkansas where they get a bunch of legislators, they send them on a retreat, and they talk about how to be more civil. They train them in the language of civility,” he explains. “If you’ve got both parties in the legislators’ leadership pushing this sort of thing onto the rank-and-file members, it does send a signal that, ‘Hey, this is kind of important, and maybe we should rethink how we behave when we talk to one another.’”
