civility

Mr. President, Americans Agree On Social Security. So Talk To Us, Not Washington.

Richard Eskow — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 03:53:11 -0500

Mr. President, you moved a nation today with your words in Tucson. "Rather than pointing fingers or assigning blame," you said, "let us use this occasion to expand our moral imaginations, to listen to each other more carefully, to sharpen our instincts for empathy, and remind ourselves of all the ways our hopes and dreams are bound together."

You also said this: "It's important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we are talking with each other in a way that heals, not a way that wounds."

Two weeks from now the State of the Union address will be an opportunity to bring Americans together - Americans who have been bitterly divided by party loyalty and ideology, but who stand united in their support for the social programs that have improved our lives for the past seventy-five years. On that night, will they know that somebody has heard them? Will they feel that someone is talking to them? Will they feel they have a voice inside the Capitol rotunda, in a city where they sometimes seem to have been forgotten?

There's a popular idea in Washington that I've - perhaps too harshly - called "the Third Way Fallacy." It essentially says we can end the harsh and divisive nature of today's politics by having Washington party leaders work out their differences in private. Some of us think that's the wrong way to go about the people's business - that a truly "bipartisan" approach must respect the opinions of each party's members, not just those of its leaders.

But whatever my past criticisms of Third Way, the organization had a terrific suggestion today for increasing civility in politics. In an open letter to Speaker Boehner, they suggested that the Congressional seating chart be changed for this year's State of the Union address so that members aren't separated by party.

"We do not see any purpose behind putting Democrats on one side of the floor and Republicans on the other," Third Way's letter said. "The spectacle of one side of the room leaping to its feet while the other sits glumly on its hands is just that--a spectacle. Perhaps having both parties sit together, intermingled, would help control the choreography of partisanship that accompanies the President's remarks."

This idea is smart, moving, and even beautiful. The State of the Union has turned into an annual circus, as you know far better than I. Americans want more statesmanship in Washington, and this would be a symbolic way of letting them know they've been heard. The Speaker would bring honor to himself and his institution if he took this suggestion. It would, in Third Way's words, "demonstrate what is true but not always apparent--that we are one nation, not two, and that Members are unified by their service to our country."

Mr. Boehner is famous for crying in public, but if he follows this suggestion maybe we'll cry instead. It might be good for the country if more of us shared the burden of tears.

But the business at hand won't just be symbolic. As you know, Mr. President, leaders of both political parties have been talking about Social Security cuts. Your own Deficit Commission came up with some very Draconian (and unpopular) ideas, and members of your Administration haven't committed to defending retirement benefits. There are even rumors that people in your Administration have floated trial balloons about cutting a deal with Republicans to raise the retirement age and make other cuts.

Inside the Beltway there's some "bipartisan" approval for those ideas. But outside Washington the real bipartisan consensus is even stronger: Large majorities of Americans - Democrats, Republicans, and independents alike - agree that Social Security must be defended, not cut.

Mr. President, I hope you'll have the chance to see the poll numbers on Social Security. We know you've said you won't govern by following polls, and we respect that. But it's moving and inspiring to see the way Americans of all political parties have joined together in their defense of Social Security. They speak with one voice about how to handle it: Raise the payroll tax cap and protect its current benefits. They're equally united in their defense of Medicare in similarly large numbers. These are the people's programs, and people of all political persuasions want them protected.

We know that Americans don't like party squabbling. But that doesn't mean they want the two parties to collaborate on policies that rank-and-file members of both parties have rejected. Voters mean exactly what they've told those pollsters for years: They want Washington politicians to work for them, not each other. They'll be watching on January 25 to see their leaders speak to them, or to each other.

When asked how we should cut the deficit, Americans would rather raise taxes on the wealthy than cut Social Security by more than two to one. These Americans - Democrats, Republicans, and independents - make up the New Silent Majority, and they speak with a single voice. To paraphrase Third Way, when they talk about Social Security they demonstrate what is true but not always apparent - that we are one nation, not two.

This bipartisan consensus has the unwavering support of non-partisan experts, too - experts like Harry C. Ballantyne, who was appointed Chief Actuary for the Social Security Administration under Ronald Reagan. Mr. Ballantyne and two respected economists wrote a paper that explains how the bipartisan preference for Social Security - keep benefits and raise the payroll tax cap - addresses that program's very modest long-term shortfall.

There will be many people in the room with you who want to make these cuts anyway, Mr. President. Despite the great benefits that have flowed to the wealthiest among us, they'll want to protect the wealthy from paying the same payroll tax rate as police officers or nurses. These differences of opinion are unavoidable in a democracy. But you'll have an opportunity to show the nation how its leaders can differ with courtesy and grace - and in this case, with a bipartisan majority at your back. You'll be able explain that you're not defending Social Security because you speak for Democrats, but because you speak for all Americans.

While you're at it, you can also defend the principles of trust and honesty. Too many politicians and pundits have said that the government's bonds, which cover the money it has borrowed from Social Security's Trust Fund, is just an "IOU." That's not true. And you can remind them that even if it were true, we're an honorable people who make good on our IOUs.

There isn't a single argument being thrown around today about Social Security that hasn't been around for 75 years: "Ponzi scheme," too many old people and too few workers -- you name it, we've heard it before. That's why President Eisenhower's bipartisan panel refuted them all back in the 1950s. Ike's experts defended our shared hopes and dreams back then, and now it's our generation's turn.

You also said that in a time of tragedy "we reflect on the past. Did we spend enough time with an aging parent ... Did we express our gratitude for all the sacrifices they made for us?" What better way of expressing gratitude to all of our aging parents than by ensuring their financial security? That's an ideal way to "expand our moral imaginations, listen to each other more carefully, sharpen our instincts for empathy, and remind ourselves of all the ways our hopes and dreams are bound together."

Our moral imaginations shouldn't be limited to slanted ideas cooked up in think tanks and parroted by pundits and consultants.

Sometimes listening to one another, really listening, means we have to silence the clamor of Beltway chatter.

Our instincts for empathy can be sharpened by the image of an elderly woman in a small urban apartment, struggling to get by on $800 per month. They should direct our thoughts to the 68-year-old janitor whose back aches after half a century spent pushing a broom. They should call us to remember the waitress whose feet can no longer support her for eight hours, and whose bent fingers can no longer scribble on her order pad.

We've been bound by shared dreams since the country was founded. Social Security and Medicare turned some of those dreams into reality. Let's not turn them back into dreams.

Mr. President, this year's State of the Union will help to shape your legacy. That legacy can be one of real bipartisanship. You can bring us together as a people by expressing our shared commitment to Social Security. That's a commitment that binds Republicans, Democrats, Independents, and even Tea Party followers together in a common bond.

Reach out for that bond. Express it. Build on it to create a new American consensus - a consensus for fairness, a consensus for security, a consensus for growth and jobs. Americans are united on the issue of Social Security, and the state of that union is sound.

At least in one small way, we're already bound together in our hopes and dreams. In a wounded moment, that bond can help us heal.

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This post was produced as part of the Strengthen Social Security campaign.

Outright Barbarism vs. The Civil Society

Sara Robinson — Tue, 06 May 2008 19:35:14 -0400

I live in a nice place.

I mean that literally. It took some getting used to. After 20 years in Silicon Valley, where people put a premium on being direct and to the point, have no time to waste on small talk or personal sharing, and will call a stupid idea stupid to your face, moving to Canada required a whole lot of gearing back on that brusque American aggressive-in-your-face thing. The humbling fact was: We had to learn to mind our manners.

Much of the adjustment work that first year involved re-learning the art of Being Nice. We had to get used to meetings that started with 10 or 15 minutes of personal chit-chat. We had to train ourselves to stop interrupting people, and to be more careful to say "please" and "thank you." We had to discover (sometimes, the hard way) that losing your temper with Canadians means that you will invariably lose the conflict. The more terse and irritated you get, the more determinedly calm and polite Canadians become, until you're standing there looking like a raving idiot and they're still firmly in control (though they're very sorry you're having such a bad day).

We also learned the unofficial Canadian motto, which is "I'm sorry." Canadians will say "I'm sorry" even if you were the one who bumped into them. (Americans, on the other hand, won't say it at all: apologizing is admitting fault, which is an invitation to lawsuits.) We used to respond to this by pleading with them out of our own misguided sense of Niceness: "No. Please. Don't be sorry. It was MY fault." But after a while, we gave up, went with the flow, and started apologizing for everything, too. It was really...well, nice, once we got used to it.

The whole world makes fun of Canadians' resolute civility -- but once I'd read a little Canadian history, I realized that this Being Nice thing isn't just a cute cultural quirk. In fact, up here, it's is a deadly serious matter of national survival. Canada's 13 provinces and territories are, effectively, three separate nations—each with its own culture, language, religion, and history. On top of that, the country is the world's largest importer of new immigrants, a large fraction of whom are from cultures very different from Canada's aboriginal and European bedrock. The federal constitution that binds all this together is very weak (it's not unlike the U.S.'s original Articles of Confederation), and the overwhelming bulk of government power is still tightly concentrated in the hands of the provincial premiers (that's Canadian for "state governors"). Secession is eminently possible, as the Quebecois so often like to remind us.

In the face of all that, there's the constant possibility—which does not exist in the U.S.—that one cranky politician having one bad day could stand up and say one idiot thing that would cause one faction or another to decamp en masse, thus precipitating the instant demise of Canada-as-we-know-it. The threat is real. It could happen. And the only thing that keeps it from happening is that resolute collective determination to stay calm, keep the peace, and Be Nice.

Civility is, in a very real sense, the glue that holds this big, diverse nation together. Name-calling, othering, and losing one's temper is, quite simply, un-Canadian and unpatriotic. Failure to be civil in public is the fastest way (perhaps the only way) to get Canadians genuinely peeved at you. In the land where "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" is supplanted by "peace, order, and good government" as the organizing values, there is simply no excuse at all for that kind of behavior, ever.

Our essential reliance on civil discourse—and the big trouble that awaits us when we try to function without it—is the same idea that Jeffrey Feldman explores, far more pointedly, in his new book, Outright Barbarous: How the Violent Language of the Right Poisons American Democracy. Feldman, whose indispensable Frameshop blog has done a lot of the heavy lifting in deconstructing the way the American right uses and abuses language, briskly and thoughtfully deconstructs seven specific ways 30 years of us-versus-them rhetoric has polarized the country, forced us into unnecessary conflicts against each other and everyone else, and virtually destroyed our ability to govern ourselves.

Dave Neiwert, who coined the term "eliminationist rhetoric" to describe the language Americans have so often used to justify violence against each other, has carefully outlined the process by which ugly talk can easily devolve into horrific action. Call it holocaust, lynching, or apartheid -- whatever the atrocity, it always begins with language that privileges us, dehumanizes them, and somehow justifies their removal from our midst. Feldman's book breaks out another side to this conversation, by showing that the right wing has scored some very specific and tangible (and otherwise politically untenable) benefits by the simple act of grinding our discourse down the point where it's now mostly conduced in the coarsest of us-versus-them terms.

For each of the seven topics Feldman calls out, there's one conservative spokesperson who's led the rhetorical race to the bottom -- and one specific long-term conservative political agenda item that got served as a result. In his first example, the NRA's Wayne LaPierre sells a "vision of the world where violent assaults on individuals are inevitable, all laws and institutions are powerless to stop them, and the only guarantee for survival is for citizens to be prepared to fire a gun at the oncoming danger." Feldman argues that America can only adopt this worldview at the cost of its own democratic ideals, by fostering a "command-obedience" relationship between the governors and the governed—one that places the use of force outside the rule of law and beyond the control of the people's government. In the presence of arms, people are silenced, and the creative give-and-take required for good problem-solving suffers. Those who hold the guns prevail. This way, he warns, lies tyranny.

Then there's Pat Buchanan, leading the charge against immigration, which he insists is a calculated, well-planned "Reconquista" which has enlisted millions of triumphant Mexicans to invade America and exact their terrible revenge for the defeat of Santa Anna 160 years ago. Our only defense against the barbarian horde is to kill or be killed. Feldman notes that this kind of overheated eliminationist framing has been a boon to corporate conservatives, because it's made it impossible to have a nuanced (or even coherent) conversation that acknowledges NAFTA's grotesque destruction of the economy and the environment on both sides of the U.S./Mexico border.

"Immigration has become a political issue because of trade, not because of race or 'civilization,'" notes Feldman. "At its most primary, political level, America's immigration problem is a product of what David Sirota has aptly named the 'hostile takeover' of key economic policies in our government by vast corporations in control of unimaginable wealth."

But as long as we're talking about anchor babies and bilingual culture, we won't be talking about that. And that's just fine with those who are making a killing of their own on the status quo.

Ann Coulter's success is largely built on her ability to take any issue and instantly use it to justify violence against the right wing's favorite targets. Feldman traces the way this dubious gift has defined the trajectory of her career, culminating in her insistence that liberals need to be eliminated because they're traitors who are ready to hand the country over to al-Qaida. That's always the bottom line with Ann—and that quickness to write off anyone capable of a creative or nuanced thought creates a climate that stifles our ability to solve problems together, which is the essence of democratic government. It also effectively discourages people from participating in politics at all, lest they become targets of people who've learned their moves from Ann. "Coulter's rhetoric," writes Feldman, "poisons the soil in which civic identity takes root."

Feldman goes on to unmask Bill O'Reilly's bluster as a smokescreen that makes it impossible to talk seriously about national security and the things that really threaten us; John Gibson's "War on Christmas" as an assault on our ability to teach diversity in schools; and James Dobson's weird ideas about child discipline and family authority as a noxious cognitive pattern that influences the way we approach larger issues of community, authoritarianism, citizen discipline, and even foreign policy (inasmuch as some policymakers tend to view smaller countries exercising their sovereignty as wayward children in need of correction).

In the final chapters, his dissection of Dinesh D'Souza's rhetoric ties it all up with a bow. According to Feldman, every issue D'Souza touches down to the inevitable conclusion that liberals are to blame—a broad and breathtaking act of scapegoating that makes it impossible for us to get a collective handle on the true chain of responsibility that resulted in everything from 9/11 to the disastrous war that followed.

Taken as a whole, Feldman argues persuasively that the right wing's use of violent language and imagery over the past 30 years has gravely, deeply—perhaps even mortally—wounded the American body politic. As social theorists from John Dewey to Miss Manners have pointed out—and as my Canadian neighbors seem to understand as the central fact of their civic existence—civility is the necessary ingredient that allows democracies to function. Without it, there is no common good, no mutual respect, no reason to have faith in our ability to govern together wisely and well. When these basic agreements fail, so does our ability to self-govern. Reading this book from my peaceable perch on a mountainside in western Canada, the destruction of America's civic order, as Feldman describes it, looks utter and complete.

Somehow, we need to find our way back to each other. And, as simple as it sounds, it may start with a determined resolution that we are going to be civil to each other. Always. Even to your obnoxious Dittohead neighbor. Even to your annoying fundamentalist sister-in-law. Even to that jerk with the faded W'04 bumper sticker who stole your parking space. Even to the whinging concern troll in the comments thread. Catharsis feels like a birthright in our I-want-it-now society; but it's a luxury that progressives can no longer afford. Every time we give into it, the culture splits a little wider, and our odds of ever healing again it grow a bit more remote. It's time for progressives to step up and show the rest of the country how grownups behave. We've got an example to set, and a hundred million people to educate.

It's a lot to ask of "please" and "thank you." But the stakes are too high to ignore.

If we want democracy, we need to be able to see our fellow citizens as human beings, possessed of their own inherent worth and dignity.

If we want justice, we need to grant them the same rights and respect we feel entitled to—even when they're strenuously disagreeing with us, or when their interests and ours line up on opposite poles.

If we want security, we must first learn to be safe with each other, and trust ourselves as guardians of our collective well-being.

If we want to rebuild the country, we need to remember that we are all heirs to the same vast trust of social, political, and physical capital built up by previous generations; that our livelihood and liberties depend entirely on how well we can manage to sustain that common legacy; and that we share a duty to ensure our children's future by passing all of that on to them, not only intact but richer yet.

The only disagreements we should have are over the best means to achieve all this. The goals themselves should be beyond question. Feldman gives us a useful primer on how the right wing has carefully and deliberately separated us from both our founding goals and the means to achieve them. It's up to us to put put it all back together, and that starts with Being Nice.

A final note. The idea that Being Nice is a sign of weakness is, as noted above, inherent in the conservative narrative Feldman describes. Anger merchants like Coulter and O'Reilly have sold an entire generation of Americans on the idea that the mere desire to gather facts, contemplate them calmly, and discuss them rationally with people who might have other points of view makes one a traitor to the nation—weak, ineffectual, and dangerously liberal.

The horrifying result of this is a political climate in which many Americans believe that those who can throw the biggest tantrum deserve to get their way. (Which is not democracy, or anything like it. It's rule by bullies.) If you want to know why American politics sounds like a sandbox fight in the kindergarten playground, there's one good answer. Look at it this way, and it becomes clear that the Obama/Hillary partisan pissing matches of the past many weeks are, once again, playing right into conservative hands. Never mind the fact that when those two fight, McCain wins. Look beyond that to the more distressing fact, which is that too many Democrats have finally become every bit as ugly as the GOP has always been. They've gotten to us. We've finally become what we most despise.

For the record: Being Nice, done well, has a ferocious strength all its own, as anyone who's watched a CBC news interviewer or dealt with a Canadian school headmaster can tell you. Over the past four years, I've seen fastidious politeness and heartbreaking compassion used in the hands of master practitioners, and marveled at the power of sheer civility to defeat hotheads, deflect crazy ideas, and send shit-stirrers right out the door. It's a skill we need to relearn, and soon. Fortunately, we have 32 million neighbors and authors like Jeffrey Feldman to show us the way.