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Angry Words, and Then What?


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angry-words-and-then-what-14707.htmlCity Journal:

Broken civility could bring something even worse.

Matthew Hennessey

August 29, 2016

 

The last several decades have seen one of the great policy achievements of our age: a policing revolution that dramatically reduced crime in most major cities, especially New York. It was grounded in a fundamental insight that small signs of disorder—a broken window in an abandoned building—lead to bigger ones. The same insight holds true, it seems, for political speech and civility. Small excesses lead to more troubling statements. When people laugh off a politician’s crass remarks or nod their heads at not-so-veiled threats, it only encourages crasser remarks and more direct threats. Recall the crowd’s guffaws when Donald Trump suggested that maybe “the Second Amendment people” could serve as the last line of defense against the Supreme Court picks of a President Hillary Clinton. The Clinton campaign produced an ad claiming that if Trump wins the election, neo-Nazis will be running the country. Political civility has been suspended until at least the second week of November.

 

Our politics have always been a little salty. John Adams called Alexander Hamilton “the bastard brat of a Scottish peddler”—a brickbat that may have brought the quality of our political discourse down a peg, but at least had the virtue of eloquence. The current campaign’s insults, by contrast, are crude and crass. And it’s not just Trump and Clinton. Across American society, standards of civility have been slipping for a while. Maybe it all started with The McLaughlin Group and CNN’s Crossfire, the long-running shows in which liberal and conservative pundits shouted, interrupted, and insulted each other for half an hour. Nothing like that had existed on TV before 1982, when both shows debuted. Soon, people were screaming at each other on the other channels, too, egged on by the likes of Morton Downey, Jr., Jerry Springer, and Geraldo Rivera. In the nineties, cable news broadcasts often took the lowest-common-denominator format and put it on around the clock. Any time of the day or night, tune in and watch the other team get walloped.

 

Then came the Monica Lewinsky affair, with nightly news anchors leading their 6:30 broadcasts with talk of stained blue dresses and Oval Office cigars. Americans were forced to confront the fact that the presidency could be captured by an unfaithful cad, a charming lowlife, a congenital liar. Rhetorically, the George W. Bush years plumbed new depths. His critics freely called him a stupid, unsophisticated embarrassment—and suggested that he was probably a war criminal, too.

 

(Snip)


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