I liked that Ryan Powers article. It's possible that my calls for civility can be misinterpreted as a call for "etiquette" or "decorum". I'm very aware of how often we misunderstand each other (two countries separated by a common language etc). In fact, I approve wholeheartedly of taking hard, tough action against the enemies of democracy, and of calling a spade a spade. If someone (Trump, Vance anybody else, including Ds) lies, I favour calling it lies. If a policy which e.g. directly contradicts what the ruling party said they would do while campaigning is introduced by stealth, I approve of calling it out and doing what's necessary to impede it. If attempts to subvert voting rights (gerrymandering etc) are made, I approve of doing what's necessary to impede them. And if unconstitutional actions are made by the government, I approve of demonstrating and taking other necessary actions (law suits, states' rights related etc) to oppose them. I agree that the Dem national leadership have been lily-livered and hidebound in their opposition by obsolete norms and assumptions.
What I mean by civility is the opposite of Ubu's behaviour. You don't have to insult and demean people to openly and factually describe what they're doing, including how and why. Calling dishonest, corrupt politicians dishonest and corrupt when you can support the accusation is a moral and practical imperative. Where my call for what I call civility particularly applies is in two situations: 1. when arguing and debating with people who defend the actions of those in power, in which case it is perfectly possible to factually describe what is happening without insulting them (e.g. demonstrating that lies are lies), and 2. when arguing and debating with people who might otherwise be considered on the same side as oneself, when there are occasional doctrinal differences but their basic intentions are otherwise congruent with one's own. In this second case, the irresistible case of the Judean People's Front and the People's Front of Judea springs to mind; as well as being an illustration of a kind of narcissism of small differences, such infighting is counter-productive and does one's opponents' work for them.
Where American politics is concerned, I only wish there were more journalists and Dem politicians prepared to call a spade a spade, in such a way as to get their message truly across to the wider electorate. And I wish that there were platforms on which they could do so. Wit and creativity (like the dancing costumed protesters in Portland) really help in this, when enabled. And even Gavin Newsom's attempt at wit is better than nothing!
I think wj is absolutely right, nobody using the word knows what definition of "elite" anybody else uses. In the case of Rory Stewart, it can be quite hard to imagine how he wouldn't know he was part of "the elite", having been educated (as he was) at Eton and Balliol. It is of course a point in his favour that he only attended one meeting of the Bullingdon Club having realised how appalling their prevailing behaviour was, but on the other hand I believe they make a bit of a fetish of only selecting the "right kind" of members, which would mark you out as being a member of what many people (like Etonians for example) understand "the elite" to be. The only thing that would perhaps make sense is that he imagines the elite to be about money: he is right when he says that Oxford professors are not what most people these days consider "rich". Of course, before they started the immensely popular podcast, neither was he, although I believe he and Campbell are now!
I sympathise with novakant's view of Campbell, it took me a long time to get over his behaviour on Iraq etc. And I have never forgotten how he stormed onto the C4 News, with no notice, and tried to browbeat Jon Snow about the Dodgy Dossier. Watching it again makes me very much miss the calibre of those kinds of journalists (JS, not AC).
Aha, got it, thanks lj and Michael. I wasn't even sure the links would copy over, and the graphs, tables etc didn't, but at least I'll know what to look out for in the future. I haven't abandoned the idea of front page posts, lj, but a) this seemed appropriate to put in this thread, and b) I'm wary of there being too many new posts because I've always found the meandering, semi-discursive nature of our long threads one of the most appealing aspects of ObWi - like a bunch of friends sitting around chewing the fat.
Meanwhile, the NYT editorial board at least tells it like it is. Too bad the Rs have so bought into the fake news/MSM lie that they think they can safely ignore it:
OK, my comment which was "awaiting approval" has now disappeared, so it looks like it didn't gain approval. If so, lj, I think it's important to know why, so I (and everybody else) can avoid such a failure in the future. If it was the length, at the old site all I would have had to do was split it into two comments, so if that were confirmed I could act accordingly.
I have no idea how this will copy across (in the original there are loads of links - hopefully here in blue - and images etc which I think have not copied) and I have certainly gathered that Ian Leslie is not everybody here's cup of tea. But although I don't know how much of this is completely right, I found it interesting. I have italicised the part that particularly interested me, and bolded the portion of that which is something I have been aware of for a long time. Years ago I used to call this phenomenon "cluster of attitudes", and not only is it infuriating, and misleading, it is IMO really lazy.
How Moderates Win In a Hostile Environment Ian Leslie
Oct 11
Paid
It has not gone unremarked that Americans with different political views distrust and dislike one another. This is usually framed as a 50:50 division between supporters of the two main parties: two vast armies, fighting for entirely different values and policies, facing off in a cold civil war. Look under the surface, however, and something more complex is going on.
First of all, it’s not true that the America’s population can be easily divided into ideological camps, and while such questions are much debated among political scientists, there’s a good case that Americans overall haven’t become more extreme or rigid in their views. What’s happened is that America’s political culture has been poisoned by a minority of ideologues on either side.
Ideologues, in the sense used by political scientists, are voters who have consistent beliefs, organised into recognisable patterns. If you know they’re against immigration, you can predict they’re also anti-abortion and pro-gun. Non-ideologues either have no strong views on politics, or they have strong opinions which don’t follow a standard template.
Although the number of ideologues has been growing (they’ve doubled over the last twenty years) they still represent only about a fifth of voters. Most Americans aren’t as structured in their views and don’t easily fit into Democrat or Republican boxes. Many of them are ambivalent about the most divisive issues, like abortion. Plenty of them have a mix of liberal and conservative positions.
Ideologues have disproportionate influence and power, however. They shout the loudest and generate the most political content. They’re also the ones funding and running political parties. (Politicians are more ideologically consistent than most voters, partly because they have to be to get ahead but also because many of them are predisposed to be).
Another reason that ideologues matter so much is that they exhibit more anger, distrust and hostility towards the other side - and those feelings are contagious. While most voters don’t share the political fervour of this minority, they have absorbed their animosity. Voters who identified as Democrat or Republican didn’t used to have strong feelings about those who leaned the other way - it was just politics, after all - but they do now. “Affective polarisation” has increased and spread throughout the population.
High levels of negative feelings about those on the other side have become normal. This is true even among independents. Most independents lean toward one party or the other. Between 1994 and 2018 those with “very unfavourable opinions” of the other side increased from 8% to 37% among Democratic leaners, and from 15% to 39% among Republican leaners.
In short, ideological polarisation is a minority pursuit, but affective polarisation is a national pastime. Most voters don’t actually have very strong views on economic or social policy and couldn’t necessarily point you to major differences in the parties’ platforms, but they have a strong feeling that the other side is wrong and bad. They don’t care much about politics but they know who they don’t like.
In Britain, things are a little different. Whenever I hear people say British politics is “polarised” I wince a little. To polarise means to divide into two opposing groups. The term is lifted from America, where nearly everyone votes for one of two parties, and it doesn’t make sense here.
In fact the salient feature of British politics in the last few years has been a decline in the popularity of both main parties and a fragmentation of the vote. Our slightly milder but still fractious political debate takes place between a series of cultural-political clusters which don’t line up neatly with institutional affiliations. There’s more than one way to cut the cultural cake but More In Common’s typology is a useful one (numbers here).
Parties aiming for a parliamentary majority need to straddle different clusters, which is far from impossible. Without America’s party binary, British voting patterns are inherently more fluid. The differences between most voters are not necessarily wide: most Reform voters favour same-sex marriage, for instance, and are vaguely in favour of diversity, even if they want immigration to come down (the latter being true of most voters). I hear a lot of politicians and pundits urging Keir Starmer to focus on his “natural” voters rather than on those tempted by Reform, but that would represent a tragic failure of ambition. Nigel Farage certainly doesn’t accept that he can’t win over left-leaning voters.
There is a sense of pessimism among centrist commentators - a feeling that British voters are both irretrievably atomised and radicalised. I’m not convinced by this. Pollsters who spend a lot of time doing focus groups tend to over-estimate the extent to which people care about politics, and also how miserable and angry voters are. Focus groups are socially awkward events, and one of the main ways British people bond with each other is by having a good moan.
My guess is that, as in the US, a substantial minority of hardliners on left and right generate most of the public anger and animosity, which breeds a listless but pervasive distrust and cynicism among voters at large. (More of the hardline anger comes from the right than the left - see the “Dissenting Disruptors” in More In Common’s framework, a very frustrated, verging-on-anarchist group of voters which now constitutes nearly a fifth of the electorate.) In America and Britain ideologically driven voters are in the minority but on the rise, and they have an outsized democratic impact. America, in particular, places a lot of power in the hands of ideologues, via the presidential nomination process. The Republican Party was famously radicalised by Trump, and the Democratic electorate is a lot more left-wing than it was when Joe Biden won the nomination. We might even say that the future of democracy depends on these voters. So it’s worth taking a closer look at how they behave. I found this new paper on disagreement among ideologues very interesting. It’s by a political scientist, Tadeas Cely, who studies America’s political polarisation. Cely adopts the definition of “ideology” coined by the godfather of modern political science, Philip Converse: “a system of explicit and unequivocal political beliefs”. Ideologues are people who are politically sophisticated enough to know, in Converse’s phrase, “what goes with what”, and stick to the pattern of beliefs that they share with their cohort. Cely ran a survey of a couple of thousand American voters in which he presented them with the opinions of a hypothetical voter on controversial political issues (like immigration and gun control). The hypothetical voters was either liberal, conservative, a mild centrist, or someone with an unusual mix of strongly held views - a “messy” belief system. The respondents were classified in the same way, according to the firmness and consistency of their policy positions. After viewing the hypothetical voter’s opinions, respondents were asked to rate how warmly they felt about this person, using a hundred point “thermometer” scale. Cely found that disagreement between ideologues produces more animosity than other disagreements. Not just a bit more - way more. When two ideologues clash, they hate each other about three times more intensely than after disagreeing with people with equally strong but “messy”, non-patterned beliefs, and four times more than with mild-mannered centrists. Cely’s analysis of how animosity gets triggered is fascinating. In a second survey, he used the same model and told participants that their fictional interlocutor held views on two additional issues (student debt and Gaza ceasefire) without saying what those views were. What he found is that those “unrevealed” opinions increased the hostility of the disagreement. Why? Because the ideologues “filled in the blanks”. After having seen the person’s view on abortion, they just knew what this person would say about Gaza. And it made them furious. We might put it like this: disagreement between ideologues is metonymic. The part stands in for the whole. As soon I know one of your beliefs, I know all of them. More than that, I know what kind of person you are: you’re somebody I hate.
In a sense the whole political environment now operates metonymically. With so much competition for eyeballs, the amount of attention voters spare for politics is smaller than ever, so they make thin slice judgements based on content produced by ideologues on their own side - content which highlights the most outrageous and objectionable ideologues from the other side. Voters extrapolate from the worst to the whole.
If you’re non-ideological, moderate politician, you need to be able to speak to the ideologues on your side.¹ They’re a growing group of voters, overrepresented in the centres of power, who set the tone of the wider debate because of how noisy they are and how intensely they dislike the other side.
But if you only speak to the ideologues, you get trapped inside the ideologue’s rigid belief system, which makes it harder to reach the non-ideological majority. You’d also be faking it, which is quite easy to spot. The trick is to adopt enough of the pattern to avoid being denounced as a traitor by your own side, while adopting one or two elements beyond it which show that you’re not a captive of it.
Pattern-disruption is important both to be noticed in the first place - given that voters are predictive processors with scarce attention for politics who simply screen out familiar patterns - and to prove that the politician is their own person rather than a robot controlled by his or her party or faction. Most voters have ‘messy’ sets of beliefs and they respond to politicians who mirror them in that sense.
This is not to be confused with putting together a ragbag of positions based on whatever policies do well in polling. Ambitious politicians need a set of positions that are internally coherent, grounded in a story about how the country needs to change (beyond ‘get the other guy/party out’). But it can’t be a matching set; it has to be new or surprising in some way.
I’m not suggesting anyone emulate Trump’s brazenly offensive manner or authoritarianism, which have done so much to toxify American politics. But consider how his unlikely success in 2016 was based on a pattern-breaking combination of policy positions: strongly anti-immigration, opposed to foreign wars, pro tax-cuts, pro-Medicare. Consequently he was regarded by voters as less conservative than most Republican candidates, and more moderate than his opponent, Hillary Clinton.
Or recall Boris Johnson’s greatest political victory. He won the 2019 general election by mixing cultural authoritarianism (Get Brexit Done) with economic interventionism (”levelling up”). That broke the expected patterns and knocked down the Red Wall. Johnson and Trump were very different in style, even if they often get lumped together but it’s important to note that successful politicians practice strategic pattern-disruption at the level of tone as well as policy.
For instance, a moderate politician might not want to present as moderate. “Moderation” by itself doesn’t make noise, and at worst, it signals complacency and weakness. (If Josh Shapiro, the popular and moderate governor of Pennsylvania, wants to win the 2028 nomination, he will have to lean into his inner Bernie.) But pure “radicalism” keeps you in the ideologue box. A “combative moderate” uses the rhetorical intensity of ideologue wing to moderate ends. Hence the current incarnation of Gavin Newsom.
Zohran Mamdani is a pattern-breaker. Progressives often come across as stern and scolding; Mamdani is relaxed, funny, a good listener. He is a radical leftist who wears a smart, some might say conservative, suit and tie. His wire-crossing may end up extending to more than style or personality; it will be interesting to see if he ends up adopting a politically heterogeneous, ‘messy’ mix of policies once in office, as Ken Livingstone, similar in some ways, did in his first, successful term as London mayor.
It is probable that the share of ideologues in the electorate will continue to grow, as social media makes political discourse ever more algorithmic and ever more angry. Politics may eventually become a clash of armies with rigid, unyielding, static positions. But we’re not there yet, and we probably won’t be for quite a while. It is still possible for imaginative politicians to disrupt established patterns and create new ones, and plenty of space for them to do so in the middle ground. What they can’t afford to be is predictable.
It's a long time since I read The Fire Next Time, but I just saw somewhere this quotation from it, which resonated:
"I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain"
I think contemplating that makes certain kinds of people very afraid.
What's amazing to me is how few commentators, explaining why Trump has so recently started putting real pressure on Netanyahu, are making the connection with a) Trump's fury with Israel attacking Qatar, his favourite gold-drenched plane donors, and b) what must be his growing understanding that the old automatic calculation that American presidents need to keep the US Jewish community sweet is changing, and has changed, as a result of Israel's extraordinarily disproportionate reaction to the admittedly horrific events of 10/7/23.
I actually agree with pretty much all of this, particularly with describing openly what much of the R/Trumpian project really does to ordinary people. I think it's particularly effective to expose the lies, call them lies, and provide clear proof. The fact that, on the shutdown, D messages on the loss of health care are cutting through is a good example. It seems obvious to me that the finer points of progressive ideological concerns do not cut through to the electorate, or move the Overton window (except in the wrong direction).
The tags (<b>, </b> etc) don't seem to be working any more (for reasons I bet some of you understand, but I don't). It's a pity, I think they really add.
ps As my last comment probably makes clear, but just in case not: I mainly believe in civility <b>to</b> the person/people with whom you are actually arguing. Civility <b>about</b> people you have strong and justifiable opinions on is a different thing, at least in my opinion.
I cannot resist replying to you russell. I agree with every single word you say about Stephen Miller. I do not think it is demonisation to describe him as a bad person.
<i>A civility that just means “we don’t talk about that” is going to choke us.</i>
Agreed with every fibre of my being. I think my participation on ObWi shows very clearly that "not talking about that", and practising a civility that implies agreement, is not my way!
Yup, I think we're just going to have to agree to disagree. In my case because it looks to me like at the moment it is the "right" (if these categories are even useful any more) that is clearly being far more uncivil than most of the "left" (again IMO the "left" seems to specialise more in implied guilt, or at least invalidation, by association or history). And one thing is for sure, I'm definitely not in favour of "performative civility" which can definitely be used for "bad aims". I don't think calling for civility (as I understand civility) is about exerting power. I think it is about an attempt to avoid demonisation, and the inevitable descent into intractable silos, from which (as far as I can see) no good (or repair, in Gay's word) ever comes. And it is an attempt to remember, in Pro Bono's formulation, that one's ideological opposites are human. So be it. In russell's inimitable words, peace out.
lj: I certainly don't think one should ignore someone's history if, like Kirk, they have a consistent record of saying the same kind of thing. But if they make good or interesting arguments, while being not particularly offensive, I consider it an irrelevant distraction to use their nationality, their previous professional experience or their ideological difference from oneself to discredit them or make their argument suspect, rather than something actually in the argument itself. It seems to me the very recipe for constructing a bubble around oneself.
On the other hand, I certainly consider it relevant in certain circumstances to consider someone's background to explain why they might make an argument with which one disagrees, because emotional past experiences certainly affect one's opinions, even if not in logically justifiable ways. So, in e.g. the case of Gay, the fact that she is a second generation Haitian immigrant could certainly make one understand why in the wake of a lifetime of discrimination and recent accusations that Haitians have been eating Americans' dogs and cats, she might be enraged enough to make an argument that civility is unnecessary, or a mistake. But it doesn't make the argument right.
I often think this when bereaved relatives make understandably heart-rending arguments against their family member's murderer receiving parole, or life imprisonment rather than the death penalty. Their suffering is real, and a life sentence. But, IMO, that does not and should not triumph over a rational attempt to do the right thing. And, again IMO, civility (respect and politeness not agreement or capitulation) is an essential ingredient for the possibility of continuing meaningful debate and even sometimes change.
But weirdly the bit that made me sit up related to some of the difficulties I have had here posting things by people who then get dissed by virtue of some of their past policies, jobs etc:
There’s a sort of dance I see among commentators reacting to Newsom’s various engagements with Donald Trump. Praise his fight but don’t praise it too much because then one gets looped into whatever list of things this or that group doesn’t like that Newsom has done in the past, gets branded as a Newsom advocate, gets involuntarily associated what what I guess is best labeled as Newsom’s politician’s “slickness.” I realized I was giving too much weight to these things, even as I told myself I wasn’t.
And I suppose I quote this to show why I think it worth zeroing in on the arguments people actually make, rather than those people’s origins, past statements etc. Not that those things are irrelevant, and context is always valuable, but I do believe that an argument should mainly be evaluated on the strength of its actual argument, rather than the history, character or other attitudes of the person making it. I wonder if this was what Donald was getting at when he talked about (using Chomsky as an example) having to cast about and find alternative sources to quote for an argument, that would not generate distracting conversation about their other views.
ps By the way, I completely agree with what Pro Bono says @11.44. And, about Ian Leslie, on reading more of his Wikipedia entry I see it says he is a "writer on human behaviour", and that "Leslie also writes about psychology, culture, technology and business for the New Statesman, The Economist, The Guardian and the Financial Times." which to me at least gives slightly more context than the extract from his website “communication strategist for some of the world’s biggest brands, at ad agencies in London and New York; he still advises companies on workplace culture and strategic communication”.
Ah, I think I'm finally getting what you mean by "a stake" in this context, lj. If I understand correctly, you mean that people who have constructed (or subscribe to) an intellectual or ideological framework with many intersecting parts, can be so personally invested in it that they feel called to dispute any questioning of any element of it. In which kind of case, of course their arguments should be examined (like everybody's) for logic and evidence. But my view is that often people's views are complex, and that sometimes one can object to (and find logical or moral fault with) some of the elements, but not all, and that occasionally discussion along these lines can throw up interesting or productive ideas as well as being an example of treating other people with respect (i.e. civility).
It is much the same with the tendency to dismiss someone's opinions or arguments based on e.g. their profession or their past work, rather than engaging with their actual ideas or arguments. Very tempting, sometimes, but surely extremely reductive. I know almost nothing of Ian Leslie (have no idea why I get his newsletter - I think someone else subscribed me), but I think this quotation from his Wikipedia entry has a lot to recommend it:
"Open, passionate disagreement blows away the cobwebs that gather over even the most enduring relationships . . . It flushes out crucial information and insights that will otherwise lie inaccessible or dormant inside our brains. It fulfils the creative potential of diversity".
On the whole question of civility, I have been marvelling at the idea that it could mean a necessity to agree with one another. Is this a widespread idea, I wonder? If so, it could certainly explain why there is so much neglect of and resistance to it. But when Charles talks upthread about a site he used to frequent:
One of the regular participants would occasionally cross the line with ad hominem attacks, insults, and general nastiness. When called to task, he would complain bitterly about the Civility Brigade.
I think the opposite of this is the real definition of civility (and I would have thought the normal one): treating other people (even those with whom one vehemently disagrees) with politeness and respect. After all, if you hate their views in their entirety, and find them completely morally repugnant in every respect, nobody forces you to interact with them. Choosing to insult them, attack them and ascribe views to them which they have not stated or have even denied surely says more about the person doing it than the person on the receiving end.
But rather than pretend that we will reach agreement, I think civility demands that we accept that there are going to be points that we just disagree on
Sorry, the penultimate paragraph was supposed to be a clear quotation!
But since Gay starts her essay with Vance’s demand for civility, don’t you think it is a bit disingenuous to summarize Gay’s argument by not even noting that?
Oh, it seemed clear to me that after starting with a denunciation of Vance's hypocrisy and cosplay of civility, when Leslie goes on to talk about Gay and says Last week the academic and essayist Roxane Gay denounced Vance’s words in a column for the New York Times. She didn’t just criticise his double standards; she denounced the idea of civility itself, calling it “a fantasy”. (my bold) that he is absolutely noting that.
But anyway, textual analysis aside, your points about stakes seem worrying to me. People's biases seem relevant, and if one has no history with someone one can tease them out in argument and discussion, but "stake" seems to imply a personal involvement versus a principled position. Actually, that makes me realise I'm not sure what you mean by stake. Do you mean personal involvement or history with the issue? For example, when you mention "the usual suspects complaining about how women are treated in Islamic countries", (I'm assuming e.g. Afghanistan for the purpose of this conversation) who do you think needs a "stake" (and if so, what sort) to complain about it? If you mean that some people are complaining about it who are perfectly OK with women being treated poorly in countries they support, that hypocrisy is easy enough to bring up in the argument, isn't it?
i>But rather than pretend that we will reach agreement, I think civility demands that we accept that there are going to be points that we just disagree on
I completely agree with you on this. In fact, the possibility that "civility carries the demand that we have to reach agreement" seems to me absurd; I have certainly never heard of it, or meant it.
nous, the "GOP and their core voters" and their base, and MAGAs, are clearly not available for civil discussion, and maybe they never will be. But some soi-disant conservatives, and not just outliers like wj, are, and maybe eventually the public discourse, Overton Window etc will shift back somewhat (when healthcare disappears from millions perhaps?), and the habits of civility will be useful among larger populations. One can hope, and try to keep the home fires burning....
Charles, as someone who has been (understandably) piled on, you certainly have my sympathy. But I pay you the compliment of hoping and believing you don't mind an ongoing conversation, question and answer etc, and I hope you take it that way. I find your ongoing explanations and glosses valuable too.
lj, my reading of that Leslie piece was that he was in not implying that Vance is in any way at all "practising civility". He seems to make this pretty clear when he says:
So – cancel culture is bad, but if you see someone posting a dumb tweet about Kirk, it’s your patriotic duty to get them fired. This is before we get to the absurdity of claiming to believe in civility while acting as head boy to a president who glories in insulting opponents and using the f-word. You might suspect Vance of self-parody if he weren’t so joyless.
Sorry if the formatting made any of it unclear, I'm finding the inability to proofread before posting, and uncertainty about the new rules etc, inhibiting when copying and pasting. Hopefully, some of that will get better.
By the way I was fascinated by your concept of people arguing a position which they do not have a stake in. Who would make the decision about what commenters' stakes in their various arguments were, and therefore which were permissible? I was thinking for example of myself: a white, upper-middle class British woman from a reasonably privileged background. Someone who did not know my background (parents who left a successful and privileged life in South Africa in the 50s with very little money because of their opposition to apartheid) might wonder why I am so concerned with racial inequality, what my "stake" in it is. (In fact, in DC in the 70s, I was much more interested in racial discrimination than some of the black Republicans I met.) How on earth would one know unless told, and why would there need to be an background check? Surely people are allowed principles which do not have an easily explicable origin story?
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “The Mother-in-law defense”
I liked that Ryan Powers article. It's possible that my calls for civility can be misinterpreted as a call for "etiquette" or "decorum". I'm very aware of how often we misunderstand each other (two countries separated by a common language etc). In fact, I approve wholeheartedly of taking hard, tough action against the enemies of democracy, and of calling a spade a spade. If someone (Trump, Vance anybody else, including Ds) lies, I favour calling it lies. If a policy which e.g. directly contradicts what the ruling party said they would do while campaigning is introduced by stealth, I approve of calling it out and doing what's necessary to impede it. If attempts to subvert voting rights (gerrymandering etc) are made, I approve of doing what's necessary to impede them. And if unconstitutional actions are made by the government, I approve of demonstrating and taking other necessary actions (law suits, states' rights related etc) to oppose them. I agree that the Dem national leadership have been lily-livered and hidebound in their opposition by obsolete norms and assumptions.
What I mean by civility is the opposite of Ubu's behaviour. You don't have to insult and demean people to openly and factually describe what they're doing, including how and why. Calling dishonest, corrupt politicians dishonest and corrupt when you can support the accusation is a moral and practical imperative. Where my call for what I call civility particularly applies is in two situations: 1. when arguing and debating with people who defend the actions of those in power, in which case it is perfectly possible to factually describe what is happening without insulting them (e.g. demonstrating that lies are lies), and 2. when arguing and debating with people who might otherwise be considered on the same side as oneself, when there are occasional doctrinal differences but their basic intentions are otherwise congruent with one's own. In this second case, the irresistible case of the Judean People's Front and the People's Front of Judea springs to mind; as well as being an illustration of a kind of narcissism of small differences, such infighting is counter-productive and does one's opponents' work for them.
Where American politics is concerned, I only wish there were more journalists and Dem politicians prepared to call a spade a spade, in such a way as to get their message truly across to the wider electorate. And I wish that there were platforms on which they could do so. Wit and creativity (like the dancing costumed protesters in Portland) really help in this, when enabled. And even Gavin Newsom's attempt at wit is better than nothing!
"
Pretty much everything russell says @ - oh, no time stamp. His longer comment anyway.
On “Brought to you by your latest captain of industry”
I think wj is absolutely right, nobody using the word knows what definition of "elite" anybody else uses. In the case of Rory Stewart, it can be quite hard to imagine how he wouldn't know he was part of "the elite", having been educated (as he was) at Eton and Balliol. It is of course a point in his favour that he only attended one meeting of the Bullingdon Club having realised how appalling their prevailing behaviour was, but on the other hand I believe they make a bit of a fetish of only selecting the "right kind" of members, which would mark you out as being a member of what many people (like Etonians for example) understand "the elite" to be. The only thing that would perhaps make sense is that he imagines the elite to be about money: he is right when he says that Oxford professors are not what most people these days consider "rich". Of course, before they started the immensely popular podcast, neither was he, although I believe he and Campbell are now!
I sympathise with novakant's view of Campbell, it took me a long time to get over his behaviour on Iraq etc. And I have never forgotten how he stormed onto the C4 News, with no notice, and tried to browbeat Jon Snow about the Dodgy Dossier. Watching it again makes me very much miss the calibre of those kinds of journalists (JS, not AC).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBWE7QzADe8
On “Let’s start calling a thug a thug”
Aha, got it, thanks lj and Michael. I wasn't even sure the links would copy over, and the graphs, tables etc didn't, but at least I'll know what to look out for in the future. I haven't abandoned the idea of front page posts, lj, but a) this seemed appropriate to put in this thread, and b) I'm wary of there being too many new posts because I've always found the meandering, semi-discursive nature of our long threads one of the most appealing aspects of ObWi - like a bunch of friends sitting around chewing the fat.
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Meanwhile, the NYT editorial board at least tells it like it is. Too bad the Rs have so bought into the fake news/MSM lie that they think they can safely ignore it:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/10/opinion/letitia-james-indictment-trump.html?unlocked_article_code=1.sk8.XvAr.7ewQlq_sNfRI&smid=url-share
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OK, my comment which was "awaiting approval" has now disappeared, so it looks like it didn't gain approval. If so, lj, I think it's important to know why, so I (and everybody else) can avoid such a failure in the future. If it was the length, at the old site all I would have had to do was split it into two comments, so if that were confirmed I could act accordingly.
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I have just copied something quite long, which is "awaiting approval". I don't know why - maybe the length.
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I have no idea how this will copy across (in the original there are loads of links - hopefully here in blue - and images etc which I think have not copied) and I have certainly gathered that Ian Leslie is not everybody here's cup of tea. But although I don't know how much of this is completely right, I found it interesting. I have italicised the part that particularly interested me, and bolded the portion of that which is something I have been aware of for a long time. Years ago I used to call this phenomenon "cluster of attitudes", and not only is it infuriating, and misleading, it is IMO really lazy.
How Moderates Win In a Hostile Environment
Ian Leslie
Oct 11
Paid
It has not gone unremarked that Americans with different political views distrust and dislike one another. This is usually framed as a 50:50 division between supporters of the two main parties: two vast armies, fighting for entirely different values and policies, facing off in a cold civil war. Look under the surface, however, and something more complex is going on.
First of all, it’s not true that the America’s population can be easily divided into ideological camps, and while such questions are much debated among political scientists, there’s a good case that Americans overall haven’t become more extreme or rigid in their views. What’s happened is that America’s political culture has been poisoned by a minority of ideologues on either side.
Ideologues, in the sense used by political scientists, are voters who have consistent beliefs, organised into recognisable patterns. If you know they’re against immigration, you can predict they’re also anti-abortion and pro-gun. Non-ideologues either have no strong views on politics, or they have strong opinions which don’t follow a standard template.
Although the number of ideologues has been growing (they’ve doubled over the last twenty years) they still represent only about a fifth of voters. Most Americans aren’t as structured in their views and don’t easily fit into Democrat or Republican boxes. Many of them are ambivalent about the most divisive issues, like abortion. Plenty of them have a mix of liberal and conservative positions.
Ideologues have disproportionate influence and power, however. They shout the loudest and generate the most political content. They’re also the ones funding and running political parties. (Politicians are more ideologically consistent than most voters, partly because they have to be to get ahead but also because many of them are predisposed to be).
Another reason that ideologues matter so much is that they exhibit more anger, distrust and hostility towards the other side - and those feelings are contagious. While most voters don’t share the political fervour of this minority, they have absorbed their animosity. Voters who identified as Democrat or Republican didn’t used to have strong feelings about those who leaned the other way - it was just politics, after all - but they do now. “Affective polarisation” has increased and spread throughout the population.
High levels of negative feelings about those on the other side have become normal. This is true even among independents. Most independents lean toward one party or the other. Between 1994 and 2018 those with “very unfavourable opinions” of the other side increased from 8% to 37% among Democratic leaners, and from 15% to 39% among Republican leaners.
In short, ideological polarisation is a minority pursuit, but affective polarisation is a national pastime. Most voters don’t actually have very strong views on economic or social policy and couldn’t necessarily point you to major differences in the parties’ platforms, but they have a strong feeling that the other side is wrong and bad. They don’t care much about politics but they know who they don’t like.
In Britain, things are a little different. Whenever I hear people say British politics is “polarised” I wince a little. To polarise means to divide into two opposing groups. The term is lifted from America, where nearly everyone votes for one of two parties, and it doesn’t make sense here.
In fact the salient feature of British politics in the last few years has been a decline in the popularity of both main parties and a fragmentation of the vote. Our slightly milder but still fractious political debate takes place between a series of cultural-political clusters which don’t line up neatly with institutional affiliations. There’s more than one way to cut the cultural cake but More In Common’s typology is a useful one (numbers here).
Parties aiming for a parliamentary majority need to straddle different clusters, which is far from impossible. Without America’s party binary, British voting patterns are inherently more fluid. The differences between most voters are not necessarily wide: most Reform voters favour same-sex marriage, for instance, and are vaguely in favour of diversity, even if they want immigration to come down (the latter being true of most voters). I hear a lot of politicians and pundits urging Keir Starmer to focus on his “natural” voters rather than on those tempted by Reform, but that would represent a tragic failure of ambition. Nigel Farage certainly doesn’t accept that he can’t win over left-leaning voters.
There is a sense of pessimism among centrist commentators - a feeling that British voters are both irretrievably atomised and radicalised. I’m not convinced by this. Pollsters who spend a lot of time doing focus groups tend to over-estimate the extent to which people care about politics, and also how miserable and angry voters are. Focus groups are socially awkward events, and one of the main ways British people bond with each other is by having a good moan.
My guess is that, as in the US, a substantial minority of hardliners on left and right generate most of the public anger and animosity, which breeds a listless but pervasive distrust and cynicism among voters at large. (More of the hardline anger comes from the right than the left - see the “Dissenting Disruptors” in More In Common’s framework, a very frustrated, verging-on-anarchist group of voters which now constitutes nearly a fifth of the electorate.)
In America and Britain ideologically driven voters are in the minority but on the rise, and they have an outsized democratic impact. America, in particular, places a lot of power in the hands of ideologues, via the presidential nomination process. The Republican Party was famously radicalised by Trump, and the Democratic electorate is a lot more left-wing than it was when Joe Biden won the nomination.
We might even say that the future of democracy depends on these voters. So it’s worth taking a closer look at how they behave. I found this new paper on disagreement among ideologues very interesting. It’s by a political scientist, Tadeas Cely, who studies America’s political polarisation. Cely adopts the definition of “ideology” coined by the godfather of modern political science, Philip Converse: “a system of explicit and unequivocal political beliefs”. Ideologues are people who are politically sophisticated enough to know, in Converse’s phrase, “what goes with what”, and stick to the pattern of beliefs that they share with their cohort.
Cely ran a survey of a couple of thousand American voters in which he presented them with the opinions of a hypothetical voter on controversial political issues (like immigration and gun control). The hypothetical voters was either liberal, conservative, a mild centrist, or someone with an unusual mix of strongly held views - a “messy” belief system. The respondents were classified in the same way, according to the firmness and consistency of their policy positions.
After viewing the hypothetical voter’s opinions, respondents were asked to rate how warmly they felt about this person, using a hundred point “thermometer” scale. Cely found that disagreement between ideologues produces more animosity than other disagreements. Not just a bit more - way more. When two ideologues clash, they hate each other about three times more intensely than after disagreeing with people with equally strong but “messy”, non-patterned beliefs, and four times more than with mild-mannered centrists.
Cely’s analysis of how animosity gets triggered is fascinating. In a second survey, he used the same model and told participants that their fictional interlocutor held views on two additional issues (student debt and Gaza ceasefire) without saying what those views were. What he found is that those “unrevealed” opinions increased the hostility of the disagreement. Why? Because the ideologues “filled in the blanks”. After having seen the person’s view on abortion, they just knew what this person would say about Gaza. And it made them furious.
We might put it like this: disagreement between ideologues is metonymic. The part stands in for the whole. As soon I know one of your beliefs, I know all of them. More than that, I know what kind of person you are: you’re somebody I hate.
In a sense the whole political environment now operates metonymically. With so much competition for eyeballs, the amount of attention voters spare for politics is smaller than ever, so they make thin slice judgements based on content produced by ideologues on their own side - content which highlights the most outrageous and objectionable ideologues from the other side. Voters extrapolate from the worst to the whole.
If you’re non-ideological, moderate politician, you need to be able to speak to the ideologues on your side.¹ They’re a growing group of voters, overrepresented in the centres of power, who set the tone of the wider debate because of how noisy they are and how intensely they dislike the other side.
But if you only speak to the ideologues, you get trapped inside the ideologue’s rigid belief system, which makes it harder to reach the non-ideological majority. You’d also be faking it, which is quite easy to spot. The trick is to adopt enough of the pattern to avoid being denounced as a traitor by your own side, while adopting one or two elements beyond it which show that you’re not a captive of it.
Pattern-disruption is important both to be noticed in the first place - given that voters are predictive processors with scarce attention for politics who simply screen out familiar patterns - and to prove that the politician is their own person rather than a robot controlled by his or her party or faction. Most voters have ‘messy’ sets of beliefs and they respond to politicians who mirror them in that sense.
This is not to be confused with putting together a ragbag of positions based on whatever policies do well in polling. Ambitious politicians need a set of positions that are internally coherent, grounded in a story about how the country needs to change (beyond ‘get the other guy/party out’). But it can’t be a matching set; it has to be new or surprising in some way.
I’m not suggesting anyone emulate Trump’s brazenly offensive manner or authoritarianism, which have done so much to toxify American politics. But consider how his unlikely success in 2016 was based on a pattern-breaking combination of policy positions: strongly anti-immigration, opposed to foreign wars, pro tax-cuts, pro-Medicare. Consequently he was regarded by voters as less conservative than most Republican candidates, and more moderate than his opponent, Hillary Clinton.
Or recall Boris Johnson’s greatest political victory. He won the 2019 general election by mixing cultural authoritarianism (Get Brexit Done) with economic interventionism (”levelling up”). That broke the expected patterns and knocked down the Red Wall. Johnson and Trump were very different in style, even if they often get lumped together but it’s important to note that successful politicians practice strategic pattern-disruption at the level of tone as well as policy.
For instance, a moderate politician might not want to present as moderate. “Moderation” by itself doesn’t make noise, and at worst, it signals complacency and weakness. (If Josh Shapiro, the popular and moderate governor of Pennsylvania, wants to win the 2028 nomination, he will have to lean into his inner Bernie.) But pure “radicalism” keeps you in the ideologue box. A “combative moderate” uses the rhetorical intensity of ideologue wing to moderate ends. Hence the current incarnation of Gavin Newsom.
Zohran Mamdani is a pattern-breaker. Progressives often come across as stern and scolding; Mamdani is relaxed, funny, a good listener. He is a radical leftist who wears a smart, some might say conservative, suit and tie. His wire-crossing may end up extending to more than style or personality; it will be interesting to see if he ends up adopting a politically heterogeneous, ‘messy’ mix of policies once in office, as Ken Livingstone, similar in some ways, did in his first, successful term as London mayor.
It is probable that the share of ideologues in the electorate will continue to grow, as social media makes political discourse ever more algorithmic and ever more angry. Politics may eventually become a clash of armies with rigid, unyielding, static positions. But we’re not there yet, and we probably won’t be for quite a while. It is still possible for imaginative politicians to disrupt established patterns and create new ones, and plenty of space for them to do so in the middle ground. What they can’t afford to be is predictable.
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It's a long time since I read The Fire Next Time, but I just saw somewhere this quotation from it, which resonated:
"I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain"
I think contemplating that makes certain kinds of people very afraid.
On “…..”
What's amazing to me is how few commentators, explaining why Trump has so recently started putting real pressure on Netanyahu, are making the connection with a) Trump's fury with Israel attacking Qatar, his favourite gold-drenched plane donors, and b) what must be his growing understanding that the old automatic calculation that American presidents need to keep the US Jewish community sweet is changing, and has changed, as a result of Israel's extraordinarily disproportionate reaction to the admittedly horrific events of 10/7/23.
On “Let’s start calling a thug a thug”
I actually agree with pretty much all of this, particularly with describing openly what much of the R/Trumpian project really does to ordinary people. I think it's particularly effective to expose the lies, call them lies, and provide clear proof. The fact that, on the shutdown, D messages on the loss of health care are cutting through is a good example. It seems obvious to me that the finer points of progressive ideological concerns do not cut through to the electorate, or move the Overton window (except in the wrong direction).
On “Excelsior 2.1”
like this ? Aha! And I've never known how to
strike through"
The tags (<b>, </b> etc) don't seem to be working any more (for reasons I bet some of you understand, but I don't). It's a pity, I think they really add.
On “Where are the 5 words?”
ps As my last comment probably makes clear, but just in case not: I mainly believe in civility <b>to</b> the person/people with whom you are actually arguing. Civility <b>about</b> people you have strong and justifiable opinions on is a different thing, at least in my opinion.
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I cannot resist replying to you russell. I agree with every single word you say about Stephen Miller. I do not think it is demonisation to describe him as a bad person.
<i>A civility that just means “we don’t talk about that” is going to choke us.</i>
Agreed with every fibre of my being. I think my participation on ObWi shows very clearly that "not talking about that", and practising a civility that implies agreement, is not my way!
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Yup, I think we're just going to have to agree to disagree. In my case because it looks to me like at the moment it is the "right" (if these categories are even useful any more) that is clearly being far more uncivil than most of the "left" (again IMO the "left" seems to specialise more in implied guilt, or at least invalidation, by association or history). And one thing is for sure, I'm definitely not in favour of "performative civility" which can definitely be used for "bad aims". I don't think calling for civility (as I understand civility) is about exerting power. I think it is about an attempt to avoid demonisation, and the inevitable descent into intractable silos, from which (as far as I can see) no good (or repair, in Gay's word) ever comes. And it is an attempt to remember, in Pro Bono's formulation, that one's ideological opposites are human. So be it. In russell's inimitable words, peace out.
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lj: I certainly don't think one should ignore someone's history if, like Kirk, they have a consistent record of saying the same kind of thing. But if they make good or interesting arguments, while being not particularly offensive, I consider it an irrelevant distraction to use their nationality, their previous professional experience or their ideological difference from oneself to discredit them or make their argument suspect, rather than something actually in the argument itself. It seems to me the very recipe for constructing a bubble around oneself.
On the other hand, I certainly consider it relevant in certain circumstances to consider someone's background to explain why they might make an argument with which one disagrees, because emotional past experiences certainly affect one's opinions, even if not in logically justifiable ways. So, in e.g. the case of Gay, the fact that she is a second generation Haitian immigrant could certainly make one understand why in the wake of a lifetime of discrimination and recent accusations that Haitians have been eating Americans' dogs and cats, she might be enraged enough to make an argument that civility is unnecessary, or a mistake. But it doesn't make the argument right.
I often think this when bereaved relatives make understandably heart-rending arguments against their family member's murderer receiving parole, or life imprisonment rather than the death penalty. Their suffering is real, and a life sentence. But, IMO, that does not and should not triumph over a rational attempt to do the right thing. And, again IMO, civility (respect and politeness not agreement or capitulation) is an essential ingredient for the possibility of continuing meaningful debate and even sometimes change.
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Josh Marshall has an interesting post today about fighting this/getting back from this. This should be a gift link:
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/power-is-the-order-of-the-day-and-other-beds-trump-has-made
But weirdly the bit that made me sit up related to some of the difficulties I have had here posting things by people who then get dissed by virtue of some of their past policies, jobs etc:
There’s a sort of dance I see among commentators reacting to Newsom’s various engagements with Donald Trump. Praise his fight but don’t praise it too much because then one gets looped into whatever list of things this or that group doesn’t like that Newsom has done in the past, gets branded as a Newsom advocate, gets involuntarily associated what what I guess is best labeled as Newsom’s politician’s “slickness.” I realized I was giving too much weight to these things, even as I told myself I wasn’t.
And I suppose I quote this to show why I think it worth zeroing in on the arguments people actually make, rather than those people’s origins, past statements etc. Not that those things are irrelevant, and context is always valuable, but I do believe that an argument should mainly be evaluated on the strength of its actual argument, rather than the history, character or other attitudes of the person making it. I wonder if this was what Donald was getting at when he talked about (using Chomsky as an example) having to cast about and find alternative sources to quote for an argument, that would not generate distracting conversation about their other views.
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TonyP: I meant on the blog! But, FWIW, I am in general completely in sympathy with your approach.
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ps By the way, I completely agree with what Pro Bono says @11.44. And, about Ian Leslie, on reading more of his Wikipedia entry I see it says he is a "writer on human behaviour", and that "Leslie also writes about psychology, culture, technology and business for the New Statesman, The Economist, The Guardian and the Financial Times." which to me at least gives slightly more context than the extract from his website “communication strategist for some of the world’s biggest brands, at ad agencies in London and New York; he still advises companies on workplace culture and strategic communication”.
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Ah, I think I'm finally getting what you mean by "a stake" in this context, lj. If I understand correctly, you mean that people who have constructed (or subscribe to) an intellectual or ideological framework with many intersecting parts, can be so personally invested in it that they feel called to dispute any questioning of any element of it. In which kind of case, of course their arguments should be examined (like everybody's) for logic and evidence. But my view is that often people's views are complex, and that sometimes one can object to (and find logical or moral fault with) some of the elements, but not all, and that occasionally discussion along these lines can throw up interesting or productive ideas as well as being an example of treating other people with respect (i.e. civility).
It is much the same with the tendency to dismiss someone's opinions or arguments based on e.g. their profession or their past work, rather than engaging with their actual ideas or arguments. Very tempting, sometimes, but surely extremely reductive. I know almost nothing of Ian Leslie (have no idea why I get his newsletter - I think someone else subscribed me), but I think this quotation from his Wikipedia entry has a lot to recommend it:
"Open, passionate disagreement blows away the cobwebs that gather over even the most enduring relationships . . . It flushes out crucial information and insights that will otherwise lie inaccessible or dormant inside our brains. It fulfils the creative potential of diversity".
On the whole question of civility, I have been marvelling at the idea that it could mean a necessity to agree with one another. Is this a widespread idea, I wonder? If so, it could certainly explain why there is so much neglect of and resistance to it. But when Charles talks upthread about a site he used to frequent:
One of the regular participants would occasionally cross the line with ad hominem attacks, insults, and general nastiness. When called to task, he would complain bitterly about the Civility Brigade.
I think the opposite of this is the real definition of civility (and I would have thought the normal one): treating other people (even those with whom one vehemently disagrees) with politeness and respect. After all, if you hate their views in their entirety, and find them completely morally repugnant in every respect, nobody forces you to interact with them. Choosing to insult them, attack them and ascribe views to them which they have not stated or have even denied surely says more about the person doing it than the person on the receiving end.
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But rather than pretend that we will reach agreement, I think civility demands that we accept that there are going to be points that we just disagree on
Sorry, the penultimate paragraph was supposed to be a clear quotation!
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But since Gay starts her essay with Vance’s demand for civility, don’t you think it is a bit disingenuous to summarize Gay’s argument by not even noting that?
Oh, it seemed clear to me that after starting with a denunciation of Vance's hypocrisy and cosplay of civility, when Leslie goes on to talk about Gay and says Last week the academic and essayist Roxane Gay denounced Vance’s words in a column for the New York Times. She didn’t just criticise his double standards; she denounced the idea of civility itself, calling it “a fantasy”. (my bold) that he is absolutely noting that.
But anyway, textual analysis aside, your points about stakes seem worrying to me. People's biases seem relevant, and if one has no history with someone one can tease them out in argument and discussion, but "stake" seems to imply a personal involvement versus a principled position. Actually, that makes me realise I'm not sure what you mean by stake. Do you mean personal involvement or history with the issue? For example, when you mention "the usual suspects complaining about how women are treated in Islamic countries", (I'm assuming e.g. Afghanistan for the purpose of this conversation) who do you think needs a "stake" (and if so, what sort) to complain about it? If you mean that some people are complaining about it who are perfectly OK with women being treated poorly in countries they support, that hypocrisy is easy enough to bring up in the argument, isn't it?
i>But rather than pretend that we will reach agreement, I think civility demands that we accept that there are going to be points that we just disagree on
I completely agree with you on this. In fact, the possibility that "civility carries the demand that we have to reach agreement" seems to me absurd; I have certainly never heard of it, or meant it.
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nous, the "GOP and their core voters" and their base, and MAGAs, are clearly not available for civil discussion, and maybe they never will be. But some soi-disant conservatives, and not just outliers like wj, are, and maybe eventually the public discourse, Overton Window etc will shift back somewhat (when healthcare disappears from millions perhaps?), and the habits of civility will be useful among larger populations. One can hope, and try to keep the home fires burning....
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Charles, as someone who has been (understandably) piled on, you certainly have my sympathy. But I pay you the compliment of hoping and believing you don't mind an ongoing conversation, question and answer etc, and I hope you take it that way. I find your ongoing explanations and glosses valuable too.
lj, my reading of that Leslie piece was that he was in not implying that Vance is in any way at all "practising civility". He seems to make this pretty clear when he says:
So – cancel culture is bad, but if you see someone posting a dumb tweet about Kirk, it’s your patriotic duty to get them fired. This is before we get to the absurdity of claiming to believe in civility while acting as head boy to a president who glories in insulting opponents and using the f-word. You might suspect Vance of self-parody if he weren’t so joyless.
Sorry if the formatting made any of it unclear, I'm finding the inability to proofread before posting, and uncertainty about the new rules etc, inhibiting when copying and pasting. Hopefully, some of that will get better.
By the way I was fascinated by your concept of people arguing a position which they do not have a stake in. Who would make the decision about what commenters' stakes in their various arguments were, and therefore which were permissible? I was thinking for example of myself: a white, upper-middle class British woman from a reasonably privileged background. Someone who did not know my background (parents who left a successful and privileged life in South Africa in the 50s with very little money because of their opposition to apartheid) might wonder why I am so concerned with racial inequality, what my "stake" in it is. (In fact, in DC in the 70s, I was much more interested in racial discrimination than some of the black Republicans I met.) How on earth would one know unless told, and why would there need to be an background check? Surely people are allowed principles which do not have an easily explicable origin story?
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.