Civility is taking a beating this year

Published 8:42 pm Friday, September 26, 2014

Yes, it’s election season, and yes, the Senate is up for grabs — that means the stakes are high. But that’s no excuse for the rhetoric to be so low.

Tom Bevan, a political observer and founder of RealClearPolitics.com, is calling out some Democrats for spectacularly uncivil remarks lately (though to be sure, Republicans are just as capable of lowering the bar).

As Bevan writes, “While campaigning in Wisconsin earlier this month, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, declared that ‘Scott Walker has given women the back of his hand. I know that is stark. I know that is direct. But that is reality.’ As the second and third sentences indicate, this was not a spontaneous, off-the-cuff comment. Wasserman Schultz knew this was highly inflammatory rhetoric.”

It gets worse; later, Wasserman Schultz added, “What Republican Tea Party extremists like Scott Walker are doing is they are grabbing us by the hair and pulling us back.”

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi went even further. In an interview with liberal talk show host Bill Maher, she claimed, “Civilization as we know it today would be in jeopardy if Republicans win the Senate.”

But the most uncivil statement came from Democratic congressional candidate J.T. Smith of Alabama. Last week he tweeted, “The greatest country on earth is being bullied from within. Actions of Republicans in Congress are worse than #ISIL.”

That’s too much for Bevan, though he acknowledges that rough-and-tumble campaigns are nothing new.

“But at a time in human history when actual terrorists are beheading Americans and filming the carnage — and calling on extremists to murder Americans everywhere in the world, such rhetoric seems not only out of place but uniquely offensive,” he writes. “We seem to have arrived, to paraphrase writer Francis Fukuyama, at the end of civil rhetoric. When one of the highest ranking members of the Democratic Party is willing to compare her political opponents to wife beaters, and another is unwilling to distinguish them from murderous enemies who behead our own citizens, how much more shocking can the rhetoric get? Where else can we possibly go?”

Democrats are only trying to stir up their base. But such tactics could backfire, Bevan warns.

“It’s unfortunate that we’ve come to accept the idea that voters can only be motivated by fear and anger toward their political opponents,” Bevan writes. “But here’s another thought: Maybe Democratic leaders aren’t finding success in expanding their liberal base because fair-minded Americans don’t easily gravitate to a political party led by people whose default election tactic is to demonize its opponents.”

This stands in stark contrast to a recent speech in Tyler given by U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, who made a point of not demonizing his opponents.

“I disagree with my colleagues, but they are not disagreeable people,” he said. “I don’t know how you can work with people and treat them as though they are the enemy.”

That civility is worth emulating this election season.