1 year ago
57
Last Monday, Washington Post publisher Fred Ryan announced he was stepping down from his post after nearly a decade. We can speculate at least a little about whether the departure was his idea or was precipitated by newspaper owner and Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos, only because the resignation comes just as Bezos appears to be taking a much more hands-on approach to the Post, but it seems a graceful enough departure.
In stepping down, Ryan announced that he will be taking on a new role as an official societal scold, someone who can look at the absolute chaos unfolding in the world, squeeze it all into a ball, and declare it to be evidence of historic rudeness that all of you need to knock off right now.
As I have shared in conversations with many of you, I have a deep and growing concern about the decline in civility and respectful dialogue in our political process, on social media platforms and more broadly across our society. Many of us can recall an era when people could disagree without being disagreeable. Political leaders on opposite sides of the aisle could find common ground for the good of the country. Today, the decline in civility has become a toxic and corrosive force that threatens our social interactions and weakens the underpinnings of our democracy. I feel a strong sense of urgency about this issue.As a result, I have decided to leave my position at The Post to lead the nonpartisan Center on Public Civility that is being launched by the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute. Jeff is personally providing support for the planning and design phase of this new initiative and supports my decision to make this move.
Ah, yes. Who among us can forget The Washington Post’s own rousing slogan: Democracy Dies in Rudeness.
Many of you are no doubt aware of my own opinion on civility in politics, which is that people who want civility in politics can bite me. But it's especially jarring to see the publisher of the actual Washington Post write that he has shepherded the nation's most respected newspaper through a decade of national and international crises ranging from pandemic to an attempted overthrow of the United States government, and his main takeaway is that Our Dialogue These Days is not very respectful, and that what would patch things up is that if we returned to the era when people could "disagree" about things like trying to topple the U.S. government without being "disagreeable" in our arguments against it.
As a sentiment, it does not come out of the blue. The more political power a person is given, the more they are convinced that the real problem in Washington, D.C., is that too much of the rabble outside it insists on making too much noise.
This was a dominant notion in the runup to the Iraq War. Americans marched in the streets, correctly pointing out that George W. Bush administration figures like Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld were straight-up lying, and that going to war under false premises landed a hell of a lot closer to being a war crime than to executing a proper foreign policy. On the other hand, many of those protesters were quite rude about it, with mean signs and mean taunts, and so the opinion columns of those days and for 10 years afterwards were chock full of sneering that well fine, it turned out that the dirty hippies were on the right side of things, but that the ruling class was still right to ignore them all because nobody wants to listen to rudeness when deciding whether or not to murder hundreds of thousands of people for the sake of a think-tank vision of theoretical hegemony.
That precise political twitch was revisited again when the Bush administration instituted a policy of torturing “War on Terror” prisoners. Much of the political and pundit class could vaguely agree that torturing innocent cab drivers for the sake of obtaining false confessions was in fact bad, and even immoral. But when the staunchest torture advocates had to face name-calling or similarly flitting instances of public anger, the political class was far more eager to condemn the name-calling, not the torture, as the real reason our society was turning coarser and more "disagreeable."
Can we not have a polite debate on whether we should torture war prisoners? What is the world coming to, in which the advocates of torture are publicly disapproved of?
We saw this again in the Trump White House. The Trump press room was known for the sort of dissembling and disinformation that the nation's free press was theoretically supposed to be guarding against. It began immediately, with a hapless Trump press secretary insisting that the man's inauguration crowd was much much bigger than any of the pictures showed. While reporters for the most part laughed it off, the intentional distribution of abject bullshit became a standard White House pattern. Yet when some restaurant owner had the absolute gall to ask White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders to leave because the restaurant's staff could not abide serving one of the most recognizable faces of the Trump administration's viciously inhumane anti-immigrant policies, the keepers of our political discourse melted the entire f--k down.
Actual white supremacists in the Trump Administration enacted a string of border policies that ran roughshod over international treaties and basic human decency, but nope—it was a tiny restaurant somewhere in Virginia that set off the "civility" alarm bells.
Like torture years before, separating children from their parents at the border in an attempt to frighten would-be asylum-seekers into turning away was not seen by the politically powerful as something that ought to result in rudeness to the people responsible for bringing it about. And that, right there, is why the United States is now struggling to maintain its democracy through a tide of rising fascist sentiments.
I'm not kidding about that one, either. The elite-held notion that public condemnation for indecent acts is an attack on "civility" just as damaging as the abuses that provoked them is, point blank, the reason that the promotion of anti-democratic hoaxes and rank propaganda is now an omnipresent feature of Republican rhetoric. It is the reason conservatism has slid into declarations that immigration itself is a "plot," a "Great Replacement" designed to strip power from White America, the reason elected members of Congress can blurt out hate-premised QAnon conspiracy theories, and the reason conservatism now reflexively asserts that transgender Americans, or schoolteachers, or university professors are all "groomers."
Our political and pundit classes decided that lying to the public, goading violence against societal out-groups, torturing prisoners, separating refugee children, and doing out-and-out crimes while in office were not as detrimental to society, meaning to them, as people responding rudely to those outrages.
The publisher of The Washington Post has already gotten precisely what the political class demanded: a nation in which civility is pursued over justice. A nation where even criminal acts are weighed foremost by how much political gain the perpetrators might squeeze out, and newspapers like The Washington Post are under strict orders to not elicit an emotional or moral response to any of it.
The American press is responsible for the rise of American fascism. Straight up. And even after media ambivalence to political corruption resulted in an attempted toppling of the government, the facade of neutral civility is used to paper over corruption, rather than condemn it. Even now.
Now, there are some reasons why the publisher of The Washington Post would be particularly disposed to think that torture, war, systemic hoax promotion, government-backed propaganda, and an actual damn attempted coup are all of lesser national consequence than "decline in civility and respectful dialogue in our political process, on social media platforms and more broadly across our society." Fred Ryan was not just the publisher of The Washington Post, but is chairman of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation, was assistant to the president during Reagan's administration, was Reagan's post-presidential chief of staff, helped to design and construct the Reagan Presidential Library, and co-founded Politico before being picked out to head The Washington Post.
If you were to handcraft a man to be one of the linchpins of the political-press alliance, you could not do much better than Ryan, a man who no doubt truly does pine for the days when Reaganism put a sunny face on the racist Republican southern strategy, on pandemic denialism, and on administration dalliances with violating U.S. laws just a wee bit, here and there. Politico is the epitome of modern political journalism—presuming that news stories consist of whatever political figures want to say, delegating annoying questions about truthfulness to separate "fact checkers" begrudgingly tucked into some newsroom corners.
So yes, this is precisely the resume of someone who would come away from a lifetime of politics and news coverage with the belief that it is the people on "social media" who are coarsening our society, not the torturers or hoax-promoters or fascist promoters of insurrection. When the chairman of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation assumes his new position, a Bezos-supported sinecure monitoring the nation for instances of incivility, will the new Center for Public Civility be issuing press statements declaring that calling an attempted coup an attempted coup crosses the "civility" line? If a "social media" wag correctly notes that Trump had an enormous amount of help from Republican Party officials spreading known-false conspiracies about our elections, and the wag has the audacity to note that it was Republican lawmakers and Republican Party officials promoting that propaganda, does that count as being "disagreeable?"
What about the now-universal Republican insistence on calling the Democratic Party the "Democrat Party," a little twist of faux-illiteracy spawned from the Newt Gingrich days in which Republicans decided that no, actually, incivility was a tool that could be honed to prod public opinion without the bother of even coming up with policies to back the insults up? How many press statements will the clan of Reagan be spitting out to titter at that?
I for one maintain my previous position: Civility in politics must be situational. It must be granted to those that deserve it, and withheld from those who do not. Those who promote torture of the innocent as a "necessary" evil deserve public scorn; those who attempt to topple the government deserve to be called seditionists and a great many other things besides; those who spread false information about vaccines for the sake of a political spat are just murderers willing to take a more roundabout path than most; and those who are willing to promote known, provable lies about our very democracy are opponents of our democracy, and it does nobody any good not to say so.
