Rude Democracy: Civility and Incivility in American Politics. Susan Herbst. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2010. 216 pp.
Like an exciting classroom discussion, Rude Democracy opens with the shock of a counterintuitive challenge. Author Susan Herbst suggests that the incivility so rife in our politics can be a valid tactic, and that condemning it outright is “banal and unsophisticated.”
From there, she constructs a nuanced argument that some incivility, but not too much, stimulates healthy debate. Rather than wasting time trying to drum it out of politics, she maintains, we should educate our students and citizenry to deal more thoughtfully with the inevitable discord.
Herbst is professor of public policy at Georgia Tech and has a deep academic record. But she also draws on the personal. She dedicates the book to her father, Adolph, a “holocaust survivor and once stateless person, who lived the ideals of American civility without ever having to think about it.” Together, her personal experience and scholarly expertise allow Herbst to achieve something unusual in this day and age: a civil book about the uncivil.
She begins with a compact essay on the nature of civility and incivility, then uses material from the 2008 presidential campaign and its aftermath to flesh out her points. She also offers survey results on how young people respond to a politicized climate.
Herbst refuses to spend time debating “the alleged decline of civility,” an exercise she labels a “distraction.” Instead, she suggests that incivility be dealt with as an ongoing presence in the civic arena. Importantly, she believes, civility and incivility play to both the emotional and interactive aspects of contemporary politics. Rather than approaching civility as “a set of social and cultural norms,” she prefers to see it as a “tool in the rhetorical and behavioral arsenals of politics.”
With that in mind, Herbst looks at the 2008 vice presidential candidacy of then-Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, who she says represented “extraordinarily effective uses of both civility and incivility as strategic assets.” Palin could be “rabid, mean-spirited, catty, empathetic, warm, humane, and engaging, all at the same time,” as Herbst says.
Palin’s rhetoric could be extreme, for example in accusing then-Sen. Barack Obama of “palling around with terrorists.” But Herbst also finds that Palin used interaction, humor, passion, warmth, and gratitude to “create a comfortable environment for people to express themselves.” Palin’s campaign “ran to the heart of how civility and incivility are both thoroughly and self-reflexively tactical, thrown on and off, in an age of constant media attention and Internet chatter,” she says.
As for Obama, Herbst focuses on early activities of his presidency, including a speech at Notre Dame where he explicitly asked Americans to debate courteously despite their differences. Then, however, came the notorious town hall meetings over health care reform, where anger and disruption often kicked civility aside. If Obama’s method was, to quote one analyst Herbst cites, to “find common ground and show respect for an opponent,” his opponents often deliberately chose incivility in response.
Herbst seems determined to stay balanced and nonpartisan, but in doing so she leaves us hanging. Are we to admire or condemn Palin for whipping up crowds with extreme insults (in the “comfortable environment” she fostered, people were heard shouting “treason” and “off with his head” about Obama) and misinformation (she charged that Obama’s plan included “death panels”)? Are we to appreciate Obama’s stubborn allegiance to civility or see it as a weakness that let foes trample his ideas?
Perhaps wisely, Herbst leaves these questions for class discussion and further research. But one could hope for some greater authorial guidance. For one thing, she never fully differentiates incivility from rougher notions such as rudeness, nastiness, or demagoguery. She seems curiously unconcerned about what she calls “creative stretching of the truths” in political debate, maintaining that “’facts’” (her quote marks) “may have only a marginal relationship to the struggle over civility.”
She does offer some unexceptionable if general disclaimers. She writes that “awful lies” should be “judged with vigor.” She dislikes “hateful speech” such as “political communication [that] is racist, sexist, or just plain rude.” She promotes a “civilized ‘culture of argument’” based on “teaching basic argumentation skills,” pushing politicians for “clarification, evidence, and logic” and practicing “hard listening.”
But she leaves behind a serious drawing-the-line question. When does the rhetorical combat go too far, and what standards should apply in judging it? In treating civility and incivility as tools of political discourse, she seems to imply that what’s most important is whether they work, not whether they advance or corrupt public understanding.
Finally, to many students, the 2008-2009 headlines already seem ancient. The emergence of the so-called tea party movement in 2010 raised even newer incivility issues, the shooting of a member of Congress in January 2011 raised more, and doubtless the 2012 campaign will bring a new load. Herbst’s main questions are eternal, but the specifics may soon seem dated.
Overall, though, Herbst has written a valuable, fair-minded book. It is a contribution to the literature of history, ethics, and public affairs, and it could easily be used to stimulate lively classroom conversations—the kind that spill into the halls when the hour has ended.
CARL SESSIONS STEPP
University of Maryland