Americans Lost Their Political Civility

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian
 

An Aug. 12 riot in Charlottesville, Virginia pitted white supremacists and neo-Nazis against their Antifa opponents, leading to the murder, by a neo-Nazi, of one person, with another 19 injured. 

The main organizer of the Charlottesville rally, Jason Kessler, had contended, at a gathering held in Washington on June 27, that the country “would be better off if the South had won the Civil War.”

The mayhem shocked Americans, but maybe it shouldn't have. 
 

The Antifa group, a “diverse collection of anarchists, communists and socialists,” according to an Aug. 17 article in the New York Times, has found common cause in opposing right-wing extremists and white supremacists. 

“The essence of their message is violence,” Jed Holtz, an Antifa organizer in New York, said of his right-wing foes, so Antifa “is just responding.”

The group gained publicity in February when it physically fought alt-right supporters at the University of California, Berkeley, during a speech by alt-right ideologue Milo Yiannopoulos. 

Violence is now considered by some on the left, especially at elite colleges and universities, to be an acceptable response to political differences. In turn, on the right, provocateurs cause riots on campuses.

Democracies require compromise. Elected majorities should act with restraint and reciprocity, and politicians should campaign without disparaging their opponents’ patriotism or loyalty.

This is where things are going wrong. Yascha Mounk, a Harvard University political scientist who writes about democracy, believes that partisanship in the United States today is dangerously deep.

Many Americans have such loyalty to their political tribe that they are willing to go along with deeply undemocratic behaviour.

“American citizens are not just dissatisfied with the performance of particular governments; they are increasingly critical of liberal democracy itself,” Mounk noted in an article co-authored with Roberto Stefan Foa of the University of Melbourne, published in the January issue of the Journal of Democracy.

Furthermore, the generation gap is striking: the proportion of younger citizens who believe it is essential to live in a democracy now stands at only 30 per cent, as opposed to 72 per cent among those born before the Second World War.

So when Trump insisted that there had been “violence on both sides” in Charlottesville, Democrats “heard a dangerous moral equivalence between neo-Nazis and the people who opposed them,” observed New York Times reporter Sabrina Tavernise in an Aug. 19 article.

“But for many Trump supporters, his words appealed to a basic sense of fairness.”

John Zaller, a political scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who studies public opinion, has suggested that the president’s comments about Charlottesville raise the possibility of creating a two-sided issue out of racial equality.

Nevertheless, since the events in Charlottesville, the roof has, metaphorically speaking, fallen in at the White House, with condemnations of Trump arriving from all directions – including from dozens of Republican lawmakers.

“I do believe that he messed up in his comments,” Paul Ryan, Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, said on Aug. 21. “It sounded like a moral equivocation or at the very least moral ambiguity when we need extreme moral clarity.” 

A few days later, Steve Bannon was forced out of his job as President Trump’s chief strategist and resumed his previous position with Breitbart News. He vowed to continue his crusade against the left on the site.