In elementary school, you were probably taught to “treat others the way you want to be treated.” Your teacher probably presented the phrase as the Golden Rule. But actually, this is a simple way to teach children the concept of civility, or the baseline of respect owed to one another in a public space. Establishing these unspoken rules of conduct becomes particularly important during political discourse, when candidates and their supporters must debate policies and highlight the pros and cons of their platforms. But during this last election cycle, when Clinton and Trump supporters butted heads on a number of issues, and often got into heated arguments on social media and IRL, it may have seemed that the common courtesies of civility fell through the cracks. Is this the case? Is our society facing a crisis of civility, where respect is no longer a priority? Keith J. Bybee is a political science professor at Syracuse University, and last fall published How Civility Works, a short text exploring the subject of how we can live civilly in what can sometimes seem like an uncivil society. Teen Vogue caught up with him in the advent of Trump’s Inauguration to get his take on how we can define civility today, the state of civility in our society, and how we can be civil in our everyday lives.
Teen Vogue: Firstly, what is civility? Is it different historically from how we might think of it today?
Keith Bybee: I think a good working definition of civility is a baseline of respect that we owe one another in public life, and that has long been the definition of civility. At different times, the level and the medium of the baseline has changed. Civility has been around as a concept since the early to mid-1500s, and the first “big book” or bestseller on civility was written by Erasmus. Ever since then, civility has been part of public discourse and part of the understanding of what constitutes appropriate behavior in public life.
TV: Let’s talk about civility with regard to this most recent election. How have you seen the notions of civility warp throughout this election season?
KB: A lot of people would look at this past election cycle and say that civility has been under existential threat. If you define civility as I do (and as many people do) as that baseline of respect, it seems like that baseline has been repeatedly tested and outright disregarded. There have been several violations of civility in the past year and a half, but I think it’s important to sort out whether these violations in civility represent a crisis in civility because you can have — and Donald Trump often does this — you can have public actors strategically violating this consensus on appropriate behavior, in order to attract attention and then redirect that attention and outrage to serve their own purposes. Someone who does that is counting on there being civility in order to violate it. Take Trump’s recent tweet criticizing John Lewis: [In my view], this was a way for Trump to redirect attention away from the criticism of him in the advent to the inauguration. Suddenly, the discussion becomes about John Lewis and whether Trump understands his Civil Rights legacy.
TV: So during the election, you're saying Donald Trump and his followers strategically violated these unspoken rules of public conduct?
KB: I think that’s part of what happened (and that is a time-honored tradition in American politics, for candidates to contravene some norm of appropriate behavior). That’s not the only thing going on here. If that were the only thing going on, you would expect Trump to otherwise obey various norms and standards for election behavior, which he didn’t do. He was praised by many of his followers for “telling it like it is” which translated to having no patience at all for any existing civilities. In that context, I think something deeper was going on, which was an effort to inaugurate a new kind of civility.
TV: And undermine these existing standards.
KB: Yes, undermine existing standards. We have a long history in the United States of competitions between civilities. One example is the Civil Rights Movement — a big part of the struggle of civil rights was for a new form of civility and upending existing standards of racial etiquette known as the Jim Crow segregations laws. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his fellow activists were interested in advancing a more egalitarian form of civility.
TV: But unlike the Civil Rights movement, which was focused on obtaining equality for African Americans, a lot of the rhetoric surrounding Trump’s campaign has centered around inequality.
KB: Civility does not have to be egalitarian — there’s no guarantee that the arrow is always going to point in one direction. The Civil Rights movement was an egalitarian one, but not every movement for a new civility is as inclusive. There is something backwards-facing about Trump’s perspective, “Make America Great Again,” because it means returning to some era in the past. There’s also the attack on political correctness. What is political correctness? I think it’s a requirement that a very diverse array of groups all get an equal measure of respect. It doesn’t matter whether you are black or white, gay or straight, immigrant or native-born: political correctness gives the same measure of public respect to all these different groups, and Trump has no patience for it. When he announced his candidacy, he called Mexican immigrants rapists, but also said, “there’s some good ones.” That’s recalibrating this baseline of respect so it then becomes acceptable to denigrate certain types of people (and immigrants) and respect others, and not grant them all the same baseline of respect.
Part of my view of civility is a political one; this baseline of respect at any given time is not an independent force outside of our disputes but instead, this baseline is set through our political disputes and conflicts. It’s through the electoral campaign and the unfolding new politics of the Trump administration that we are in the process of determining what will be the baseline of respect in public life for the next four years. Right now, we’ve got this intense conflict over what constitutes appropriate behavior. This is not the first time this has happened.
TV: Do you think the way Trump handles himself and speaks about people is the result of our society’s changing views on civility? Or is it actually the opposite — the way he talks to and about people makes his followers think it’s OK to speak that way too?
KB: It’s hard to tease this apart and see whether he is the cause or the effect; I think he is both cause and effect. He is advancing this effort to reset the baseline of respect and in that sense he’s the cause, but he’s gotten as far as he has because he’s the effect. He’s speaking on behalf of people and leading his followers but also projecting a message that’s resonating with people and being lifted up those same followers.
TV: This election seems like it’s the most divisive one in recent memory, with people on one side really speaking nastily about the other side. Why do you think that is? What does it say about our society?
KB: Every generation of Americans has complained of escalating incivility — in the 20th century, people blamed jazz music, the Vietnam War, rock 'n’ roll, the large-scale entry of women into the workforce. If this level of personal attack is going to continue unabated, we’re going to end up with a different tone to public affairs than we had before this election took place. It’s really up to us. Each one of us has an opportunity many times a day to advocate and to model the kind of civility that we owe one another. Think of all of the public occasions we attend — that includes sitting down to eat with people, that’s a public occasion. We have an opportunity at every one of these public occasions to embody the norms of public behavior that we think are the right ones. We all have the opportunity on a daily basis through the dozens of interactions that make up the democracy of everyday life to model the civility we’d like to see in our society. I don’t think it’s the case that we’re headed in one direction; so much depends on how each one of us chooses to behave in public. It’s a ground-up, rather than a top-down process. That applies to social media interactions as well.
TV: Can you talk a bit about the way Trump has so far spoken to the American people, particularly since he was elected President?
KB: What is interesting about many of his public communications is they seem to be still in the campaign mode, speaking to his supporters rather than speaking to all Americans. He did strike that tone when he won in his victory speech but has since occasionally struck this inclusive tone that presidents often adopt. Presidents see themselves as having a constituency of the entire United States, but Trump seems frame his comments to target his supporters, which is unusual. That, I think, can have a lasting effect because it would divide the public into different camps of support for different politicians. The hope of civility is that you can use this baseline of respect in a society where there is diversity and disagreement and conflicting interest and yet we can still have some kind of common language and mode of behavior that allows us to communicate that we are good and decent people even if we are very different and we disagree. If we treat each other civilly, we are signaling to each other that we understand what the baseline of appropriate behavior is, and we can productively interact. If you repeatedly demonize your opponents and lionize your supporters, then you take away [the notion that everyone’s opinion deserves the same amount of respect]. That would be a crisis of civility.
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