Rude Democracy: Civility and Incivility in American Politics, by Susan Herbst

It’s embarrassing to look in your stack of unread books and find a book you borrowed from a friend years ago and still haven’t read. So with apologies to my friend Nisan, I have finally read Rude Democracy. One of the things that was immediately interesting was that the book was written in 2009-10, in the wake of the 2008 election and the health care debates—a time when we thought incivility was high but did not realize the escalation that would occur in the Trump era. It would definitely be interesting to see what the author has to say about the current situation. (Early on in the book she says “My belief is that truly interesting and important cases of intentional public lying are somewhat rare,” a statement I think might require some revision.)

Herbst suggests there are three basic definitions of civility—one equates civility with virtue, one with good manners, and the third, the definition Herbst favors is that civility and incivility are strategic tools. One can certainly see this in the 2008 election, which Herbst looks at (with particular emphasis on Sarah Palin) and the 2016 election, which of course she was unable to consider. She is hesitant to say that the level of incivility is worse than it has previously been, arguing instead that modern communications put incivility in our faces in a way that would not have been possible in previous centuries. She also makes a strong argument that civility is not only about how we talk but about how we listen.

The book is organized into three major sections; the first looks at Sarah Palin’s use of civility and incivility in the 2008 campaign; the second examines President Obama’s commencement address at Notre Dame in 2009, in which he discussed the need for civility, as well as how subsequent events related to the health care debate tested Obama’s thinking about civility; the third presents results surveys of Georgia college students regarding freedom of speech and civility on campus. I did not find any of these analyses particularly helpful. In the section on Palin’s use of civility and incivility, which she praises as skillful, she spends more time critiquing the way media covered Palin and Obama rallies than actually dissecting how Palin used civility/incivility as strategic tools and why her use was effective.

I did find interesting the fact that American Presidents rarely have talked about civility. A search of the American Presidency Project’s archive of 86,000 documents revealed only 129 mentions of civility, only one before 1961. She does look at strategies Obama used in his speech, but I am not sure they are strategies of civility but rather strategies used in discussing civility. The strategies—linking terms by forcing associations among them, breaking a concept into parts to identify one’s proposal with the most favored part, creating a symbol that condenses an issue, and frame shifting—are interesting but I’m not sure what I learn about civility through learning about these strategies for controlling the discussion of an issue.  

The major idea I took from the chapter on the survey of college students is that, while students have very strong feelings about political discussion, they have very few skills for engaging in such discussion. As an educator who has spent years teaching teachers how to develop discussion skills in their students, this came as disheartening confirmation of the concerns most of us have about the civic preparation of young people.

Overall, I was disappointed by Rude Democracy.  While Herbst presents some interesting ideas, her analysis could have been more pointed.

Favorite Passages:

“Again, Eulau gets to the bottom of it, proposing that civility is about emotional maturity: “We have achieved the politics of civility when we are capable of asking not only ‘What is in it for me?”’ but also ‘What can I do for you’ It is out of these two simple questions that the maturity of civility is born.”

Just as incivility is a strategic asset, a real skill when practiced well, listening and dealing with incivility can also be both skill and asset. Neither ignoring nor capitulating in the face of incivility will move a conversation.