The Civility Myth

The springs had broken under the nook of the sofa that I’d claimed as mine while it dawned that Trump was going to win the 2016 Presidential race. But I perched anyway, coils digging into my arse as if I was doing penance. I’d moved back home by then and remember mum solemnly cleaning the kitchen for hours with Gardeners Question Time on full blast because I refused to turn the TV off. It had not been a banner year. There was the whole getting fired and descent into unemployment thing, yes, but each month seemed to bristle with new turmoil. Brexit. Jo Cox. Austerity protests. Terror in Europe. Russian hacking. Philando Castile’s last breath on a livestream. It had become impossible to know where to direct your despair. So having a pantomime villain elected into the White House seemed like an apt end to the year. 

I was surprised at how deflated I felt. I’d taken to binge-watching anything on the 1960s, finding great comfort in shouting “GEDDAH LOAD OF THESE GUYS” to myself at grainy footage of the Viet Cong, only for the ‘Are you still watching?’ prompt to flash up. Then the slumped reflection of my double chin and gob-full of half-masticated Hula Hoops would stare back at me in the black computer screen, and I’d realise I was living through the newest most unhinged decade. 

Still, it shouldn’t have been such a rude awakening. Softening the ground for this enormous populist coup, Trump’s mutation from comedy candidate into President was aided by an ever-increasing fixation on civility. One that only ever seems to serve the most dangerous idiots in the name of “gotta hear both sides.” One that interviews the likes of Nigel Farage and Tommy Robinson with curiosity, as if they were of sound mind, functioning adults and not just a couple of cunts with hateful rhetoric.

It also personally came for me in tandem with my dismissal exposing the machinations of the media with ugly clarity. I may not have ever been a hard-hitting reporter but I certainly got a firsthand taste of how, as the industry continues to struggle, the media’s counterproductive relationship with power and politics will become even more contentious.

I thought about this when I bumped into one of my bosses who’d gladly been interviewed for my hearing to confirm I was a livewire. Previously, he’d been one of my biggest champions but as union talks had picked up speed, my skill at burning professional bridges with pig-headed self-righteousness rubbed him the wrong way. A devastating lack of character, he’d aided VICE’s rebrand to all things #Resistance while simultaneously fawning over James Murdoch at pub lock-ins and asserting that their rotten empire had no bearing on future output. I’d heard that he’d slammed his laptop shut and stormed out of the office when he’d read an anonymous snippet about the buyout and staff mistreatment I’d snuck to Private Eye, and I was pleased. I knew he admired them as “real” journalists. 

But when I bumped into him on this day, as I sheepishly waited for my union rep to collect stray belongings from the office, he greeted me with a shit-eating smile and lunged in for a hug. I was taken aback by the brazenness. Always referring to the staff by their last names like we were stuck in a perpetual boarding school dorm room, it clicked that he considered destroying my career par for the course. Kind of like, “Sorry I kicked you straight in the perineum in that rugger match ol’ chap, but it had to be done!” Civility, for him as an egomaniac, was a kind of career insurance and I was his liability. Which is fine for most, we all bite our tongues to protect professional relationships. But when you’re a journalist it’s not. In order to do your job and hold those in power to account it helps to have a spine.

Four years on, and again I stayed up watching how the US election would play out until the tiredness would turn to nausea. The switch in tone as the votes swung in Biden’s favour seemingly in slow motion and it became clear Trump was on his way out was miraculous. News outlets who had at best offered listless, often uncritical coverage of proven lies and at worst platformed his most grotesque allies in the name of whataboutery, now peppering him with daggers and arrows when he was already on his knees. Galling. 

That’s not to say there aren’t those who’ve pushed back full throttle against so-called client journalism. There will always be individuals who vigorously believe in ‘speaking truth to power’ but the number of mouthpieces for them to do so is dwindling. Instead, there’s a battle for access to power that does very little to serve the general public but everything to further careers. 

What is harder to grasp though is a class of commentariat — older, whiter, liberal, financially comfortable — who voluntarily beg for the same civility deployed to protect professional relationships and for what? Because they are pleased with the lowest denominator cookies being proffered? Or that heckling politicians who make choices that decimate communities is not the polite or decent thing to do? As if to say striving for more and for better is pushing your luck. It's the same brain worms diagnosis which has both rehabilitated George W. Bush as a cuddly old man that likes to paint and defended Theresa May from criticism for simply being a woman. I have been rolling it around in my head all this week from sleepless night to sleepless night. Anticipating, as the outcome became clearer, how they’d say we should be satisfied with superficial representation wins and a President who reaches the bare minimum of not being a freak. 

Nobody is saying that the sweet relief of having a dump after four years of constipation should not be celebrated. But it’s Trump’s loss rather than Biden’s victory that’s the collective win. He had to go because he was a temperamental lunatic. Not because Trumpism was some flash in the pan movement and he was it’s Dr Robotnik final boss. Cutting the head off does nothing when the rot remains. So the cheek required to posit just and energetic criticism of both the incoming government and the rubble left behind of the last as being the product of contrarian killjoys is breathtakingly obtuse. It makes me wonder if civility fetishists had all along been more disturbed by Trump being a massive pleb than they are by him being a bigot.

The only case for civility when discussing politics is as a method for persuasiveness; offering an escape route for those amenable to convincing. Beyond that, civility just means you end up treating something like, say, I dunno, fascism, like a cute and rational difference of opinion. You say, ‘hey, let’s be polite and hear out this person who believes an entire section of society is subhuman, it’s the sportsmanlike thing to do!’ It’s the twee, lacklustre protest placard with “Keep Calm and get the Tories out!” designed to be seen and congratulated. Or seal-clapping over politicians doing paint-by-numbers timeline wokeness as if they were pop stars and not the architects of demonstrable suffering. 

Civility, in short, is always demanded from those who benefit the least by those who could do so much more, to make them comfortable in their complacency. Nobody is shitting on anyone’s parade. Rather the ones who appear to be the mean-spirited pessimists are in fact the optimists because they know there is always more progress that can be made. 

There is always more work to be done.

Thank you for reading!