During a congressional debate in 1860, as pressure simmered toward the Civil War, the House of Representatives got disorderly. An anti-slavery Massachusetts Republican, named Charles Train, was finding it hard to deliver his remarks amid pestering by a pro-slavery Alabama Democrat, George Houston. Congressman Train gamely persisted, but when Houston, the pro-slavery guy, interrupted, and said, “You are a lying scoundrel,” well, then the situation became too much for those “gentlemen,” as members of Congress refer to themselves. Proceedings stopped abruptly, until, finally, the Alabamian apologized.
It was, The New York Times asserted in an editorial the next day, “the most disgraceful of the many disgraceful scenes” witnessed in the House in those days – and, the Times went on, those events had “degraded the Representative office in the eyes of all respectable Americans, and damaged the general reputation of our institutions throughout the world.”
Doesn’t that sound quaint now, when political discourse is so, well, coarse? That 1860 editorial in the Times noted that when rules of decorum are so violated, then what it called “men of a lower grade” would begin to “disregard them far more grossly.” That is, harsh words among leaders could lead to worse behavior throughout society.
Recent evidence suggests that’s so. Lately there’s been some outrage because Donald Trump referred to his political opponents as “vermin,” which is the language Adolf Hitler used to denigrate Jewish Germans, and call for their extermination. But that’s hardly unusual. Trump has described Black prosecutors as “animal” and “rabid.” He labeled Jack Smith, the special prosecutor who brought his federal indictments, as “deranged” and he called the Department of Justice “a sick nest.”
FCC regulations and common decency generally preclude the use of some of Trump’s other public language. And there are plenty of Trump disciples and wannabes who mimic his coarseness. You know why? Because it works. Politicians use incendiary words because they arouse the passions of people who are already inclined to support them – and they make more temperate politicians seem weak. That is, bad language makes good politics.
Political life in America has become not just ruthless, but rude. And that rude political culture is pushing our society toward what sociologists call anomie — that is, a state of breakdown of social or ethical standards.
A study in Harvard Business Review last year documented the incivility facing workers on the frontline of businesses: as the report said, “from ignoring people to intentionally undermining them to mocking, teasing, and belittling them.”
Does mocking, teasing and belittling sound like the behavior of anybody you’ve noted in public life? They are, in fact, typical responses of people with narcissistic personality disorder, which a number of mental health professionals believe is the illness afflicting Donald Trump. And as other candidates mimic his behavior, the sphere of rudeness has extended throughout the political ecosystem. And it’s contagious. If those who lead our public institutions can rant without basis and behave badly with impunity, why shouldn’t we all?
Of course, we can’t attribute all of the bad behavior we see around us to political influences. Experts say there are other factors for the breakdown in social norms: The pandemic in many ways increased stress and upset the way we live, and economic challenges have pushed a lot of families into uncertainty. You could even blame the weather, which is almost always unsettled these days somewhere, a result of human-induced climate change.
Yet there used to be consequences to bad behavior. Even just before the Civil War, when the gentleman from Alabama insulted the gentleman from Massachusetts, an apology followed. We don’t get apologies from today’s uncivil politicians – nor from people who yell at airline ticket agents or harangue sales clerks or scold nurses or cut us off in traffic. They’ve seen that there’s little price paid in America these days by those who behave badly.
This is surprising, because working together was long said to be an American civic attribute, and most of us weren’t raised to be proud of exhibiting selfish and antisocial behavior. Nor do we encourage it in our kids: Parents surely hope to inspire good behavior in the next generation — preferably not by threat of punishment, but by teaching that treating others fairly and kindly is simply the right thing to do. To get that point across to our kids, of course, we need to model our expectations.
And maybe there’s hope in that. Kids usually manage to outshine their parents, after all. Perhaps in this generation we’ve reached a nadir. Maybe the rising generations will reject the ugliness of our time, and lead us to a future where there is resonance to something as simple as the Golden Rule. That, in fact, may the simple standard we ought to expect of those we put into positions of political leadership, who so influence the course of our society.
Rex Smith, the co-host of The Media Project on WAMC, is the former editor of the Times Union of Albany and The Record in Troy. His weekly digital report, The Upstate American, is published by Substack.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.