No free cheese plates from Adams and Hancock
Charles Pierce burning up the page on the subject of “civility” and not being rude to those neatly-dressed people approaching us with whips and flaming torches.
By all accounts, the most civil action taken in L’affaire Poule Rouge was the way Stephanie Wilkinson handled her refusal to serve Sarah Huckabee Sanders at the Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, Virginia.
She talked to her staff, she took a vote, she took Sanders aside, she asked her to leave with an explanation why, she comped Sanders and her party for their cheese plate.
She did not use an official government Twitter account to discuss the episode, as Sanders did later. She did not use the power of the Oval Office to try and destroy someone’s business, as the president* found time to do later…
It would have remained a shiny object unworthy of pursuit had it not roiled up a good portion of official Washington, which seemed grateful to be discussing anything except hijacked migrant children. Suddenly, just as the issue of the hijacked children was beginning to bite the administration* severely in the ass, here was an event over which the elite political media could do one of its favorite traditional fan dances: the Question of Civility.
Right on cue, Fred Hiatt’s Washington Post editorial page, which has no compunction about publishing the words of torture-enthusiast Marc Thiessen, blurted out the most embarrassing single paragraph written about the events at the Red Hen. To wit:
We nonetheless would argue that Ms. Huckabee, and Ms. Nielsen and Mr. Miller, too, should be allowed to eat dinner in peace. Those who are insisting that we are in a special moment justifying incivility should think for a moment how many Americans might find their own special moment. How hard is it to imagine, for example, people who strongly believe that abortion is murder deciding that judges or other officials who protect abortion rights should not be able to live peaceably with their families?
Er. Pierce becomes rather vehement at that point, and you can see why. It’s not hard to imagine because it happens constantly, including MURDER. Imana guess it was all men who put their heads together on that editorial, because women are pretty likely to be aware of how dangerous it is to need an abortion in this country.
I’m old enough to remember the raucous town halls of 2010, when the AstroTurfed forces of the Tea Party shouted down members of Congress while men with automatic weapons strolled around the perimeter of arenas in which the President of the United States was speaking. I’m old enough to remember when N. Leroy Gingrich, Definer of Civilization’s Rules and Leader (Perhaps) of The Civilizing Forces, was working out his Universal Lexicography of Insult for the benefit of a party that ate it up with an entrenching tool. Newt also emerged on the electric Twitter machine over the weekend, leaping to SarahHuck’s defense, and that was nearly enough to make me give up English as a hobby.
You know who would’ve been baffled by this sudden debate over “civility”? Samuel Adams and John Hancock, that’s who. They were a helluva lot less civil to the crew of the Dartmouth than Stephanie Wilkinson was to the Sanders party, and the citizens of Boston did not comp Thomas Hutchinson to a cheese plate when they ran his sorry ass across the pond.
Yes but they didn’t have a Trump Tower to bow to.
I look forward to WaPo’s high-minded editorial, and tweets of outrage from Newt Gingrich, Papa Huckabee, et al over this latest lack of civility.
Ha. More likely the Republicans will nominate her for Congress in 2020.
I’m looking at this from an outside perspective and here is the thing that strikes me:
American conservatives recently argued in court, and quite successfully, that a baker shouldn’t be compelled to bake a cake for a gay wedding if the said baker is opposed to gay marriage.
Well, from where I’m sitting it makes it pretty damn hard to argue that the diner doesn’t have the right to not serve someone who is involved in an administration that created concentration camps for babies.
And if you are going to call Stephanie Wilkinson uncivil for her refusal to serve Sarah Huckabee Sanders – what do you call those conservatives who pushed the whole cake saga to the supreme court?
Of course this could be argued as being an unfair comparison, after all the gay couple have not committed gross human rights abuses that are likely to scar children for life, a breach of hospitality which goes beyond merely being rude, but it still strikes me as something worth noting.
Conservatives always seem to have one song for how they want to be treated, and another for how they want to treat others. They demand responses be polite, yet their behaviour races past the rude into the horrendous with such regularity that it is breathtaking.
We’d need a neutral metric for measuring hypocrisy for starters to be sure that they’re really coming ahead of us that way. I mean, I’m not in any serious doubt about that, but I’m also aware of bias that way.
Still though, assuming I’m not merely biased but correct and they’ve left us in the dust in the hypocrisy race, it may have roots in conservative moral values. Liberals come to moral questions in terms of fairness, equality, and minimizing harm. Hypocrisy is a clear violation of fairness and not too consistent with equality. There’s not much in the way of liberal means of defending and accepting hypocrisy, absent avoiding the charge by reframing the comparison so that it does not apply.
Conservatives tend to spread moral considerations over additional categories: loyalty, authority, purity. These make for an easier time making situations out as disanalogous. Refusing the gay wedding cake customers is a matter of respecting purity demands; refusing a public servant of a (legitimate, white) presidential administration is a matter of disrespecting authority and of questionable national loyalty. What constitutes fairness gets evaluated through that sort of lens, and what equality is recognized at all is caged up by the hierarchical relationships authority, loyalty, and purity impose.
You can argue that here and make it work, but many conservatives would disagree with you. They are convinced that seeing a gay couple will scar children for life, will turn them gay, and make them pedophiles.