if you’re worried that hypocritical civility will be the new order of our civic conversation, just wait a few hours and something else will happen, just like every other time over the last five years that hypocritical civility has been on the menu

the imposition of civility is a transparent brake on even the most basic forms of accountability

civility has so often been used to mask frank atrocity that it’s very mention has become discredited in the common parlance to a degree I do not believe most politicians understand

the long era of supposed “civility” in American government was so only because politics was still considered a gentleman’s profession, with all the rules of gentry implied

said rules mandated euphemism and civility over almost all, and that’s the world from which biden hails

what strikes me as interesting is how much politicians hate it when people drop the euphemisms and actually talk about the real consequences of political actions

suddenly actions taken previously and principally in the abstract become charged with actual meaning and intent

the idea that politics is comprised of actions that create material effects is alien to the mindset that politics is a series of rules used to regulate the functioning of government

pointing out real consequences to abstract decisions seems distasteful to so many politicians

those politicians who can figure out how to speak directly to the material conditions people experience will thrive, if they aren’t strangled in the crib by their own parties for threatening to blow the whole scam wide open

but boy howdy, in the here and now, do politicians hate the idea that they might ever personally be called to account for their own actions ... the idea that their actions might be judged on the basis of vulgar morality and not mere professional comity seems to terrify them ...