Post by Barb MayThe Civility Pledge
* will be civil in my public discourse and behavior.
* will be respectful of others whether or not I agree with them.
* will stand against incivility when I see it.
PHOENIX The finger-pointing started before authorities had even confirmed
that one of the victims of a shooting rampage near Tucson was Rep. Gabrielle
Giffords.
The gunman was clearly motivated by negative election rhetoric, the voices
behind the fingers said. The political website with the crosshairs, the
campaign event with guns. Nonsense, other voices insisted. The website, part
of Sarah Palin's efforts to support candidates, was never intended to evoke
violence. Shame on the Pima County sheriff, they said, for sullying a
tragedy with his comments calling Arizona a "mecca for prejudice and
bigotry."
As victims fought to survive, the finger-pointers just fought. When an
emotional President Barack Obama, speaking at a memorial service at the
University of Arizona, pleaded for "a more civil and honest public
discourse," the airwaves and the Internet instead sputtered with bickering
over the Native American speaker whose invocation at the memorial included
references to his religious traditions and his family's Mexican heritage.
In the days after the shooting, the words from the memorial still fresh,
lawmakers pledged to foster a new civility in tribute to Giffords and the
others who were injured or killed. Yet one year later, Americans and their
elected leaders still struggle to show each other respect when opinions
differ. Partisan brinksmanship plays out in Washington. Back home, voters
treat lawmakers with scorn and berate one another for differing opinions.
Surveys suggest that Americans recognize the lack of civility and want their
leaders to behave better, but experts say that until people exercise
civility themselves and demand it from their representatives, little will
change.
"As citizens ask for civility in a demonstrable, measurable way, they can
get to a place where an elected leader says, 'I've got way too many
constituents who want this to ignore it,' " said Cassandra Dahnke, a
co-founder of the Houston-based Institute for Civility in Government.
"Whether those leaders believe in it or not, it will become politically
expedient."
The issue of civility entwined itself with the Giffords shooting that first
day in part because so many people leaped to the conclusion that the accused
attacker, Jared Loughner, had been motivated by over-the-top political
rhetoric. Loughner, who is charged with 49 felonies related to the attack,
was deemed mentally unfit to stand trial and is undergoing treatment at a
prison in Missouri before he is evaluated again.
But the reaction itself -- immediate and visceral -- soon emerged as its own
example of incivility. Commentators and online writers leveled angry charges
against each other for their role in ascribing blame for the tragedy.
"From the moment that shooting happened, we saw mudslinging, even before we
knew what was going on," said Clark Olson, an Arizona State University
communications professor who has studied civility. "Some major media outlets
reported that Gabrielle Giffords was dead and they were saying it was due to
(Sarah) Palin having her in the target in an ad. That sort of thing was
everywhere, and it was one of the worst examples of what we can do."
Incivility in politics has almost certainly existed since the moment
politics itself was invented. The shootings at a shopping center near Tucson
only brightened the spotlight, just as the rancorous health care town halls
did in 2009 and the "tea party" infused elections in 2010.
But researchers say the level of incivility has risen in recent years, and
it has moved from the backrooms and barrooms into council chambers and
once-decorous settings like Obama's 2009 address to Congress, where Rep. Joe
Wilson, R-S.C., famously yelled to Obama, "You lie!"
"If we sanction that from our elected officials is it any surprise at all
that during town halls, where there are local officials, is it any surprise
they would be interrupted and disparaged?" Olson said. "I don't think it
should be a surprise."
Voters see mean-spirited political debates, where sarcasm has replaced
reasoned thought, Olson said. A Republican leader last month walked out of
the House chamber rather than allow a Democrat the chance to speak. The high
standards that once existed for elected officials erode with each incident.
So at town-hall meetings, voters booed lawmakers and shouted down fellow
citizens who tried to express differing viewpoints. At a 2009 constituent
meet-and-greet at a Holbrook Safeway, one very similar to Giffords' 2011
event, former Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick, D-Ariz., left abruptly after some people
in line to see her started shouting and demanding that she answer questions.
Instead of organizing phone campaigns to express opinions, opponents of a
lawmaker flood a congressional switchboard with calls to disable the phone
system and prevent others from airing views.
"It's a shame we're reaching that place," said Dahnke. "If we can't talk to
one another, we can't do anything else. Being able to maintain civility is
critical to problem-solving at any level, whether it's a local school board
or international diplomacy. If you cannot talk to one another, you can't
solve a problem."
Rep. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., said he understands that voters sometimes want to
vent their frustrations in some situations.
"Given the mess that the country's in, I can never blame constituents for
being angry," he said. "Far be it from me to try to call out my constituents
for passionate feelings on things."
Flake said he believes some of the seemingly rude behavior common on
cable-news outlets or in online forums is less about incivility than it is
about visibility.
"There is still a lot of petty partisanship that goes around, and maybe I'm
seeing it through rose-colored glasses, but I do think it has been better,"
he said. "The cable news feeds it (the perception of incivility) quite a
bit. It's much easier to get on if you're going to say some pretty tough
things about your opponent."
He concedes such role-playing can send the public the message that
compromise is bad, that true believers should never budge from their
hard-and-fast positions.
"That's what the public sees, and unfortunately that's what a lot of members
of Congress want the public to see," Flake said. "It's not a virtue,
unfortunately, to be seen as being able to work across the aisle sometimes.
Sometimes it is, but increasingly that is not seen as a strong trait for
somebody."
Public-opinion surveys show that the public recognizes incivility and wants
something better, but research also suggests that not everyone is clear
about the cause of the rancor.
Eighty percent of Americans surveyed believe that political campaigns are
uncivil and many believe they will worsen, according to a June 2011 poll
conducted for Weber Shandwick and Powell Tate, two Washington-based
public-affairs and research firms. The poll found that 85 percent believe
politics in general has become uncivil. Nearly nine in 10 said that their
decisions in upcoming elections would be affected by a candidate's behavior
and the way he treats those with opposing opinions.
In a poll conducted in April 2010 for the Center for Political Participation
at Allegheny College in Pennsylvania, 95 percent say they believe civility
in politics is important for a healthy democracy, and 87 percent say it is
possible for people to disagree about politics respectfully.
Yet experts say one of the reasons for the rise in incivility is that people
no longer want to disagree respectfully. The idea of "agree to disagree" has
been squashed by the array of partisan media that allows people to filter
out opposing viewpoints.
"There is research to suggest that if you hear a fact presented by the other
side, you discount the fact," said John Genette, president of Black Mountain
Communications, a company that helps non-profit groups raise money, and one
of the architects of an ASU-based project called Civil Dialogue.
"If you're a lefty and you hear that the sun is yellow, you might believe
it, but if you hear the sun is yellow according to Fox News, you might say
that sometimes it's reddish," he said. "There is a deep distrust of the
other side."
Civil Dialogue was born of Genette's own frustrations as an ASU graduate
student in 2003, when he found it impossible to have a civil discussion
about the Iraq war. Organizers bring together people to discuss issues in a
structured format designed to elicit viewpoints from across the spectrum.
"It's about civility," Linde said. "We are going to disagree. We need to be
able to disagree. Our goal is that it's a given. You're not going to come
here to learn to agree with somebody, but to disagree in a civil manner and
let something productive come out of that dialogue."
Any movement toward more civil politics will likely originate at the
grass-roots level and move through the system slowly, experts say. Media
outlets promote and profit from debates that invite hard-line opinions.
Politicians often believe they can win only if they go negative. No one will
change overnight.
"The political landscape is more dictated by personalized politics than it
is about issue-based politics," said U.S. Rep. Raul Grijalva, D-Ariz. "I
think civility needs to be driven by the issue and the comportment and the
comity that one sets up for each other in Congress. This great deliberative
House needs to be that once again."
U.S. Rep. Ed Pastor, D-Ariz., has seen more unwillingness to compromise,
especially on the part of freshmen lawmakers who were sent to Washington on
a platform of shaking up the system.
"Obviously, this year has been partisan, that's for sure, but when we were
in the majority, we were equally as partisan," Pastor said. "What's
interesting to me about this year is the new members, the 60 or however many
there are, have come in with the attitude that, 'It's my way or no way.' "
Part of what's going on, said Dahnke of the Institute for Civility in
Government, is that "it's easier to be with people who agree with you,
easier to talk to people who agree with you. We've reached a place where
compromise is a dirty word. It used to be something that was valued, but now
it's seen as a weakness."
After the Tucson shootings last year, Dahnke said her group saw a dramatic
increase in interest from the public and from politicians and businesses.
They wanted to take up the president's call for honest civil discourse.
Then, after a time, the interest faded.
"We tend to have short attention spans," she said. "We're also a culture of
wanting immediate gratification. We seem to struggle as a society with
taking the longer vision or going into something for the long haul, and
civility is one of those things that's going to be a long haul."
Dahnke said that when someone asked her one day what to do about all of the
negative campaign fliers filling a mailbox, "the first thing that came to my
mind was send it back. Tell them you don't accept negative ads and you'd
like to see a positive one. Explain why you sent it back, just like any
other product you're not satisfied with. If a campaign gets enough of those,
they'll get the message."
Olson, the ASU professor, said listening is the starting point. No one was
listening the day Giffords was shot. They jumped to conclusions about the
motive of the shooter almost before the shooter was identified, conclusions
that were mostly wrong.
"We should balance speaking with listening," he said. "Civility is as much
about listening as it is about speaking. It's acknowledging differences.
Having civil dialogues is so important to expose ourselves to real, live
people who have differing opinions and find out why they have differing
opinions."
People can also hold elected officials accountable for their civility.
"That will have to come from voters and the grass-roots level," Olson said.
"I don't think there's going to be any broad coalition of people that holds
anyone accountable. It's going to have to be individuals, all of us."
--
"If Barack Obama isn't careful, he will become the Jimmy Carter of the
21st century."