Category: News and Analysis

Houston’s Furr High School Wins $10 Million XQ Grant

Institute Staff

Does civility matter? Yes it does.

In 2001, Dr. Bertie Simmons came out of retirement to become the principal of Houston’s Furr High school when no one else wanted to take the reigns. Six years later, concerned that gangs were ready to take over the school, Simmons called on us at the Institute and asked if we would take some of her students to Washington D.C. It might help, she thought, for them to learn about politics, and citizenship, and investment in public service.

We did, and we became one part of a series of events that changed students’ lives. In 2001, the school was dangerous. In 2007, it was only beginning to turn around. When we first walked into Furr High School, we were greeted with a physical altercation between a teacher and a student – with shoving, and yelling in the halls.

Today, walking down those same halls, the change is palpable. The students know that we are the folks who take groups to Washington D.C. But we aren’t the only ones who are treated with respect. Respect is the rule rather than the exception. And respect has led Furr High School to win a major award.

So what happened? Civility did.

Civility has been a theme threaded through Furr’s curriculum for years now. From their teachers in their classes, and every time we take a group to Washington D.C., students learn to claim their needs and listen past difference, to build consensus and even to speak with their elected representatives. Civility has become such a watchword at Furr that students now plan an annual “Civility in the Part” celebration at Herman Brown Park Pavilion.

You need only look at this short video to see what a dramatic effect civility has had on Furr High School.

The change is nothing if not a cause to celebrate building civility one person at a time, one community at a time, and one nation at a time. And with all our hearts, we would like to congratulate the students and teachers at Furr High School on winning the XQ: The Super School Project grant, which will bring $10 million over the next five years to reinvent what a high school can do.

Civility in Nebraska’s Effort to Reform Redistricting

Adam Zolkover

Because the national press hasn’t picked it up, you may not have heard the story. But there’s some very interesting civility news going on right now in the state of Nebraska. On Wednesday, Nebraska’s legislature passed a bill that would reform the state’s redistricting process, taking it largely out of the hands of the legislators themselves and empowering an independent commission. Emily Nohr of Omaha.com describes it this way:

The bill would create an independent commission of citizens to redraw the state’s political maps for six elected bodies: U.S. House, the Legislature, Public Service Commission, University of Nebraska Board of Regents, State Board of Education and Nebraska Supreme Court.

No more than five commission members could be from a single political party.

Don Walton of the Lincoln Star-Journal adds that the process would start with the submission of a series of computer-generated maps to the commission, proposing plans that could achieve relative population equity and meet other goals, such as adherence to county boundaries. The commission would then decide on a course of action and submit it to the legislature for final approval. If a plan is rejected, Walton writes, the commission would reconvene to offer an alternative to the Legislature.

Redistricting Reform in Nebraska
Nebraska’s Congressional Districts, as of the 113th Congress (2013-2015).

This comes in response to a particularly acrimonious redistricting fight in 2011 that resulted in personal disputes and some rancor among senators over their legislative district boundaries – boundaries that were, in particular, seen by many Democrats to unduly benefit the Republican Party in metropolitan Omaha’s 2nd Congressional District.

Not every elected official in Nebraska is pleased with the new bill. At an earlier stage in the process, eleven senators abstained from a vote to move the bill forward. And though Governor Pete Ricketts has not publicly commented on the plan, reports indicate that he has privately expressed some degree of opposition.

That said, contentious as it might be, both the legislative process and the plan for reforming redistricting practices in Nebraska indicate some positive news for civility.

Recently, data has increasingly suggested that redistricting conducted through independent commissions has not, as we might suppose, significantly increased competitiveness for congressional seats. But in the six states where independent commissions have been instituted, what it has done is decrease the frequency and intensity of the sort of legislative battle that precipitated Nebaska’s bill.

It hasn’t entirely done away with acrimony. But according to Peter Miller and Bernard Grofman in the U. C. Irvine Law Review [PDF], states with commissions tend to deliver district maps on time, and largely without legal contestation. And though the process remains marked with controversy, the resulting maps tend not to be altered or overturned during the decade in which they are instituted.

Moreover, the specific process by which Nebraska came to their new plan has been intentionally inclusive on a number of levels. As Don Walton writes, the bill is the product of years of cooperative work and negotiation by Sens. John Murante of Gretna and Heath Mello of Omaha – a Democrat and a Republican respectively. The nine-member independent commission in charge of the redistricting itself can have no more than five members – the barest of majorities – from any one party. And according to an earlier article about the plan, the members of the commission are chosen in equal measure by the state’s three legislative caucuses, which each represent one of the state’s main geographic areas.

Several senators, according to Walton, have raised concerns about possible urban domination of the commission in what is otherwise a highly rural state. Six of the nine commissioners would come from the vicinity of Omaha and Lincoln, the state’s two largest cities.

But no plan could be perfectly representative. And this one bars lobbyists, elected officials, party officials, and their relatives from serving on the commissions, potentially decreases the possibility of other kinds of conflicts of interest.

We here at the Institute do not endorse plans to do redistricting by independent commission – or by any other particular means. We are not a policy organization, and moreover we believe that the method by which states manage electoral districts must be highly specific to their individual circumstances – that each state must decide for itself.

But we are highly encouraged by any legislative move that puts fairness and the needs of voters ahead of the interests of partisanship and legislators’ job security. We are highly encouraged by evidence-based legislation that seems designed to curb acrimony in debates among lawmakers. Our interest is piqued by the bipartisanship that Nebraska legislators have shown here. And should Governor Ricketts sign it into law, we will be watching closely to see how this experiment in redistricting reform turns out.

Supreme Court Nominee Merrick Garland’s Pattern of Civility

Adam Zolkover

The Institute does not endorse candidates or policies, and it certainly doesn’t endorse nominees for judicial appointments. But from time to time, as we read the news, we’ll see something from a public figure – or about a public figure – that’s profoundly heartening. It has happened over the past several months with both Bernie Sanders and Chris Christie, who have each had exemplary moments of civility. And it’s happening again right now, as we learn more about D.C. Circuit Court judge and newly-minted Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland.

Supreme Court of the United States

In an interview after the nomination, NPR legal correspondent Nina Totenberg pointed out to President Obama that he could have chosen a candidate for the highest court who would be much more satisfying to his liberal base, and who might more effectively inflame Democrats’ passions in an election year. Asked about the logic of choosing the seemingly moderate Garland instead, the President said this:

This moment in our history – a time when judicial nominations have become so contentious, a time when our politics is so full of vitriol – I think particularly benefits from a man who by all accounts is decent, full of integrity, is someone who tries to hear the other side’s point of view, and can build bridges.

The President told Totenberg that Garland has shown himself to be a consensus builder, and that he believes, rightly, that we’re at a time where the more consensus we can forge, the better off we’re going to be.

Now, Garland is the President’s nominee. And the President has every reason to inflate his bona fides, including – or perhaps especially – his prowess as a civil guy. But we don’t need to take President Obama’s word on Merrick Garland’s civility. In the wake of his nomination, civility – born of integrity and diligence – has quickly become one of his most talked-about characteristics.

There is Republican Senator Orrin Hatch’s praise for Garland, whom he called a moderate and a fine man. And there is Chief Justice John Roberts’s assessment, at his own confirmation hearing, that anytime Judge Garland disagrees, you know you’re in a difficult area.

But more to the point, there are Merrick Garland’s former clerks and colleagues.

On CNN, Jeffrey Bellin, William & Mary Law School professor and former clerk to Garland said this of his process as an appellate court judge:

He works behind the scenes to find common ground. When called upon to do so, he will explain to other judges why the record, the facts and the law support his view. If they don’t agree, he will listen. The resulting opinions are carefully crafted to find consensus, reflecting the reality, not the rhetoric, of “rule of law.”

The most telltale sign of Garland’s influence is not blazing rhetoric; it is that a diverse group of judges will agree on the resolution of an otherwise polarizing case.

Former clerk Jay Michaelson, in The Daily Beast, wrote about his commitment to conscience over ideology:

There was not a single case I worked on with him, from the most mundane Federal Energy Regulation Commission matter to a 20-plus-year-old civil rights case, in which politics played into his considerations. Conscience, sure — Judge Garland often reminded me that there were human beings on both sides of these contentious cases—but never ideology.

In The Recorder, UC Davis law professor Albert Lin said that Garland’s goal has often been to resolve cases in a way where he could get consensus from the entire panel. And John Trasvina, dean of the University of San Francisco School of Law, said: I couldn’t imagine him ending a discussion based on whose voice was loudest or who had the most authority. More than to win, Garland’s goal has been to move some minds.

That’s a pattern of high praise. Individuals on all sides of the political spectrum, and more importantly people who have worked with him, have called Merrick Garland’s process deliberate and inclusive. They have indicated that he listens when others disagree with his assessments, and that he is more interested in decisions that are satisfactory to as many parties as possible than decisions that simply forward his beliefs.

The politics of Merrick Garland’s Supreme Court nomination are complicated, both in terms of his own beliefs which are generally regarded to be somewhere on the progressive side of moderate, and in terms of the process of his confirmation, which is held up in no small part by the pending presidential election.

But for our purposes, all of that is besides the point. What’s important here is that in his professional life, Judge Garland seems committed to a brand of civility that prefers deliberation on the facts – and that prefers consensus and good communication over polarizing pronouncements. And regardless of where his nomination ends up, that’s a thing from which we all can learn.

Anaheim, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Problem of Escalating Violence

Adam Zolkover
Stop_Klan_Terror
Image by Michael Scott Van Wagenen

This past weekend has, once again, provided a sad example of the urgent need for civility – not as a means of policy negotiation or a form of politeness, but as an antidote to hatred and violence.

This is what happened: last Saturday, at Pearson Park in Anaheim, California, members of the Ku Klux Klan clashed violently with counter-protesters at what Klan supporters described as a white lives matter rally.

According to reporting from Vibe.com, the rally was aimed at raising awareness against “illegal immigration and Muslims”. Protesters arrived on the scene hours before the event was scheduled to begin, and as Klansmen exited their SUV, donning Confederate flag patches, the counter-protesters, who were reportedly armed with two-by-fours, approached them.

The resulting melee left three people stabbed and 13 people arrested.

As The New York Times reports, one Klan supporter waved a flagpole bearing the American flag as a weapon. Klan members carried signs with slogans including “White Lives Do Matter Say No To Cultural Genocide.” And one carried the Confederate battle flag.

The protesters seem to have been instigators of the physical assault. And in one video of the violence, after the Ku Klux Klan SUV had sped away, one stood over a stranded Klan member and, enraged, yelled: Your own white people left you!

In an interview with Southern California radio station KPCC, Anaheim Mayor Tom Tait said that this sort of incident is not an accurate reflection at all of who we are in Anaheim. He called Anaheim one of the most ethnically diverse cities in the United States and a city of respect and tolerance and kindness.

But while everything Mayor Tait said may be true of Anaheim under ordinary circumstances, if we can learn anything from what happened, it’s that denial and an affirmation of the people’s generous spirit is not enough. Violence like this is not an isolated event. It exists as part of an escalating cycle of hatred. And, sadly, it has deep roots in the United States.

Even just in Anaheim, The Los Angeles Times reports, there is a long and troubling history with the Ku Klux Klan. They write that Klansmen were once the dominant political force in Anaheim, holding four of five City Council seats through the early 1920s, and drawing tens of thousands of participants to their rallies.

And they write that in 2003, an eight-foot cross was burned outside the home of a black man.

But even this is not the most immediate context for what happened at Pearson Park. If we pay attention to the rhetoric of the Klansmen, we find its roots much closer to home – in the incivility and angry rhetoric that characterizes our current presidential election cycle.

The Klansmen in Pearson park claimed to be concerned about Muslims and immigrants. Well, over the past several months, we have seen specific language from presidential candidates that vilifies both groups: we have heard proposals to ban all Muslims from entering the United States; claims that immigrants from Mexico are rapists and murderers; and in the context of the Syrian refugee crisis, suggestions that the United States should only accept immigrants who can prove that they are Christians, because non-Christians are more likely to be violent extremists.

The Klansmen called themselves a “white lives matter” protest. At campaign events, we have seen physical altercations between Black Lives Matter activists and rally-goers; we have seen calls of all lives matter – some well-intentioned, and some not; and we have seen candidates repeatedly deny the existence of the pattern of police violence that spawned the movement in the first place.

And the fact that this group identified itself as Klan-affiliated at all is not insignificant. Recently, we have seen the media offer broad publicity for the political endorsements of white supremacist leaders like Klan Grand Wizard David Duke. Not positive publicity, but much more airtime than most other political endorsements garner.

The problem at Pearson Park – as Anaheim’s Mayor Tait seemed to understand in the framing of his comments – is not the impulse to stand against hate. That is invaluable. The problem is that while the impulse to meet hatred with violence may seem satisfying in the moment, it is profoundly unproductive. It crystallizes the most intolerant feelings and impulses on every side, it leads to escalation, and it shuts down the possibility of communication. No amount of beating can expunge hate.

But neither can the response to this incident be nominal civility via another impotent cry of “can’t we all just get along?” There is always need for greater kindness and more courtesy, but requiring we not say those things that might offend leads to frustration, not resolution. Which is why scorn for political correctness has been such an effective campaign tool in this current election cycle.

Instead, one way forward may be the sort of civility that allows us to perceive the humanity in those we think of as our enemies, and to take their needs and beliefs seriously. According to The O.C. Weekly, one speaker at a peace rally following the incident in Pearson Park invoked the spirit of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. quoting the slain civil rights leader when he said, “Let no man pull you so low as to hate him.” This is on the right track.

But as that same article suggests, it may be more helpful to recall Dr. King’s “Beyond Vietnam” speech in 1967. There, King reflects on the value of compassion and nonviolence. As he says, it:

Helps us to see the enemy’s point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of ourselves. For from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition.

And this is ultimately key. As we saw this past weekend, violent words breed only more violent words and ultimately violent deeds. But if instead we meet hatred with a question – if we require our opponents to account for themselves and their hate – we humanize them, and we humanize ourselves to them.

Change by this route is slow, and it will frustrate us at every turn. But it is a process of teaching our opponents to see their own positions as we see them. And that, more than any violence, has the potential to undo hate.

Antonin Scalia’s Indelicate Brand of Civility

Adam Zolkover
Justice Antonin Scalia
Photo by Stephen Masker, CC-BY

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who died unexpectedly this past Saturday, is not someone whose name we usually associate with civility. Reflecting on his life for The New York Times, Bruce Allan Murphy, law professor and author of Scalia: A Court of One, writes that he changed the United States Supreme Court… more than President Ronald Reagan could ever have foreseen when appointing him. And he writes about the importance of his advocacy of “originalism” and “textualism” – the theories that judges should decide cases according to the “public meaning” of the words in the Constitution or its Amendments as understood by the American people in the state constitutional ratifying conventions.

But as Scott Lemieux of The Guardian said on Sunday: as enormous as his influence on American jurisprudence and American public culture has been, Antonin Scalia’s legacy is in many ways one of polarization.

Scalia’s public persona was that of provocateur, and he was perhaps best known for being colorfully undiplomatic and eminently quotable. Sometimes his penchant for provocation ran toward the crass, like in 2012, when he was asked by a Princeton student about his moral judgment of homosexuality, and he responded: if we cannot have moral feelings against homosexuality, can we have it against murder?

Sometimes his provocation turned personal, straying into the territory of ad hominem attacks. As Bruce Allan Murphy writes, he called Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s 1989 opinion in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services “irrational,” “totally perverse” and “not to be believed.” And he belittled Anthony Kennedy’s 1992 opinion in the Lee v. Weisman school graduation prayer case as “psychology practiced by amateurs” and “incoherent.”

But as often, he was wickedly incisive in his critiques. As in 2005 when, in a speech at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., he defended his judicial philosophy by dismissing the idea of moderation on the bench. We say we want moderate judges, Scalia told his audience [PDF], but:

What is a moderate interpretation of the text? Halfway between what it really means and what you’d like it to mean? There is no such thing as a moderate interpretation of the text. Would you ask a lawyer, “Draw me a moderate contract?” The only way the word has any meaning is if you are looking for someone to write a law, to write a constitution, rather than to interpret one.

Yet despite all his bluster – despite the decisions (and especially the dissents) that earned him a reputation as a warrior in the conservative cause – Scalia was in his own idiosyncratic way an advocate for a particular brand of civility.

In his dissenting opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges – the case that legalized same-sex marriage across the United States – he wrote [PDF] that the most unfortunate consequence of the majority opinion was that it shut down debate:

Public debate over same-sex marriage displayed American democracy at its best. Individuals on both sides of the issue passionately, but respectfully, attempted to persuade their fellow citizens to accept their views…. Win or lose, advocates for both sides continued pressing their cases, secure in the knowledge that an electoral loss can be negated by a later electoral win. That is exactly how our system of government is supposed to work.

Until, he said, the courts put a stop to it.

Whatever else readers may think about the case or the tenor debate in the states that led up to it, Scalia’s point here is fundamentally about civility. What he calls for, to paraphrase the Institute’s definition, is disagreement without disrespect, and negotiation in the face of deeply rooted and sometimes passionate differences of opinion. Policy-making is an adversarial process, he tells us. But it’s supposed to be that way. The point of civility is not to eliminate conflict in public life, but to make it bearable, productive, and as useful as possible for all parties.

This is something we see in other aspects of how he conducted himself. In a 2013 interview with Jennifer Senior in New York Magazine, Scalia talked about how he chose his clerks. His preference, he said, is for clerks whose predispositions are quite the opposite of mine — who are social liberals rather than social conservatives. The advantage of that, he said, is productive debate: that kind of clerk will always be looking for the chinks in my armor, for the mistakes I’ve made in my opinion. That’s what clerks are for — to make sure I don’t make mistakes.

And what’s true for he and his clerks is also true for the court as a whole. Writing about his loss, friend and fellow Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had this tribute:

When I wrote for the Court and received a Scalia dissent, the opinion ultimately released was notably better than my initial circulation. Justice Scalia nailed all the weak spots — the ‘applesauce’ and ‘argle bargle’ — and gave me just what I needed to strengthen the majority opinion.

And at the end of the day, as Scalia told Jennifer Senior, everybody I’ve served with on the Court I’ve regarded as a friend. Some were closer than others, but I didn’t consider myself an enemy of any of them. His approach to deliberation, in other words, is a reflection of his approach to public policy: adversarial and contentious, but conscious of avoiding the uncivil mistake of confusing opposition for enmity.

The fact of the matter is that, yes, Justice Antonin Scalia is a deeply polarizing figure in our polarized political landscape. In no small part because he was so colorful and so quotable, he is for many American progressives singularly villainous. And undoubtedly in part for that same reason, he is for many American conservatives singularly heroic.

But both of those characterizations miss the point of Scalia in this regard: as much as any political ideology, his commitment seems to have been to a process by which, through ardent but respectful disagreement, we come to decisions that are as thoroughly examined – and as well made – as they can possibly be.

His civility wasn’t the sort that manifested as politeness. But for all his penchant for provocation, we may be able to learn a thing or two about civility from Antonin Scalia.

Recent Poll Confirms: Civility Matters

Adam Zolkover

AmacheChartWe here at the Institute all already knew it was true, but it’s confirmed: Americans do in fact care about civility. According to a recent poll conducted by communications firms Weber Shandwick and Powell Tate, with KRC Research, the great majority of likely voters in the upcoming Presidential race say that they care about the civility of their candidates, and say that civility will make a difference in who they vote for when they go to the polls.

Ninety-three percent, in fact, say that a candidate’s tone or level of civility will be an important factor for them in the election. Of those, more than half report that it is a “very” important factor. And more than half also report that the civility of the race makes a difference in how enthusiastic they are about voting at all.

The poll shows some relatively small differences in results along party lines. Voters who identify as Democrats seem to be more emphatic about the importance of civility, with 61 percent reporting that it is “very” important, to Republican voters’ 44 percent. And voters who identify as Democrats seem to see the current tenor of the election as being slightly more uncivil than their Republican counterparts, with 60 percent reporting that this is the case, as opposed to 55 percent.

More interesting in this regard, however, is how members of each party perceive the civility of the other:

There is a noticeable split in their reaction to the presidential debates. Majorities in both parties view the Republican debates as generally uncivil but nearly two-thirds of Democrats see their own party’s debate as civil, while nearly half of Republicans say the Democrats’ debates have been uncivil.

The purported incivility of the Republican debates seems to boil down to one clear factor: the presence of Donald Trump. Members of both parties perceive Trump to be the least civil candidate in the Presidential race, with 79 percent reporting that this is the case.

But in terms of the Democratic debates, the cause of the split in perception is less clear. Voters may perceive Hillary Clinton as uncivil, but not nearly in the same numbers as Donald Trump.

One possible cause of this split is the type of implicit bias we’ve discussed here on the blog before. In December, we reported on a study by political scientists Shanto Iyengar and Sean J. Westwood that suggested that the system of political parties in the United States increasingly resembles a form of tribalism, where party affiliation bleeds into personal identity and affects seemingly non-political aspects of our lives like our perceptions of the sort of people who make appropriate friends, or even appropriate mates for our children.

Iyengar and Westwood used a computerized test to reveal embedded, unconscious partisan biases: that test-takers who identify as Republicans and conservatives code things associated with the Republican Party as “good” and things associated with the Democratic Party as “bad”; while for Democrats and liberals, it is the inverse.

This suggests a kind of blind-spot for politically engaged Americans – for the sort who identify themselves as likely to vote, and who follow the primary debates closely enough to have an opinion. Among people who fall into this category, it seems probable that partisans on the Democratic side would perceive their own debates as more civil than they actually are, while Republican partisans would perceive them to be less civil.

In terms of Republican debates, in other words, the perception of Trump as uncivil is enough to balance out implicit biases. While for perceptions of Democratic debates, implicit bias triumphs and the truth about their relative civility probably falls somewhere in the middle.

In any case, Weber Shandwick’s Civility in America study makes encouraging news for civility advocates, no matter their party preference. It suggests that Americans would largely be amenable to a shift in tone among candidates for public office. And with three quarters saying that the media has a responsibility to decrease incivility, it suggests that Americans would applaud a shift in tone among news organizations, too.

Nothing about this study offers a specific way forward to a different kind of political climate in the United States. But given just how pro-civility participants in this study seem to be, it does confirm what we at the Institute have been saying all along: that a way forward to a more civil politics is in fact within our means.

Govinfo.gov Shows Us the Work of Governing

Adam Zolkover

In the heat of the presidential primary season – amid ballots and debates, name calling, lawsuit threats, and no small amount of controversy about the value of the coin-toss as an electoral measure – it seems important from time to time to take a step back from both the sensationalism and the seriousness of choosing new elected officials and remember why we do it in the first place.

It’s easy, given the volume and intensity of media coverage that the presidential race receives, to forget that it’s not the only – or even the most important – feature of the American political landscape. The fact is that even as ballots are being cast, the work of governing – of setting, implementing, and enforcing policy – is still chugging along.

Govinfo.gov Shows Us the Work of Governing

There is no better reminder of this than the fact that, this past week, the Government Publishing Office (GPO) released a new online tool – govinfo.gov – that allows any interested citizen to track records of what the various branches of the Federal Government are up to. It’s like Google for government documents, said the GPO’s spokesperson, according to Roll Call:

Users can access the Congressional Record, track the course of legislation or perhaps dive into a treasure trove of information specifically on President Gerald Ford.

Government geekery aside, anyone from the general public may punch out “Obamacare” and get a copy of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act — the agency’s most popular document at 14 million downloads in the last six years.

This new system is not an innovation so much as it is an evolution. For years the GPO has maintained FDsys, an online archive that has afforded the public searchable access to Federal Government documents. But govinfo.gov is much more robust. According to the GPO-provided overview of the system, it offers an overall enhanced user experience and a whole host of new features that make searching both easier and more powerful. Some of them include:

  • a new modern look and feel,
  • the capability to link related content,
  • two new ways to browse content: alphabetically and by category,
  • a new open-source search engine,
  • enhancements to the search filters, and
  • more options for sharing pages and content on social media.

Beyond the hype, govinfo.gov does in fact offer a user-friendly inoculation against the tunnel vision of the election season. Users can certainly find the kinds of historical documents Roll Call talks about. But perhaps more relevant for creating and maintaining an informed citizenry, it allows users to search by date, pulling all documents from the last day, week, month, six months, or year.

In the last seven days, for example, govinfo.gov tells us that one bill was introduced in the House of Representatives concerning research into dyslexia, and another was introduced to authorize funding for the Coast Guard. It gives us documents related to cases heard in Federal Court across the United States. And it gives us access to a dozen new Congressional Reports – explanations of pending bills that include information about their contents, potential effects, and budgetary impacts.

Moreover, it allows users to refine and filter search results. So if we only want congressional reports in our seven-day period, or if we only want documents produced by one single organization or author, we an easily find that information as well.

Govinfo.gov is basically technical. The documents provided by the GPO are the archival records of the Federal Government, and as such tend to be long and sometimes difficult to follow. But even a quick search of the headlines – of the names of what has been entered into the Federal record in the past week, or of what kinds of bills have just passed or are still pending – gives us a lot of information.

Part and parcel of civility is being informed. In order to be engaged with the process of governing, and in order to have the kinds of thoughtful opinions about which we can have a substantive debate, it is imperative that we know what kinds of options are actually on the table. We can garner a lot of this from the news. But sadly, in a media climate where only the most sensational stories gain headlines and where, even in a twenty-four hour cycle, there isn’t a lot of room for nuance, the news will only take us so far.

Govinfo.gov fills some of that gap. On the one hand, the information it returns isn’t sexy or particularly entertaining. But it does serve an important purpose. It highlights just how little most of us know about what the Federal Government actually does. And it remedies that situation, allowing us to see what is politically feasible and what is politically current so that we can make better decisions about what we believe, what policies we support, an even who we plan to vote for in the presidential primaries.

Playing “Controversial Opinion.”

Adam Zolkover

Earlier this month, Sean Blanda, writing at Medium.com, had this thought-provoking essay that relates to a lot of our recent content here at The Civility Blog. Titled The “Other Side” Is Not Dumb, he comments on the impulse toward a team mentality when it comes to matters of opinion from politics to taste, and observes some of the ways that this leads to closed minds and an outright dismissal of anybody we perceive to be part of the opposing faction.

The problem, he says, stems from a psychological concept called false-consensus bias: the assumption we make that our values and beliefs are normal or widely held. It is fed by contemporary media outlets, which are increasingly segregated by ideological point of view. And it leads to the worst kind of echo chamber, one where those inside are increasingly convinced that everyone shares their world view, that their ranks are growing when they aren’t.

Blanda writes that the unfortunate results of this are a fundamental rejection of the possibility to consider that the people who don’t feel the same way you do might be right, and an assumption that opinions work like menu cards, where people who like the same TV shows, or movies, or music you do must also share the same views on social welfare, or banking reform, or immigration. It is a preference to see the Other Side as a cardboard cut out, he says, rather than as complicated individual human beings. And it is ultimately about belittling people rather than trying to understand them.

The problem that Blanda is describing is related to several we’ve talked about here before. False-consensus bias, like confirmation bias, is exacerbated by filter bubbling – the situation where media outlets, and especially websites, serve us content that is tailored to our established viewing preferences. And it is parallel to some of the research we wrote about in December: the idea that party affiliation in the United States is increasingly a matter of tribalism rather than mere electoral politics.

It is difficult, on the one hand, to fight the notion that our own points of view are what’s normal when – because of the sum of our previous search queries – companies like Google and Facebook adapt some or all of what we see to what they think we want. And on the other hand, it is difficult not to conceive of political identity as team identity when the filters account for aesthetic and political choices in exactly the same way. If our personalized list of Facebook trending topics, for example, consistently places filtered political news next to science, business, and culture, it only makes sense that our brains begin to fit them all together.

In any case, in his essay, Sean Blanda offers some useful suggestions for how to overcome this kind of thinking. He tells us that it is imperative that we have conversations with people with whom we disagree, and that in those conversations, we must not try to “win”:

Don’t try to “convince” anyone of your viewpoint. Don’t score points by mocking them to your peers. Instead try to “lose.” Hear them out. Ask them to convince you and mean it.

He suggests that we reconsider how we use social media. The next time you feel compelled to share a link, he suggests, ask yourself why you are doing it:

Is it because that link brings to light information you hadn’t considered? Or does it confirm your world view, reminding your circle of intellectual teammates that you’re not on the Other Side?

And he offers a compelling idea for a game that is, fundamentally, about instilling civility. He calls it Controversial Opinion, but it might as easily be called the same thing as his essay: The “Other Side” Is Not Dumb. The rules are simple, Blanda writes: don’t talk about what was shared during Controversial Opinion afterward and you aren’t allowed to “argue” — only to ask questions about why that person feels that way.

Each player in turn reveals opinions that they hold, but that they assume are unpopular, about any topic at all. And in the other players’ surprise, the illusion of homogeneity – of having a team or a tribe – is systematically destroyed. Like the intimate discussions that we somehow never seem to quite be able to have, Controversial Opinion reveals our collective diversity and requires that we seek to understand each other as people — not essentialize, or belittle, or make fun.

It requires respect to play. It requires empathy to play well. And it has the potential to be a gateway from which we can exit the filter bubble and move from adversarial confrontation to the sort of meaningful, civil discussion that has the potential to get things done.

Civility, Empathy, and Tears

Adam Zolkover

Civility, Empathy, and TearsIt’s an easy thing to get caught up in the idea that civility is basically cerebral. But as the past week has shown, its emotional reality is vitally important, too.

About a week ago, on January 5th, in a speech in which he announced some executive orders regarding gun control, President Obama shed very public tears as he spoke about the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut.

Our unalienable right to life, and liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, he said, with a crescendo of emotion, was stripped from first-graders in Newtown. First-graders. And from every family who never imagined that their loved one would be taken from our lives by a bullet from a gun. And then, wiping tears from his eyes, he told us: every time I think about those kids it gets me mad.

The President’s tears remind us that though it is not common, displays of raw emotion among American officials have become a part of the landscape of our political culture. Former Speaker of the House John Boehner, famous for his tears, once told a reporter that there are just some things that tug at me. He said that he can’t go to schools while campaigning. All of those little sweet kids, I’m a mess. And in 2012, as he discussed the resignation of Representative Gabrielle Giffords – who had herself been the victim of a mass shooting – he appeared to fight back tears on ABC’s Sunday show, This Week:

“I’ve never quite seen a farewell in the House like this,” he said. “A bipartisan effort, all the members were there. A sad day for the House.”

“But, a very brave lady,” Boehner added, choking up.

Progressives, over the years, have made fun of John Boehner’s publicly emotional style, producing lists of instances of tearful moments, or turning his quivering lip into online memes. And similarly, some conservative pundits this week called into question Obama’s sincerity, wondering – among other things – if he had a raw onion hidden behind his podium. Actor James Woods, on Twitter, suggested that the President’s were #CrocadileTears.

But the fact is that tears are powerful, and it behooves us to take them seriously. As Leonard Pitts Jr. of The Miami Herald says of President Obama’s speech: one grows used to thinking of politics as a craft practiced mostly by people who are only technically human – who are automatons programmed to court votes by any means, including cynical ones. But that’s not the reality. This moment destroyed that perception, he writes. The president wept and it was a starkly human thing.

Institute President and co-founder Cassandra Dahnke has made a similar observation. Tears show us that our public figures are more than politicians or lawmakers or position holders, she responded when asked about the significance of the President’s emotional moment. They are people – and while they are in unique positions, they aren’t any different from the rest of the us.

And that sameness is significant. That sameness highlights one of the core emotional realities necessary to have civility at all: empathy. Tears and other expressions of emotion are outward signs of internal connection. They are part of an economy of emotions that we all – at our best – share between us: the idea that my happiness depends on yours, and that when you suffer, I cannot help but suffer, too.

We often think of this sort of empathy as a feature of art and drama, but it is also the basis of our ability to engage in inclusive politics. Empathy allows us to respect others and make room for their feelings and needs – to make our footprint smaller so they can have space, too. When President sheds tears for the victims of the Sandy Hook school shooting, he acknowledges that in some measure the pain of those deaths – the families’ grief and loss – is his pain, grief, and loss. And that connection opens the possibility of acknowledging and balancing conflicting needs.

In the speech, President Obama plainly states: I believe in the Second Amendment. He supports the right to bear arms. But empathy informs an acknowledgment that even where rights are concerned, there is no such thing as absolute good. He tells us this with words when he says that we all believe in the First Amendment … but we accept that you can’t yell “fire” in a theater. And he tells us again with his actions – when he cries.

Does this mean that his tears are a calculated political ploy, as folks like James Woods have suggested? No. But as John Boehner can surely attest, emotional displays need not be calculated to be rhetorically and politically significant.

In both cases – the President’s and the former Speaker of the House’s – tears get to the very personal layer that underlies our politics, the reason we have a political process at all. The fact that I have needs and beliefs that require acknowledgment and respect is basically emotional. And via empathy, my ability to accommodate the needs and beliefs of others is basically emotional, too.

So what we see when our elected officials shed tears amounts to a peek behind the curtain. In tears, their most human selves break through. And in these moments of humanity is the potential for a more civil politics: one that understands that our well-being is interconnected, and that negotiates public policy accordingly.

Political Correctness is a Red Herring; Civility is the Issue

Adam Zolkover 4

Among presidential primary candidates and pundits, political correctness has once again become a watch word in the last few weeks of 2015. The trend is not exactly new. This past September Donald Trump, responding to criticism of his brusque rhetorical style and specifically of his confrontation with FOX News host Megyn Kelly, proclaimed that he is so tired of this politically correct crap. And even before that, at the beginning of August, he told a debate audience that I don’t frankly have time for total political correctness.

But discourse about political correctness, and the ritual denunciation of it, has gained momentum especially since the December 15th Republican primary debate. There, several of the candidates claimed that their strength on issues of national security as President would come from a rejection of the notion. Senator Ted Cruz said that in terms of border security, his policies would not be prisoners to political correctness. And he said that the San Bernadino shootings could have been stopped but for the Department of Homeland Security deferring to political correctness on the issue of monitoring electronic communications.

Dr. Ben Carson told audiences that United States of America is the patient. And the patient is in critical condition and will not be cured by political correctness. He said that in looking out at the advantages and disadvantages of cultures and policies from around the world, he is not anxious to give away American values and principles for the sake of political correctness.

There is a sense in which this much discussion of political correctness in such a high-profile venue seems surprising. As Philip Bump writes in The Washington Post, the term as it is currently used is something of a relic of the 1980s and 1990s. It calls to mind Rolling Stone magazine, in 1992, calling out R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe for suffering from “‘man for all causes’ syndrome,” given that he wore “all those politically correct T-shirts on the MTV Video Music Awards show.” Or as Robert Kuttner writes at The Huffington Post, it hearkens back to Allan Bloom’s 1987 book, The Closing of the American Mind, in which he attacked liberal college professors for imposing “politically correct” ways of thinking on impressionable undergraduates.

But as Bump says, antipathy toward political correctness has never gone away. It has bubbled under the surface, fueled by demographic and economic shifts that have fomented uncertainty and resentment between cultural groups. Or as Paul Waldman puts it in a recent article in The American Prospect, it has come in the past two decades to be used increasingly by right-leaning media figures to mean speaking tactfully, as opposed to speaking truthfully, about the exigencies of American political life.

So large does the concept loom in the American imagination, in fact, that in a Fairleigh Dickinson University poll released in October, 68 percent of respondents agreed that political correctness was a big problem. That includes 62 percent of self-identified Democrats, 68 percent of independents and 81 percent of Republicans, as well as majorities of white, black, and Hispanic respondents.

The thing about it is that the respondents are right. Political correctness is a problem.  And it’s a problem especially where it interacts with questions of civility.

In The Des Moines Register, Kathie Obradovich asks the question: can civility exist in a world where voters put a premium on straight talk and abhor “political correctness?” She writes that the rejection of political correctness taps into Americans’ disgust with politicians who just tell everyone what they want to hear. But that at the same time, she says, the result of jettisoning it can be downright abusive: characterizing Mexican immigrants as drug dealers and rapists (Trump), comparing Obamacare to slavery (Carson), calling people pathological (Trump about Carson).

But the fact is that political correctness and civility are two separate issues. And though the political correctness may preserve civility of speech, by throttling it down we might ultimately strengthen civility as a whole.

Consider it this way: if we wanted to define it, we could say that being politically correct is agreeing with the idea that people should be careful to not use language or behave in a way that could offend a particular group of people. We could say that it is basically a rhetorical strategy of self-censorship, in which people don’t express their true beliefs regarding identity politics because of pressure to conform themselves to some particular (usually progressive-coded) political point of view.

By this definition, political correctness is not a way of maintaining civility, but of masking the very real incivility that looms behind too many social interactions. As a regime, it does not ask people to confront the racism, sexism, homophobia, et cetera present in their views. Instead, it asks them to subsume those things. To use an example from Paul Waldman, if you’re a man of a certain age, you might think it was perfectly fine to call your secretary “sweetheart” and give her a pat on the behind whenever the mood struck you. You might not act on it because it would be politically incorrect to do so. But the fact that you know it to be politically incorrect doesn’t change your opinion, only the outcome.

The logic behind political correctness of this sort is that by changing our actions, we ultimately change our minds. But that’s clearly not the case. It has been more than thirty years since political correctness came into popular usage in this form. And the fact that Trump supporters perceive his often disparaging rhetoric as telling it like it is suggests that for many of us, there is something in those old ways of thinking that still rings true, even if we feel that we aren’t allowed to say it.

In this formulation, civility is almost the opposite of political correctness, even if it ultimately leads us to a similar place. If we define civility, as the Institute does, as claiming and caring for one’s identity, needs and beliefs without degrading someone else’s in the process, then it is incumbent upon us not to subsume our views, but to own them. And at the same time, it is imperative for us to recognize that other people – people who may be the objects of our internalized biases – have their own identity, needs, and beliefs, and that we need to make space for them to be heard and honored too.

The operative question about civility, then, is not ‘how do we act as though we were more tolerant than we are?’ It is ‘how do we make the mental and institutional space for pluralism?’

Key to this difference is two concepts: self-reflection and negotiation. In order to go from political correctness to civility, we must reflect on whether our beliefs are based in learned prejudices, or whether they are based in the real facts of the real world. And we must reflect on whether our beliefs require that we stifle the views of our neighbors, or whether they allow us to constructively take differences of opinion into account.

And going from political correctness requires that we change the way we act. It requires that we learn not just to speak the language of inclusivity, but to be inclusive. In areas where we find we are in a position of privilege, this means considering how we can reduce the footprint of our needs such that others can have their needs met, too. And in areas where we find that we are the objects of others’ biases, it requires insisting that our needs be met while recognizing that prior mistreatment is often the result of ignorance, not malice.

A future beyond political correctness may not look obviously like civility insofar as our interactions may seem ruder, or rawer, or less polite. Certainly, we are likely to be more confrontational. But both the presidential primary candidates and public opinion are right about political correctness in at least this one sense: as long as we hide our beliefs and biases behind a veil or euphemism and silence, the underlying problems that make regimes of political correctness necessary are unlikely to ever be addressed.