Can we stop pretending that the right cares about civility? Whether it’s the faux outrage over the television host Samantha Bee calling Ivanka Trump a “cunt” or the yammering over Robert DeNiro’s “fuck Trump” battle cry at the Tony awards, I’m tired of those on the right feigning shock. After all, they voted in the most brash, offensive and foul-mouthed president in history.
Are we really to believe that the same people who voted for a man who suggested a woman was too ugly to sexually assault now care about a naughty word for female genitalia? The same people who defended a man who said he grabbed women “by the pussy”? Are Americans really supposed to keep quiet and polite as Republicans implement policies that literally rip nursing infants from their mothers’ breasts and are building tented internment camps for children?
But sure, it’s our curses that are the problem.
Those on the left, too, are warning that our anger will drive more people to Trump. Frank Bruni wrote this week: “When you answer name-calling with name-calling and tantrums with tantrums, you’re not resisting him. You’re mirroring him. You’re not diminishing him. You’re demeaning yourselves.
“Many voters don’t hear your arguments or the facts, which are on your side. They just wince at the din,” he says.
But here’s the thing – the people who are standing by Trump right now are not people who are interested in arguments or facts. They’re supporting a man who lies with every other breath, a man who calls the press the “greatest enemy” of our country while he lauds an authoritarian dictator and shrugs off his human rights abuses. Someone who looked at a march of white supremacists where one woman was killed and said there were “very fine people on both sides”. Who called countries inhabited mostly by people of color “shitholes”.
This is a president who deserves a bit of profanity.
Expecting those of us who are scared and angry over what our country is becoming to speak with civility is absurd – civility died the day Trump took office. It’s like telling a woman to smile as she’s being sexually harassed on the street: we’re not just supposed to put up with injustice, we’re meant to be cheerful through it, as well.
If you’re not angry enough to curse, to scream or name-call, then you’re not paying nearly enough attention. As the New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino tweeted in 2017: “Never forget to be extremely wary of every person in your life who has not experienced this last year as a personal moral emergency.”
Meeting extreme injustices with polite banter plays right into the hands of this administration, because it paints their outrageous actions as just being on one side of a well-meaning debate. They’re not. This is not about disagreement, or political discourse. This is about fighting for what’s right over what is clearly and demonstrably evil.
Being spittlingly angry will not drive more people to Trump and will not diminish us – the high road is about morals, not a few curse words.
