Calls for `civility' generally prove short-lived

By Greg Sargent

It's nice that so many public officials and commenators are seizing on the Arizona shooting to renew calls for more "civility" in politics, but it's worth noting that recent history shows that such appeals, while somberly agreed to by just about everyone, always prove very fleeting.

Two of the most wrenching spasms of domestic violence in recent American history -- the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy in 1968, and the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 -- were followed by periods of widespread national introspection about the state of our politics. In both cases, tranquility reigned, in historical terms, for approximately a nano-second.

I checked in with Rick Perlstein, the author of "Nixonland" and an unparalled chronicler of the fraught cultural subtexts and conflicts of national politics, to talk about the aftermath of the 1968 assassinations. He pointed out that in his 1969 inaugural speech, Richard Nixon issued a clarion call for national unity that rapidly was overtaken by the events that followed.

"His inaugural was all about bringing us together," Perlstein noted. "Of course, the Nixon administration was almost exclusively the opposite. Very soon he was wiretapping journalists and going around saying that peace activists wanted us to lose in Vietnam and represented the worst of America."

It came from both sides, obviously. The pitched battles of that era flowed from unbridgeable disputes and wrenching transformations gripping our whole society: The pitched battles over Vietnam, the various civil rights movements, the searing racial tensions that resulted as urban America underwent profound demographic changes.

After the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, it was widely believed that Bill Clinton had the right on the defensive with his demands for a cooler tone in politics and his criticism of Republicans for shutting down the government. In a speech soon after the bombings, he directly targeted the rampant anti-government fervor of the times, warning against "pretending that you can love your country but hate your government."

In one of my favorite Clinton moments, at his 1996 State of the Union speech, he pointed up to the gallery at a 49-year-old Vietnam vet and Federal worker who helped dig people out of the bombing rubble. "I challenge all of you in this Chamber: Never, ever shut the federal government down again," Clinton admonished the Republicans. Commentators sagely predicted that both sides would have to take down the rhetoric a few notches.

We all know what followed: Impeachment and a protracted struggle between right and left that was as fraught, angry, emotional and uncivil as anything in recent memory.

Expect the same thing to happen again. And there's a simple reason why: All the incivility of this and other eras isn't the result of just bad manners on the part of our public officials and commentators. It flows from stark ideological divides in our society that ran and continue to run very deep -- and no amount of resolve to make nice can paper them over.

"The divisions transcend any glib efforts at civility," Perlstein says.

All of which isn't to say that we shouldn't be calling on public officials and commentators to stop painting their political foes as illegitimate and stop flirting with violent rhetoric. And by all means, we should keep pointing out false equivalences between left and right as warranted. But it's worth keeping in mind that there's a reason for all the passion and anger, and it isn't going away anytime soon.

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UPDATE, 4:06 p.m.: Paul Begala makes some interesting and related points.

