Democrats, stop imitating Trump's incivility. It'll backfire at the polls

Christian Schneider | USA Today

Show Caption Hide Caption Sarah Sanders kicked out of Virginia restaurant by owner A second member of the Trump administration was hounded at a restaurant in less than a week. This time it was Sarah Huckabee Sanders. Susana Victoria Perez has more.

In early 2011, among a throng of protesters cramming the State Capitol in Madison, Wisconsin to protest Gov. Scott Walker’s bill to weaken public sector unions, a juicy rumor began to spread. Evidently, a local restaurant had kicked Walker out after being booed by its patrons. One of the owners confirmed the story to a local blogger, and one of the bartenders said Walker’s presence “was causing a disturbance to the other customers and management asked him to leave.”

Only the story was a complete hoax. Walker had never eaten at the restaurant, and employees of the restaurant seem to have made the story up in order to boost business among the protesters. One enterprising blogger called the restaurant to get the full story and caught the employees talking about the ruse after they thought they had hung up the phone.

This story merely represented a harbinger of the #Resistance playbook in the President Donald Trump Era, when female staffers can be kicked out of restaurants simply for working for the president. Writers for legacy publications that just months ago argued against “normalizing” Trump’s unique brand of coarseness have now dropped the veil and fully endorsed harassing politicians. (One Washington Post writer actually tried to excuse stalking and screaming at Republicans, because California only gets two U.S. senators, or something.)

The problems with the rise of incivility are well-worn. Most obviously, if things get out of hand, there will be violence and bloodshed. When emotion overtakes reason, synapses in the hive mind start firing that are harder to turn off.

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Further, Democrats are just now starting to realize that while matching Trump’s incivility with their own obnoxiousness may be cathartic, it may very well backfire at the polls.

Some version of this sentiment has been offered ad nauseam in the conservative press since Trump’s election, with every example of progressive celebrities swearing at the Trump family on basic cable deemed a contribution to the Trump 2020 re-election campaign.

But now, with Trump’s approval rating slowly creeping northward, liberals are beginning to catch on. At The New York Times, Frank Bruni cautioned against hysterics and argued for “maturity, pragmatism and plain old smarts” in combating Trump.

This theme has been picked up by a cadre of major progressive columnists since, and the evidence in its favor isn’t hard to find. In the Wisconsin example, the left’s loss of self-control almost certainly contributed to Walker’s unprecedented recall election win and record Republican majorities in the state legislature.

But the most lasting damage to democracy wrought by incivility may be years off. Primarily, what type of individual will be willing to run for office while subjecting themselves and their families to daily hordes of screaming #Resisters? Who are these fictional people who would leave a successful career as a podiatrist or deli owner to have violence threatened against them on social media by Trump drones? Incivility will have the best people running away from office, not for it.

And when decent people run away from the political house fire, it will be self-interested hucksters that run toward it, hoping to pilfer the big screen TV before the walls collapse. Elected office will be reserved for toxic ideologues who are there simply to benefit themselves and trigger their opponents; rather than being a Congress representative of all walks of life, both chambers will be populated by lifelong political professionals seeking to avenge past slights and settle grudges.

Of course, politics has always been bare-knuckled and frequently uncivil. But when society devolves into an “everybody versus everybody else” cage match, the people most likely to restore sanity will simply opt to walk away.

And if progressives think they can drive decent Republicans out of office (at least the ones that don’t have Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao there to yell at protesters for them), they should take a moment to reflect. When the constraints of civility are off, exactly who do you think will replace them?

Christian Schneider is a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors