Our Constitutional Rights and Freedoms Trump Manners and Civility

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Long before Donald Trump berated Ukrainian president Volodymir Zelenskyy, the president has been criticized for his lack of decorum, manners, politesse, and political “norms.” From snubbing Hillary Clinton during his first inaugural address, to discarding “diplomatic niceties” when talking with foreign leaders,” as the AP put it in 2019, Trump’s boorishness and vulgarity has been the Dems’ go-to smear.

But complaints about manners and proper behavior generally reflect the mores and sensibilities of privileged elites defined by birth, wealth, and credentials––all policed by professional and political guilds. In a democratic republic in which all citizens are politically free and equal, such rules often function as gate-keepers to keep hoi polloi in their place, at the expense of crafting policies that serve national interests and security. Worse, they are tools for silencing rival factions’ free speech rights by question-begging labels like “misinformation” or “hate-speech.”

Ever since the birth of democracy in ancient Athens and its enfranchisement of the poor and uneducated, the issue of free public speech had been contested. Indeed, empowering the citizen masses to vote in elections, openly deliberate and speak out about policy, and hold office, was the heart of democracy, the public confirmation of the citizens’ freedom and equality––as the extant ancient antidemocratic complaints from antiquity illustrate.

Moreover, to protect the right of free speech the Athenians had very few restrictions on insults and mockery.  Ancient comedy, performed at state-sponsored religious festivals, and managed by citizens, was also a political institution unbridled by rules of decorum. Classicist K.J. Dover writes of comedy in the 5^th and 4^th centuries B.C. that “every Athenian politician we know of from historical sources was accused by comic playwrights of being ugly, diseased, prostituted perverts, the sons of whores by foreigners who bribed their way into citizenship.”

Nor was it just poetic license: political debate in the Athenian Assembly, the legislative body of the state, was just as vulgar. Sordid sexual practices, disreputable parentage, and taking foreign bribes were standard charges made in speeches, including in trials. As the philosopher Democritus said, “Freedom of speech is the sign of freedom.”

Thus for a politically free and equal citizen to participate politically, one had to be assured that there would be no repercussions or punishment for speaking one’s mind, no matter how crudely  and rudely. But less well known is the role that diversity played in institutionalizing free speech. American politics from the start reflected the intricate diversity of the founding colonies. Most important has been the differences in education and the variety of preferences about how grammatically, politely, and properly one speaks, which were markers of economic class and education.

We’ve seen this dynamic for over a decade in the corporate media’s and Democrats’ incessant attacks on Trump’s rhetorical style that is aggressive and demotic, reflecting his affinity for the middle and working classes, and the need for plain speech and common sense in crafting policies. For his enemies, however, it bespeaks his demagogic modus operandi of pandering to the unsophisticated, less well educated, hence vulnerable masses.

And those MAGA Trump supporters face the same smears and insults such as “bitter clingers to guns and religion” by Barack Obama, while Hillary Clinton called half of them a “basket of deplorables” who are “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic.” She did apologize––but only for limiting the “deplorables” to just “half” of Trump’s supporters.

Despite the eight years of hysteria about Trump’s violation of “norms” and decorum, Donald Trump isn’t an anomaly.  As Maurizio Valzania  writes in “The Conversation,” in reality, “the shredding of etiquette by presidents, other politicians and public officials has long been a feature of American politics.”

An iconic example of manners and decorum weaponized as political tools is the rise and administration of Andrew Jackson. The first non-elite, frontier president, Jackson highlighted the contrast between the masses and the quasi-aristocratic elite empowered by the federal government––itself vulnerable to the corruption that attends concentrated power, and fearful of what they called the fickle, ignorant, self-interested masses. As Jackson wrote in 1824, a Federalist central government “is calculated to raise around the administration a moneyed aristocracy dangerous to the liberties of the country.” Sound familiar?

Jackson’s famous inaugural celebration illustrated the conflict between the two contrasting ideologies. Jackson opened the White House to ordinary people, including disorderly and rambunctious frontiersmen. Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story groused “the reign of KING MOB seemed triumphant.” Outgoing president John Quincy Adams left town.

And the media agreed, noting the “disgraceful scenes in the parlors, in which even women got bloody noses,” wrote reporter Ann Newport Royal, who sneered that only a bowl of punch was able “to lure the new ‘democracy’ out of the house.” As historian Walter McDougall writes, “to the genteel it was nightmare.”

So, too, the two Trump presidencies have been nightmares for our political “genteel,” the credentialed affluent who side with the elites while patronizing the lesser classes, especially the minorities who function as their “mascots,” as Thomas Sowell has put it, the symbols of their virtue signaling and moral preening. At the same time, they see them as permanent victims of their political enemies whom they slur as “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic.”

Meanwhile they’ve been “dangerous to the liberties of the country,” trashing the Bill of Rights, especially the First Amendment. Universities, horribile dictu, have taken the lead in censoring and silencing students and faculty who challenge the progressives’ illiberal narratives, backed up by the corporate media’s Orwellian “fact-checkers” that seldom got around to fact-checking Democrats. Yet just one month of Trump’s presidency has concentrated the minds of some.

Although some media outlets and platforms are seeing the light, if only to rescue their plummeting ratings, we still regularly hear the tiresome stock accusations and question-begging epithets like “racist” and “fascist” and, of course, the tiresome use of “Hitler.” One of the worst offenders is “The View,” which Wall Street Journal’s Andy Kessler recently called “a gaggle of Greek mythology’s human-tormenting screeching harpies with a TV show.”

Unfortunately, the Dems don’t seem to have learned their lesson despite the toll taken on their electoral fortunes due to the progressives’ and “woke” lefties’ disastrous economic, foreign policy, and culture war disasters. These noxious ideas are still infecting public institutions from Hollywood to the rotting groves of academe. Thankfully, for now the federal government’s corrupt agencies are being exposed, reduced, and reformed, so the policies serve the American people and their rights.

But the federal courts still remain to thwart those rights. Some of the supposed conservatives on the Supreme Court also are nodding off. Recently some conservative justices joined the progressives in refusing to hear a lower court decision that ruled against a challenge to the University of Indiana’s Orwellian “bias response teams.” As the Wall Street Journal explains, students “can use a website to file anonymous bias reports against one another. . . . The bias team can ‘invite’ students to discuss their conduct, and it can make referrals to disciplinary offices.”

The bias team can’t directly punish free speech, but they clearly can create what the ACLU used to call a “chilling effect.” As a judge in a similar case involving the University of Michigan said, the bias team’s power to make referrals “is a real consequence that objectively chills speech,” and an invitation to meet with an official school inquiry board, however voluntarily, “could carry an implicit threat of consequence should a student decline.”

Justice Clarence Thomas’s powerful dissent also warns about the nation-wide conflicting decisions on the constitutionality of such administrative mechanisms: “The Court’s refusal to intervene now leaves students subject to a ‘patchwork of First Amendment rights,’ with a student’s ability to challenge his university’s bias response policies varying depending on accidents of geography.”

These and other policies at universities police not just political speech, but anything that a student, particularly one from “protected classes,” finds offensive or demeaning––despite the fact that the First Amendment protects that speech too.

Finally, in the case of Trump, such subjectivity and hurt feelings are not as important as good policy predicated on the Constitution and its central purpose––to protect our political freedom and equality, the two major bulwarks against tyranny. Electing Donald Trump is the necessary first step in removing the illiberal accretions from decades of Democrat rule. But the technocratic, anti-Constitutional elite enemies of our freedom, unalienable rights, and national interests, though in disarray now, still require us to “fight, fight, fight.”