“We’re voting with our middle finger,” said a Trump supporter in South Carolina. All of the institutions that have failed — failed to stop Barack Obama, failed to save the United States from adulteration, corruption and destruction — should be overturned. Burn, baby, burn.
This approach to politics has not normally been associated with conservatism, which teaches prudence, proportion and respect for institutions, even if they require reform.
.. The political philosophy of the middle finger — captured by Trump in all its vulgar, taunting, divisive glory — requires an ethical leap. It assumes that practices we know are wrong in our private lives — contempt, mockery, cruelty, prejudice — are somehow justified in our political lives. It requires us to embrace views and tactics that we would never teach our children — but do, in fact, teach them through an ethically degraded politics. Imagine your teenage son (or daughter, for that matter) calling a woman a “fat pig,” “dog ” or “disgusting. ” Imagine your child labeling someone he or she knows as a “loser,” “moron” or “dummy.”
.. For Christians, the price of entry to the Trump movement is to abandon their commitments to kindness and love of neighbor. Which would mean that their faith has no public consequence at all.
.. It is not a theory of limited government. It would use government, with augmented powers, to enforce a vision of ethnic nationalism, constructing a wall visible from space and conducting one of the largest forced expulsions in history.
.. And we know our flag stands for shared ideals, not someone’s idea of shared bloodlines.
The Devil in Ted Cruz
At a town hall in South Carolina that CNN televised, he answered a question about his miserable relations with fellow lawmakers in Washington by assuring voters that “it’s not that I speak with a lack of civility or respect.”
“The Bible talks about if someone treats you unkindly, repay them with kindness,” he added. “That has been the standard I’ve tried to follow. That’s how I’ve approached it in the Senate. So I have not attacked or insulted my colleagues in the Senate, Democrat or Republican.”
Is he suffering from delusions? Amnesia? On the Senate floor he called Mitch McConnell, the Republican majority leader, a liar. He also likened Senate Republicans who recognized the impossibility of defunding Obamacare to Nazi appeasers.
Maureen Dowd: Escape From Bushworld
When Poppy Bush ran against Bill Clinton, he simply assumed that the public would not choose a draft-dodging womanizer over him. “His ambient reality was that a president was above all a figure of dignity and decorum,” Bush senior biographer Jon Meacham said. “Clinton went on Arsenio Hall. Bush 41 probably thought Arsenio Hall was a building at Andover.”
.. Despite all the talk about civility, the Bushes threw out the red meat whenever they had to, from Lee Atwater and Willie Horton in ’88 to W.’s supporters whispering in 2000 that John McCain came home from Hanoi with snakes in his head, to the W. 2004 campaign strategy of encouraging gay marriage ballot initiatives to rile up the evangelicals, to Jeb spending a fortune on ads this winter eviscerating the character of the man he deemed the disloyal protégé, Marco Rubio.
.. Trump stunned everyone by pointing out the obvious: W. and Condi were not on the ball before 9/11, when W. was mountain-biking and ignoring memos headlined, as Bill Maher drily put it, “Osama bin Laden is standing right behind you.” Then, after 9/11, they played right into Osama’s recruiting plans by invading and occupying two Muslim countries, instead of simply going after the guilty party, as W. had promised to do when he yelled through the bullhorn at ground zero.
.. The country is now aflame with anger and disgust about politicians and bankers who conned trusting Americans and never got punished for it. That fury has led to the rise of wildly improbable candidates in both parties. As the Bush dynasty falls, it must watch in horror knowing that it is responsible for the rise of Donald Trump.
No Time to Be Nice at Work
Intermittent stressors — like experiencing or witnessing uncivil incidents or even replaying one in your head — elevate levels of hormones called glucocorticoids throughout the day, potentially leading to a host of health problems, including increased appetite and obesity. A study published in 2012 that tracked women for 10 years concluded that stressful jobs increased the risk of a cardiovascular event by 38 percent.
.. INCIVILITY also hijacks workplace focus. According to a survey of more than 4,500 doctors, nurses and other hospital personnel, 71 percent tied disruptive behavior, such as abusive, condescending or insulting personal conduct, to medical errors, and 27 percent tied such behavior to patient deaths.
.. Civility pays dividends. J. Gary Hastings, a retired judge in Los Angeles, told me that when he informally polled juries about what determined their favor, he found that respect — and how attorneys behaved — was crucial. Juries were swayed based on thin slices of civil or arrogant behavior.