In Defense Of Rude Politics – By Libby Watson (New Republic) / March 10 2020
Very online vitriol can be counterproductive, but anger is often the last resort of the dispossessed.
Last week, Amber Rudd, the former home secretary of the United Kingdom—akin to America’s Homeland Security chief—was disinvited from an International Women’s Day event at Oxford University at the last minute. Students had raised an outcry over Rudd’s speaking engagement, owing to her involvement in the Windrush scandal, in which at least 83 foreign-born people (and possibly dozens more) were wrongly deported from the U.K. Many more were denied pensions and health care, despite the fact that they had arrived in the country before any sort of work permit for Commonwealth citizens was required. (Windrush was not some aberration for Rudd: She oversaw a department that enacted an aggressive “hostile environment” policy toward immigrants and at one point proposed forcing British companies to publicly list all their foreign workers.)
Politicians across the political spectrum denounced the students’ decision. The usual cries about deplatforming and civility rang out. Perhaps most notable was Rudd’s response: She called the decision “badly judged and rude.” Her daughter later tweeted that it was, in fact, “fucking rude,” adding, “This is NOT how women should treat each other.” What kind of International Women’s Day would it be, after all, without a hollow invocation of feminism to protect the powerful from criticism?
It was indeed rude, in an interpersonal sense, to disinvite Rudd at short notice. It probably wasted her whole afternoon. She may have had to purchase an underwhelming croissant at Oxford train station for no reason! But no one other than Amber Rudd should have had much reason to give the matter much thought. Still, this personal slight became a matter of national democratic urgency. The conceptual framework of rudeness, however, should not be broadly applicable to political acts, of which canceling the former deporter in chief’s invitation to a panel is certainly one. If your functioning democracy depends on everyone being polite to each other in perpetuity, I have some bad news for you.
In the U.K., Rudd had an interestingly similar role to that of Kirstjen Nielsen in the U.S., as head of the immigration bureaucracy, and the subsequent brow-furrowing over her disinvitation from the Oxford event is reminiscent of the excruciating discourse that followed the protests of Nielsen at a Mexican restaurant in Washington, D.C., at the height of the Trump administration’s campaign of family separation. It also raises similar questions on the horrors of rudeness, which have cropped up with exhausting regularity on this side of the Atlantic since 2016, when the archetypal young man known as the Bernard brother first logged on to Twitter.
The most recent twist in this endless debate came last week, when Elizabeth Warren complained of “organized nastiness” among Sanders’s supporters on The Rachel Maddow Show, in her first interview after dropping out of the primary contest. She went on to say that campaigns “are responsible for the people who claim to be our supporters.” This is, if not flatly untrue, an utterly unworkable premise from which to conduct a modern campaign. The Sanders campaign, after all, cannot possibly seek out and privately manage the behavior of every single person who claims to be a Sanders fan. It’s harder still to set the boundary of this centralized thought-policing: Was it “organized nastiness” when hundreds of Sanders supporters replied to Warren’s tweets with snake emojis? You certainly would be within your rights to argue that it was distasteful, or even counterproductive. In that case, it’s better to argue that Sanders was also a victim of this massive swelling of online vitriol, not that he should be held accountable for it. But what kind of “nastiness” are we talking about? What crosses the line so badly that it’s worth a campaign’s time to police?
There is an important distinction to be made between people who are merely rude online and people who engage in actual harassment and threats.
Continue to article: https://newrepublic.com/article/156856/defense-rude-politics
