Our constitution does not demand that our speech be civil. The constitution protects uncivil speech – hate speech, even. But it does so not because our democracy approves of such speech, but because we believe that truth will expose lies and the evil of government censorship is greater than the perils posed by untoward speakers.
But what happens when the source of uncivil speech is not some fringe hate group, but the occupant of the Oval Office? And what happens when the lies target the very organs designed to ferret them out? We have never faced such questions before. Which explains why, on the 241st anniversary of our independence, American democracy finds itself in peril.
We have grown accustomed to the president’s lies, as recently inventoried in the New York Times. Yet such a simple enumeration fails to get at the danger. Consider Trump’s workhorse – that the mainstream media trucks in “fake news”.
If Trump were simply implying, without substantiation or proof, that the media routinely engages in unreliable reporting, this would be bad enough. But that is not the claim. Rather, it is that CNN, to take one favorite target, willfully fabricates false news to advance a partisan agenda.
The irony is rich, as the lie shamelessly attributes to CNN the very behavior that Trump himself is guilty of. Having maligned CNN as the enemy and not the vanguard of truth, the president minces no words about how enemies are to be treated. They are to be body-slammed to the floor and punched in the face.
Mr Trump’s lies can better be understood as instances of libel – they state falsehoods that malign their targets. As a sitting president, Mr Trump is, of course, immune from suit (just as he might be immune from indictment for having obstructed justice). But this does not change the libelous character of his speech.
What makes this libel so toxic is not the injury it does to the reputation of the New York Times or CNN, though certainly it may serve to discredit these organizations in the eyes of some segments of the public; it is the injury the comments do to our democracy.
But the full danger of Trump’s uncivil speech becomes clear only when viewed through the filter of his defamation of our electoral process. The 2016 presidential election revealed genuine threats to the integrity of our voting system, and we have precise, reliable knowledge about their source.
But in his alarming testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee, the former FBI director James Comey revealed that while the president repeatedly asked whether the FBI had targeted him personally, he failed to express the slightest interest in the deeper issue – Russia’s criminal tampering with our electoral process.
Instead, on his third day in office, Trump spread one of his most venomous lies: “Between three million and five million illegal votes caused me to lose the popular vote.” The president proceeded to bootstrap a bald lie into an alternative reality, establishing an “independent” commission to look into the nonexistent problem of voter fraud. Most recently, he has used the refusal of states to participate in this sham as evidence that they have something to hide – turning lies into calumny.
Civility: we seek to instill it in our children and we expect it from even our most casual acquaintances. While a democracy can afford to tolerate some uncivil speech, it cannot withstand the sweeping cultivation of contempt directed against the institutions designed to keep government honest and elections safe.
This should be obvious to all public servants. And yet the present occupant of the White House has become the strident mouthpiece of uncivil speech that libels these very institutions.