Abnormal people–which is to say, the millions of highly politically vocal, mostly ignorant Americans (plus bots) who are dwarfed by the tens of millions of Americans who hold largely milquetoast views and prefer their government to have a largely vanilla flavor–may not agree on much these days. (Substantively, that is. Procedurally, they are often peas in a pod.) But they surely agree on one thing: Donald Trump and Joe Biden are dead men.
I mean, not today nor, probably, tomorrow. But both of them are embarrassingly old (given the offices they hold or held until recently, which both were too old honorably to seek), and both of them are mortal. They will surely die. In the scheme of things, they will die pretty soon. Pushing up daisies, croaking, meeting one’s maker, passing on, kicking the bucket, taking a dirt nap–call it what you will. It’s on the agenda for all of us. May they both live long lives! (I ask my employer to take particular note of that phrase! “Alabama Professor Wishes President a Long Life” should be your takeaway from this post. No need to read further, really.) Even so, it’s on the agenda for both of them sooner than most. Ye know neither the day nor the hour, to be sure. But ye can at least take a gander at ye actuarial tables.
Maybe we should prepare.
What with politics, culture, and civilization having been replaced by social media, the endless grift, a stew of rage and cowardice, and a love and fear of the mob that has reduced our political leadership to a Yale JD who likes to say “I don’t give a shit” squaring off against a Houston JD who likes to say “fuck off,” one can assume that the Trumpian and Bidenian demises, if they happen before boring old normalcy has returned, will touch off flights of idolatry and celebration. And one can assume that there will be lots of baying for heads. Not because most of the people doing the baying will care half as much as they pretend–hell, the vice president has already compassed the death of the king–but for strategic reasons, out of tit-for-tat, and because it’s always safer and more profitable to be leading the mob than to find oneself under its feet.
Perhaps the thing to do is to convene a summit meeting, so we can agree on the post-circulatory terms of engagement. Put together a room full of “influencers,” elected officials, and other members of the opportunist classes; university presidents, chief executives, and other representatives of our leading propitiatory institutions; and, for good measure and for their relevant experience, perhaps a couple of kindergarten teachers to mediate. They should not try to decide what you ought to say. After all, if you are following rules on civility imposed by elected officials or, indeed, anyone else, then not only are you doing civility wrong, but you are living under conditions in which something other than civility is called for. But they could agree on what you are allowed to say.
More specifically, they could provide some guidelines–with examples!–on what you can get away with saying: what you can say without fear of dismissal or undue obloquy. Ideally–especially given the dynamic between the two, in which excessive praise provokes excessive criticism and vice versa–they might also offer some guidelines about what level of panegyrics will be deemed sufficient and what will constitute undue, or at least unnecessary, praise.
It seems to me such a treaty would be valuable for both things. Most people would like some sense of what they can say without losing their jobs, especially when the terms of acceptable speech and the definition of “private” or “public” spaces are subject to sudden and dizzying change. Above all, they would like to be able to prepare in advance. Speech of that nature tends to be casual rather than carefully scripted, and it would be better to know what is within the acceptable scope than to have to resort to either cowed silence or fearful conformity. Likewise, institutional leaders would like some stability and predictability, so that they have a sense of which demands can be acknowledged and ignored and which ones must be met with fierce, principled capitulation. And elected leaders, who ride the wave of the performative like surfers at Cortes Bank, would prize just as much a sense of how far they are obliged to go by way of eulogizing. Doubtless Anna Paulina Luna already has a bill ready for the hopper specifying the size in cubits of the golden calf and the number of GS-10s who must be buried alive in the memorial pyramid, but most of them would like to preserve their illusion of dignity and self-respect.
To be sure, the terms of the treaty would be violated almost immediately. (Like most treaties.) The mob is fickle and there is nothing certain in this world. But–also like most treaties–it would establish a useful set of baselines. After all, a functioning society depends upon norms–norms of conduct, norms of public vs. private (which allow us to distinguish spaces allowing for casual, careless speech from spaces in which speech is more rehearsed, constrained, and surveilled), and norms governing enforcement (which deter power from exerting itself simply because it wants to and can–such as the norm against ordering your Attorney General to hurry up already with the vengeance). And a society in which one either celebrates the rejection of norms in favor of “disruption,” “restoration,” “revolution,” or some other catchphrase, or changes those norms with rapidity and zero tolerance for error, is not a functioning society.
It is precisely within that space that the normal citizen can joke, not deadly-seriously or performatively but casually, about Biden or Trump’s death, unkindly but not especially uncommonly; that he can, perhaps, joke at all; that he can be counted as himself rather than as a jointly and severally liable member of an institution and its public relations department; that he can use the label that was acceptable last year but not last month, and about which 90 percent of those whom it describes are indifferent; that he can view advice about listing preferred pronouns in his signature block without any particular hostility but also with no particular interest in following suit. It creates the terms, finally, under which he can be casually, informally, crudely, often wrongly or unwisely, free and independent. Its boundaries are not measured by right vs. wrong or civil vs. uncivil, but by room for difference and, perhaps more importantly, room for error. One may reject or embrace the term “cancel culture” or its total synonym “consequence culture” if one wishes. But the fact remains that a functioning and free society actually demands a fairly substantial consequence-free zone for action–and for error. So those baselines provided by the treaty would help. I mean, they are going to die. Why not plan ahead?
Alternatively, we could simply agree that civility is better on the whole than incivility but treat such matters as being mostly no one else’s business, and certainly not the government’s. I think the pre-mortem treaty is the more modest and likely proposal, however.