National Post (National Edition)
To be angry is one thing. To send out obscenities and threats is depraved.
Since Alberta MLA Sandra Jansen crossed the floor from the Progressive Conservatives to the New Democratic Party, she has received a flood of obscene abuse and some apparently credible death threats. It’s hideous and we all have to do what we can to make it stop.
I understand some people’s annoyance at her switching parties, especially following a failed campaign for the leadership of the party she just left. While quite a few members of “conservative” parties in Canada are socialists, and it would clarify our political choices if they openly flew the red flag, to be elected as a Tory with all the usual anti-socialist rhetoric and then go “ha ha fooled you” might understandably upset people. But to be angry is one thing; to send out obscenities and threats is depraved.
In the modern world, such lack of civility is all too common. I have things to say about the sources and possible solutions, including that it is by no means all coming from the right. But whatever the cause, the cure is neither to engage in it ourselves, nor to excuse it in those we consider like-minded lest it should prove all too true.
At this point it is impossible not to mention Donald Trump. A lot of people rationalize, or even embrace, his obnoxious style because they feel vindicated after decades of being the target of highly uncivil rhetoric, often salted with smugness. But there’s no excuse for it, and to those people, including personal friends, I say surely you are better than that. Ditto those who are not now speaking out against the obscenities hurled at Jansen.
Jansen at one point accused Jason Kenney of bringing “Trumpstyle politics” to Alberta, thus arguably herself contributing to the problem of wanton incivility. But there is rudeness and then there’s menacing, obscene rudeness. And even if we are subject to abuse we must not take it as an occasion to become abusive ourselves, or to countenance abuse.
Like most conservatives, I feel that there has been a dangerous loss of civility in recent decades. The sort of messages Jansen is receiving used to be the province of men in shabby raincoats and cranks using capital letters, strings of exclamation marks and halfred half-black typewriter ribbons. Nowadays everybody’s letting it all hang out and far too much of it is dragging in the dirt. It’s not just unpleasant, it’s dangerous.
Partly the Internet seems to have vindicated Marshall McLuhan by turning people’s darker impulses loose, even in online discussions of thoroughly innocuous subjects. But much of it has happened not through technology or by accident but as part of a project of human liberation from repressive social structures.
Rather than turn hypocritically polemical at this juncture, let me grant instead that there have been important gains from this project, since the 1960s, in removing social conventions that oppressed non-whites, women and sexual minorities. But I ask in return that others resist seizing on Jansen’s experience to say, “Aha, told you so, conservatives are sexist pigs promoting a rape culture,” or acting in ways that justify that claim.
I have as little use for political correctness as anyone. But I believe it exists for a reason, namely that lifting so many restraints on the darker side of human nature has left women exposed to male sexual predation in ways that rightly make them very uncomfortable, and should bother men too. PC may be the wrong answer to that problem. But at least it is an answer, unlike denying or excusing obnoxious male conduct from anyone from Bill Clinton to Trump to Jansen’s abusers.
Or from Jansen’s defenders. One Tory critic of Jansen’s treatment spoke publicly about his party treating “women in politics like crap.” So shall we all start cussing like sailors? Or should we exercise restraint, especially with women and children present, and not burst into scatological rage if told this concept is Victorian repression? Because at least it’s repression of something we should all regard as hideously ugly when not repressed. And a man should be a gentleman for its own sake and even in the face of provocation.
There’s a lot wrong with the modern world. And some of the rage and vituperation is a response to infuriating double standards enforced arrogantly. But since when is the correct response to someone else doing something wrong to show how fast you can sink even lower?
Can we all agree that there’s something wrong with a world where so many people are not embarrassed and repulsed by the filth being spewed at Sandra Jansen? And even if we don’t all immediately agree on what it is that’s wrong, can’t we all refuse to have anything to do with it?
EVERYONE SHOULD BE REPULSED BY THE FILTH BEING SPEWED AT SANDRA JANSEN.