What we get wrong about civility — on both sides

Civility gets a bad rap these days.

One need look no further than our head of state for confirmation, but it could be argued that Donald Trump is no more capable of civility than he is of humility, justice, good faith, wise counsel or any other virtue we’d wish our leaders to have. The rest of us — we can be better.

What disconcerts is that some of the finer minds and political talents of the younger generations in particular have formed a distorted impression about what it means to engage in a civil manner.

People are rejecting the notion of civility. They wrongly believe that a civil person is docile and genteel to a point of ineffectiveness.

However, its root is the Latin “civilitas,” which denotes that which pertains to citizenship, politics and government. Civility ought to describe the attitudes and comportment that promote our best public values, the constructive aims we hold dear.

Unfortunately, we’re seeing more and more behavior that accomplishes the opposite.

Maryland’s former governor Martin O’Malley provided a classic example on Thanksgiving eve. He reportedly launched a tirade at Ken Cuccinelli, acting deputy secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, when the two ran into each other in a Washington pub.

A few days prior, First Lady Melania Trump was jeered and booed by teenagers in Baltimore. The students were reportedly reacting to the president’s rude and unprovoked slandering of their city as “a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess” where “no human being” would want to live.

Their beef is with the president, not the first lady. It would have been far more productive if they’d held signs asking her to press her husband to “be best.”

Civility requires that we avoid precisely the behaviors that Trump indulges: name-calling, slurs and childish derision. However, it doesn’t require us to suppress our emotions, even anger.

College campuses, in particular, have become the scenes of the national civility crisis. An all-too-typical example is the appearance of conservative writer Ann Coulter at the University of California, Berkeley, in late November.

Coulter’s the author of “Adios America! The Left’s Plan to Turn our Country into a Third World Hellhole.” Anyone who seriously wanted to have a productive conversation about immigration would never invite Coulter as the speaker. She’s a provocateur, not an honest scholar or thinker of any discernible public spirit.

And, as expected, more than 2,000 people protested, and there were a handful of arrests. Luckily there was no violence. To the university chancellor’s credit, Berkeley had undergone a yearlong dialogue on free speech, including seminars on respectful dialogue, itself a response to campus disturbances over right-wing speakers in 2017.

In his “Letter From a Birmingham Jail,” Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. warned of the pitfalls of decorum, pointedly cautioning against “the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.”

Rather, the point is to reprove those who champion error and injustice unsparingly — with words — in reasoned debate.