It’s hard to hate someone when they’re right in front of you, being nice. I’ve been involved in politics close to four years now, and that means I’ve gotten to meet elected officials face to face. No one famous, but a lot of state and local people. On two separate occasions, I’ve been face to face with people who’s politics I found morally repugnant. Without going into much details, these were people who had made decisions that had ruined people’s lives, and likely indirectly caused the deaths of innocent people. I’d met the victims, I’d heard their stories, and I knew enough to trace their misfortunes back to the source: elected officials who blatantly threw poor people under the bus in order to satisfy those who fund their campaigns.
And yet, I was polite to both of these men when I met them. There’s a certain type of etiquette that’s drilled into you growing up, especially if you’re raised as a girl. But furthermore, I was unnerved by how genuinely nice these people seemed when they were speaking to me. One of them even paid me a compliment. It felt almost treasonous later, when I harshly criticized both of them on Facebook. Because they seemed like nice people.
It’s my experience that it’s easier to get a candidate to go on the attack in an ad, or on social media, than in an in-person forum or debate when their opponent is right there in the room with them. You just shook hands with this person, maybe you made small talk about the weather or the size of the crowd, maybe their kids or their parents are there. It feels wrong then, to call them corrupt to their face, to bring up the bribes they’ve blatantly taken, to bring up all the people who lost their homes, to bring up the victims of police brutality who they’re preventing from getting justice. There’s a little voice inside of you, telling you to be nice.
And that’s exactly what these people count on to keep them around. The thin veneer of politeness, of niceness, that keeps their critics from going for the jugular. I can’t tell you how many times a Democratic candidate has told me they like their opponent. That he’s a nice man who they just happen to disagree with politically. Do the people he bombed think he’s nice? Do the people he thinks deserve to die if they can’t afford healthcare? What about the transgender people he thinks shouldn’t be allowed to use the bathroom? He may be nice, but it’s performative. He still supports terrible, harmful policies.
It works on the media too, probably better than it does on their opponents. They know the devastation caused by the policies of the people in power, and it’s their job to report that. Yet they spend time with these people, they see them at parties, they eat with them on the campaign trail. Much more time than they spend with bombing victims from Yemen or poisoned children from Flint. And time and again they’ll give some terrible person the benefit of the doubt because they know him and he seems like a nice guy. Many of them treat the people they report on like conservative cousins you still have to see on Thanksgiving rather than elected officials who’s sins they are tasked with making public.
This works across party lines, but it works even better within the parties. Democrats who come into office harshly critical of their party, whether from the right or the left, often moderate such criticisms the closer they get to the halls of power. Of course, a lot of this is self-preservation, but the fact that they’re now hanging out with these people and sharing experiences with them has to play a role. That’s one of the reasons so many establishment Democrats have been eager to reach out to new young progressives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. They’re hoping that, once she gets to know them, once she sees how nice they are, she’ll walk back some of her critiques. It’s undeniably flattering when someone important is making the effort to get to know you, even if they voted for the Iraq War.
The elites, the establishment, whatever you want to call them, these people all know each other. Many of them went to the same Ivy League schools, they often live in the same neighborhoods, their kids go to the same schools. Even in the midst of a heated campaign, when nasty allegations are flying on all sides, they still have mutual friends and common interests. And often times, candidates will insist their opponent is still a good person and blame everything on the campaign staff.
This veneer of niceness protects everyone in politics who has anything to hide. Politics is a popularity contest and the people who get the furthest are the ones who are most popular with the people who really matter. The second they think you matter, they’ll start being nice to you. It may be an act, or it may even be genuine. Our obsession with the politics of personality leads us to conflate how someone is as a person with how they are as a politician. There are plenty of politicians who may be genuinely kind, decent people, but have fallen into a dangerous ideology or deluded themselves about their motivations to the extent that they’ve done some truly terrible things. The fact of the matter is, if you think something is morally wrong no amount of niceness should change your mind about how respond to it. And when it comes to your own activism, standing up for marginalized people is always more important then being nice.
Socialist Socialite 