Following up on a nice piece on "rules for civility" by the philosopher Amy Olberding of a few weeks ago, here is a little essay by two other scholars distinguishing between two different senses, or perhaps kinds, of civility.  First they define everyday, ordinary civility:

the requirement that disputants adopt a stance towards one another that minimizes the escalation of hostility. The thought is that disagreement tends to be most productive when enacted in cooler temperatures.

and then they differentiate that from political civility in a democratic culture:

political civility cannot require citizens to adopt a calm, reserved, concessive, and cooperative posture. Whatever the duty of civility is for democratic citizens, it must allow for real disagreement. Thus, calls for civility in politics that insist upon only serene and coolly detached interaction are misguided. In fact, in the political context, ordinary civility often serves to advantage the status quo by unduly burdening the expression of new and unfamiliar ideas. Thus, political civility must be different from ordinary civility.

The duty of [political] civility, as we see it, is fundamentally the duty to actually address one’s interlocutors in political argument – to attend to what they actually say, to respond to their actual questions and objections, to offer criticisms of their views that one sincerely expects them to recognize the force of, and so on. Understood in this way, political civility is consistent with certain modes of ordinary incivility: heated tones, defiant language, various forms of refusal and resistance, and a good deal of negative affect. Again, these are what one should expect when citizens, in full acknowledgement of their political equality, engage over important matters.

This is interesting.  Precisely because political dispute matters, we have to allow for a greater scope of disagreement, and our values come into play there, and our values are not just cognitive features of our selves but are also rooted in our affective apprehension of and orientation in the world, and those apprehensions of and orientations in the world are invariably different; because of that, we will inevitably come up against ways in which our differences are not (at least immediately) reconcilable, and that is (in several senses) maddening.  Being "civil" in this context is in some ways the opposite of "civil" in the sense of "politeness;" it means something more like being authentic and honest.

You know what this reminds me of?  Nothing so much as frank discussion between partners in a marriage.  Dispute and disagreement are inevitable, because people are different--even people who have decided, and still affirm the decision, to braid their lives together into one over the course of the lifespan.  Indeed it is a truism, or maybe a cliché, that good argument is the key to a healthy marriage.  ("Healthy" does not mean, of course, uncomplicatedly and relentlessly happy.)  

Then again, there's a big difference.  Argument in marriage is normally shielded from public exposure by the privacy we acknowledge people to possess, and we work to respect that privacy; we all recognize that disagreement is inevitable, but it is normally only close friends who get to be privy to a serious disagreement between spouses.  In the case of political or public dispute, that decorous veil of privacy is not present, may not even be allowed, and that may make the participants more aware of other eyes, more aware of their exposure, and more anxious; and thus it will likely make their participation in the argument more fraught.

The authors of the piece also make this important point about argument today:

A familiar kind of pseudo-interaction with opponents now prevails in democracy: one pantomimes argument with an interlocutor while in fact using him or her only as a prop in a performance addressed to sympathetic members of an onlooking audience and designed to score points with them. We have elsewhere called these tactics dialectical fallacies. These are ways of seeming to address one’s critics while in fact only preaching to one’s own choir.

We all see this, all the time, in our public culture.  Today's example comes from a colleague of mine at the University of Virginia, a law professor here (I don't believe I've ever met him) named Saikrishna Prakash.  He has written a piece in The Hill arguing for a kind of symmetry between the Clinton impeachment and the Trump impeachment inquiry.  (I just found it in the UVA Today daily email, which trumpets our accomplishments, hooray.)  I don't think the parallels he tries to construct stand much scrutiny.  For instance, he claims 

"a Democratic administration investigated the Trump campaign…A Democratic administration used the considerable resources of the federal government to investigate a candidate based on flimsy evidence and a fake dossier. Apparently, no one thought the Christopher Steele dossier had any substance or was chock full of facts. Nonetheless, it was used to secure judicial approval to spy on an American citizen."

By all this I think he means the FBI and CIA investigation of illegal contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia.  I think--maybe I'm wrong?--this investigation was not inaugurated nor was it guided by President Obama, nor by his political operatives, but by intelligence and law enforcement specialists.  That would be a starter.  One inquiry began and was conducted by professionals; the other seems to have been driven by the President.  

The parallel the author tries to draw here is, in my understanding of the cases, not based in evidence.  In the common argot today--interestingly drawn from a movie about a marriage--this kind of assertion of an alternative reality in lieu of what is actually the case is what is known as  "gaslighting."  Prakash should know this.  Probably he does; probably he's using all his legal skills to construct a false equivalency.  I suspect he's not trying to convince anyone on "the other side" of anything here. 

If I am right about all that, what has gone wrong?  Part of the problem is that, like so many people in public culture today, Prakash trained as a lawyer, and in our system of justice, legal dispute is not, nor should it be, a model of democratic deliberation.  Their culture of argument is adversarial at its heart.  As a system of law, that seems to work pretty well for us.  As a model of public culture, it has some significant limitations to which we ought to pay attention.  Anyone who has argued with a law professor knows that understanding is not centrally a virtue of debate for them; they want, above all, to win. (Now now, don't get upset, my law professor friends: I'm not saying that all law professors do this and only this, and in fact none of them talk this way all of the time; but the basic muscle groups they develop in argument are not the muscle groups other intellectuals are trained in, in their different cultures of inquiry.)  

I wonder about the extent to which legal reasoning, or those intensively trained in legal reasoning, provide a good model for the kind of genuine public discourse, and political civility, we need.