In March 2023, a mass shooting occurred at Nashville’s Covenant School. To protest the subsequent lack of action on gun control, Democratic state legislators Justin Jones, Justin J. Pearson, and Gloria Johnson chanted “No action, no peace” on the floor of the Tennessee House of Representatives. In response, their Republican colleagues issued a set of resolutions accusing the trio of “disorderly and disruptive conduct.” The House subsequently voted to expel Jones and Pearson, who are Black; Johnson, who is white, was allowed to maintain her position. Here, ideals of decorum and politeness—of civility—were used to silence the protests of Black Americans.
The politeness-driven civility used to drive Jones and Pearson from the legislature has a long history, dating at least to before the US Civil War. Then, slavery’s practitioners, advocates, and apologists would regularly invoke manners in their attempts to rebut the claims of antislavery activists. In turn, abolitionists like Frederick Douglass condemned those weaponizations of politeness. Slaveholders are “models of taste,” Douglass scathingly observes in his 1857 speech “West India Emancipation.” When debating questions of paramount importance like slavery and freedom, he bitterly continues, “With them, propriety is everything; honesty nothing.”
From the years before the Civil War up to today, then, civility advocates have insisted on politeness. But, as Douglass shows, that distracts from urgent problems that “honesty” would demand addressing directly. In fact, as the episode from the Tennessee state house reveals (and as Douglass saw clearly), invocations of civility can actually oppose equity and social change.
But even the dangerous discourse of civility decried by Douglass—and weaponized against Jones and Pearson—is presently undergoing a transformation, and not for the better. Demands for mannerliness and propriety are increasingly being replaced by demands that those in conflict just tolerate their disagreements. The civility of politeness, in other words, is being supplanted by what I term an “agree-to-disagree civility.” This emergent civility, I argue, legitimizes reactionary stances and valorizes the status quo.
Such agree-to-disagree civility is on clear display in the seemingly cordial statement issued by all the US Presidential Foundations and Centers in anticipation of the acrimony of the recent election cycle. The leaders of the Obama Foundation, the George W. Bush Presidential Center, and 11 other similar organizations admit that they hold “a wide range of views across a breadth of issues.” Still, they insist that “these views can exist peaceably side by side.” The statement goes on to affirm that “debate and disagreement are central features in a healthy democracy,” and that “civility and respect in political discourse, whether in an election year or otherwise, are essential.” One might be moved, perhaps, to see politicians of different parties standing together against the violent bigotry of the Trump campaign. But look closer. To be sure, the civility of this statement is more productive than repressive, more interested in prompting speech than foreclosing it. Yet while the centers valorize the clash of countervailing perspectives, they’re also conspicuously silent regarding how such disagreements might be resolved. Basically, the Centers’ statement suggests, we should all just agree to disagree.
It’s easy to see the appeal of this agree-to-disagree civility, because the tolerance it calls for is often taken as a transcendentally good ideal. As the political theorist Wendy Brown reminds us, though, there’s reason to look upon tolerance talk with a more ambivalent eye. For Brown, toleration is less a political ideal than a “practice of governmentality,” a body of commentary and rhetoric that sets the terms for political discussions, and not always in salutary ways. “There are,” she notes, “mobilizations of tolerance that do not simply alleviate but rather circulate racism, homophobia, and ethnic hatreds.”
Agree-to-disagree civility, I argue, circulates and sustains such malign paradigms by neutralizing critique and forestalling social change. This civility robs us of our ability to say “x is wrong”: Its principles make racism, homophobia, misogyny, and the like perspectives to be respected, not paradigms to be defeated. Endlessly tolerating divergent outlooks on social inequities is categorically different than working to discern and pursue the most ethical and efficacious modes of redress. In short, this civility allows nothing to happen.
As I’ll explain, agree-to-disagree civility is promoted by a wide range of civic organizations beyond the Presidential Centers, and it is expressed in two recent books: Robert Danisch and William Keith’s Radically Civil: Saving Our Democracy One Conversation at a Time, and Alexandra Hudson’s The Soul of Civility: Timeless Principles to Heal Our Country and Ourselves. But while agree-to-disagree civility is increasingly prominent, it’s not entirely new; it was likewise at work in Douglass’s time, alongside the civility of politeness, and an object of analysis in his oratory, which David Blight has recently collected in Speeches & Writings. In these speeches, Douglass emerges as an especially savvy theorist of civility’s limits—and its alternatives.
In order to challenge this new form of civility (“agree to disagree”) we need to understand what distinguishes it from its predecessor (the civility of “politeness”). The history of such politeness civility is recounted in Alex Zamalin’s Against Civility: The Hidden Racism in Our Obsession with Civility. “The idea of civility,” Zamalin demonstrates, “has been a tool for silencing dissent, repressing political participation, enforcing economic inequality, and justifying violence upon people of color.” But demands for politeness, manners, and adherence to existing norms and values have long been challenged by “civic radicals,” activist intellectuals like Douglass who dispense with civility in the pursuit of justice. That civic radicalism is particularly necessary, Zamalin reminds us, because white Americans have consistently made orderliness and decorum prerequisites for political participation in ways that stifle the voices of nonwhite people. His argument is very well illustrated by the legislative expulsion of Jones and Pearson.
But if the politeness civility that Zamalin analyzes continues to play a role in society, a different and particularly insidious form of civility is becoming increasingly prominent in American culture and politics. Insightful as Zamalin’s book is, it doesn’t quite register that civility discourse is currently changing, and that in particular, civility advocates are turning from demanding politeness to calling for toleration and for agreeing to disagree.
One reason agree-to-disagree civility is on the rise is that over the last decade many organizations dedicated to promoting versions of it have appeared. These civility centers are overseen variously by academics (at, for example, Duke, Virginia Tech, and Oakland University, where I teach), by community leaders (as in The Oshkosh Civility Project), by journalists (as at The Great Lakes Civility Project), and by combinations thereof (like in the Ohio Civility Project). They share a concern with respecting difference and tolerating disagreement. One center indeed distills this civility’s ethos in its aspiration to teach people to “Agree to disagree.”
Perhaps the most prominent of these groups is Braver Angels, which draws admiring discussions in both Danisch and Keith’s Radically Civil and Hudson’s The Soul of Civility. Founded in 2016 in response to the political partisanship and animosity occasioned by the campaign and election of Donald Trump, Braver Angels aims “not to change people’s views of issues, but to change their views of each other.” They pursue that end through programming like workshops, debates, and podcasts that encourage “understand[ing] the other side’s point of view, even if we do not agree with it.” This emphasis on understanding over persuasion is applauded by Danisch and Keith, as well as Hudson, who is quite effusive in her praise. She lauds Braver Angels’ promotion of “viewpoint diversity” and holds that “civic associations such as Braver Angels are the lifeblood of American society.”
This admiration is—importantly—mutual, for Braver Angels has on multiple occasions featured Hudson as a speaker, and its website offers links to her essays as well as an admiring review of her book. One sees here a symbiotic relation between civility organizations and civility literature. Hudson’s praise makes her readers more likely to buy memberships in Braver Angels, and the organization’s support makes its members more likely to buy her book. This mutually beneficial relationship suggests, if not a fully fledged civility-industrial complex, at least a substantively integrated civility media ecosystem.
In this media ecosystem, the problem is not impoliteness, as it was for earlier civility advocates. Both Radically Civil and The Soul of Civility critique the weaponized impositions of politeness that were also the primary target of Zamalin, and before him, Douglass. Rather, the central problem advocates of agree-to-disagree civility set out to solve is something like acrimony—people just not getting along, especially regarding politics.
Danisch and Keith are worried about partisan polarization, and they draw on communications studies to develop an “antidote,” their notion of “radical civility”: “engaging respectfully with others in ways that can create meaningful connections across difference.” For Hudson, the issue is an inescapable human tendency toward “self-love” that “divides us,” often politically. She finds a remedy affirmed across a range of literary and historical texts: civility, which she understands as a regard for the dignity and value of others and sees as yielding the “cultural toleration of diverse views.”
If the problem is indeed people not getting along, then “agreeing to disagree” makes sense. But is that really America’s problem? Describing our difficulties in primly nonpartisan terms like polarization and selfishness obscures how the Trump-era Right has played an outsize role in generating political conflict, through, for instance, legislative obstruction, election denialism, and insurrection.
Agree-to-disagree civility suffers from a certain content agnosticism; it tends to ask for the toleration of disagreement without considering what the disagreement is about, or the relative merits of the arguments. As Danisch and Keith put it, “A commitment to civility teaches us that rightness and wrongness are less important than how we treat others.” Yet this relative indifference to the substance of debates carries liabilities. For instance, Braver Angels offers the content-agnostic assertion that in their programs, “neither side is teaching the other or giving feedback on how to think or say things differently.”
But is it right, say, to ask a Black American not to be “giving feedback” on how a white supremacist should think differently? Agreeing to disagree, in such a case, would require tolerating the intolerable. Such invocations of agree-to-disagree civility beg the question of when to set aside toleration and embrace persuasion, protest, and praxis.
Radically Civil and The Soul of Civility each briefly grapple with that question, in ways that suggest how agreeing to disagree conflicts with social change. Danisch and Keith acknowledge that persuasion can have a role in disagreement, but their radical civility entails far more toleration and waiting than persuasion and action. Especially in “hard cases” involving racism and misogyny, they explain, it’s best to focus on relationship building in an “outcome-indifferent way,” even though doing so is to “take a risk” that will pay off slowly, if at all. Hudson’s approach might seem more open to setting aside toleration for protest; her book features a chapter on “Civil Disobedience,” which focuses on abolitionism, Gandhian satyagraha, and US civil rights struggles and argues that inequality and discrimination demand protest. But Hudson is more interested in spelling out a “litmus test” for acceptable forms of protest than in explaining what should prompt a move from toleration to praxis in the first place. The chapter ends up most concerned with containing, not fostering change-producing protests—making sure they’re sufficiently civil and respectful.
To underscore her point, Hudson invokes Frederick Douglass, asserting that if he and other abolitionists “could be civil while criticizing slaveholders—people who owned other persons—we can be civil in disagreements in our modern political realm.” This is not a particularly convincing characterization of Douglass, whose 1845 autobiography recounts physically fighting the slaveholder Edward Covey and who in an 1848 editorial called on abolitionists to speak “words of burning truth.” But if Douglass was happy to cast aside civil decorum, civility was nonetheless often on his mind, as an object of critical analysis. His speeches offer a still-timely interrogation of agree-to-disagree civility.
Agree-to-disagree civility circulates and sustains malign paradigms by neutralizing critique and forestalling social change.
In the decades following the Civil War, there arose a version of agree-to-disagree civility similar to that promulgated today by the bipartisan coalition of Presidential Centers and organizations like Braver Angels. Then, many white Americans prioritized national reconciliation and sought to accommodate the divergent attitudes toward slavery that animated the conflict. Douglass responded in an 1878 speech given in New York City reflecting on the Civil War’s legacy. He warns, “We must not be asked to put no difference between those who fought for the Union and those who fought against it.” He insists—in a line that gives the speech its title in the Blight collection—“There was a right side and a wrong side in the late war.”
For Douglass, agreeing to disagree was untenable because such civility would legitimate the ideas of those partisans of the South who wanted to continue the Confederate project by other means. For us, Douglass’s insistence on moral and intellectual clarity regarding slavery is a reminder that some issues require no ongoing debate. It should be no more possible to agree to disagree about, say, the need to fight climate change or the importance of sexual and racial equality than about slavery.
In Douglass’s oratory, though, we find not just critiques of various forms of civility but also a deeper analysis of the ideal of an insistently tolerant political culture. Douglass recognizes that an investment in civility amounts to what we’d now call, following the cultural critic Lauren Berlant, a case of cruel optimism.
“A relationship of cruel optimism exists,” Berlant writes, “when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing.” Their touchstone example is the fantasy of the good life: of upward mobility, political fairness, and domestic fulfillment, all increasingly hard to come by in recent decades. Such a fantasy is cruelly optimistic, for Berlant, because it is a yearning for a future unlikely to arrive, and because an overriding focus on such a future prevents people from imagining other ways to thrive.
Douglass anticipates some of Berlant’s thinking about this self-defeating kind of desire. He suggests that the civility many hold up as a remedy to a contentious public sphere is in fact an obstacle to an improved state of affairs. Douglass makes this point in the “West India Emancipation” speech, when he excoriates not affability-seeking slaveholders but rather a cohort of ostensible allies of abolitionism, who see civility as necessary to the pursuit of freedom. “Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation,” he explains, “are men who want crops without plowing up the ground.”
Douglass here likens the civility advocate wary of “agitation” to a farmer who, for some reason, is unwilling to plow his field. Either way, the wariness of agitation calls to mind the devotee of political politeness as much as the advocate of agreeing to disagree. The suggestion is that their desire to suppress agitation stands as an obstacle to the flourishing of the freedom they profess to desire, much as a farmer’s desire to not plow a field would prevent a bountiful harvest. In this way, Douglass’s unusual comparison indicates how proponents of civility are stuck in a relation of cruel optimism.
Seeing civility as a form of cruel optimism allows us to better grasp its appeal. Some speakers invoke the idea of civility cynically, solely to silence opponents or to make space for otherwise untenable positions. But others might well be drawn to notions of civil discourse out of a sincere, if misguided, belief that it offers a path to a better future. In a contentious world, it can feel good to stand for civility.
Therefore, any effort to displace civility as an ideal needs to offer a vision of change that is no less affectively satisfying. Fortunately, by reading across Douglass’s oratory, we can find an alternative to civility that does so.
One might expect Douglass’s critical analysis of civility to yield a defense of incivility, as it has for some contemporary writers. But, as the philosopher Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò has argued, there are good reasons we should not simply embrace incivility as a counterideal. He observes that incivility might not be politically effective and that, moreover, “opposing civility because elites have abused it betrays the sort of politics that cannot find any orientation to the world (or even to itself) except in relation to today’s oppressor of choice.” These comments show how embracing incivility ends up conceding too much to the advocates of civility: Such a focus keeps attention on the form of discussion rather than its context, content, and outcomes.
Douglass flips the script, letting the topic, occasion, and goal of a speech determine his mode of address. Throughout his vast body of speeches, his savvy oratorical adaptability is unmistakable. His was a practice of rhetorical pragmatism: the objects were the freedom and equality of racial justice, and he would adopt whatever manner of speaking, civil or uncivil, would most likely persuade his audience to pursue those ends. It’s this orientation that emotionally energizes Douglass, and his audience, in ways that lend his rhetorical pragmatism enough affective appeal to be a viable and preferable alternative to cruelly optimistic civilities.
Douglass invites us to feel passionate about a possible-but-not-assured future of freedom and equality, not the means of getting there. There is an optimism at the heart of his rhetorical pragmatism, but it’s unlikely to turn cruel—to calcify into an obstacle—because Douglass’s practice is so variable, constantly adjusting to most effectively pursue flourishing.
When necessary, Douglass rejected civility, like in his 1852 address “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” He gave that speech at a meeting of the Rochester Ladies Anti-Slavery Society, but, as Blight explains, he saw himself as also addressing a broader national audience, which would take in his speech later, in print. Douglass aimed to use the occasion of a former slave reflecting on the nation’s anniversary to underscore the prevailing gap between American ideals of freedom and the realities of slavery and to snap his audience out of its complacent hypocrisy.
To achieve that end, he eschewed civil norms. “At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed,” he declared. “O! had I the ability, and could reach the nation’s ear, I would, today, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke.” Such fiery rhetoric is purposeful, Douglass explains, for only through such language can “the feeling of the nation […] be quickened” in a way that would silence slavery’s apologists, bring people to the antislavery cause, and lead the cause’s partisans to intensify their activism.
But Douglass could strike a civil tone if the situation required it. When in 1855 he addressed fellow abolitionists on “The Anti-Slavery Movement,” he announced, “I wish to speak of that movement, to-night, more as the calm observer, than as the ardent and personally interested advocate.” This approach reflected his immediate goals. At a moment when there were many “sects and parties” within abolitionism, Douglass wanted to persuade his audience to favor the Liberty Party, which insisted on “no slavery for man under the whole heavens,” over other, less radical organizations, which he saw as merely trying to contain slavery. Faced with the task of persuading the already engaged, he opted for a measured style of address.
This rhetorical pragmatism offers a thoroughgoing rejection of civility discourse. For advocates of civility, attaining civil speech—polite talk, agreeing to disagree—is an end in itself. By contrast, Douglass refuses such civility for civility’s sake. His objective is not the achievement of some mode of address; his goal is justice.
Douglass embodies the sort of “constructive political culture” Táíwò has recently called for. Táíwò holds that such a culture, focused “on outcome over process,” will mount the most effective challenge to racism, capitalism, and global inequality. Whereas civility would end social change, social change is the end toward which Douglass would push us. 