The Lonely Lib/Con

Jane Galt at Asymmetrical information has a new post about gay marriage.

Go read it. All of it. Seriously. I for one am committing it to memory. This is an issue to which I've been struggling to come up with an answer. Parties on both sides make good points. And while I'm inclined to say to many of the most avid partisans on both sides that they're radically mischaracterizing their opposition, so far I haven't been able to honestly say to either side that I think they're entirely wrong about the issue.

In an ideal world, of course, we'd just get government completely out of the marriage business and let pluralism reign. But we don't live in an ideal world, and there's no clear path by which we could get from our present world to that ideal one without travelling through what seems to be altogether unpleasnt dystopian territory on the way.

That being the case, we're compelled to either give government sanction to a radical redefinition of the meaning of an ancient and enduring custom...or else explicitly refuse to do so. Our prior choices prevent us from passing the buck to a level of pluralism our society doesn't currently have. And as the time now appears to be ripe, we will all shortly find ourselves having to either recognize and accept a profound and widely unpopular change in an institution that means a lot to many of us, or else tell a substantial fraction of our population that their choices are considered inferior...and American society has displayed a remarkable reluctance to the latter path in recent decades.

Andrew Sullivan is right...to the extent that committed, monogamous marriages are good for heterosexuals, they'd be good for homosexuals too. And we heterosexuals have frankly done a hell of a lot more damage to the presumptions of commitment and monogamy in marriage than the admission of homosexuals to the institution could ever be expected to do. Marriage is in dire trouble in this society, and it's not homosexuals who are to blame for that.

But the basic fact remains that anyone who doesn't understand why our current marriage customs are in place has absolutely no business whatsoever trying to eliminate them.

Francis Porretto writes about Terry Schiavo:

Let's be perfectly candid about what Michael Schiavo intends for his helpless wife: he wants her dead. His claim that she would want the same is hopelessly tainted by his pecuniary interest in her demise. He insists on killing her even though the sole legal way to get her into her coffin is to subject her to two weeks of excruciating torment.

Were a condemned serial killer to be sentenced to the same ordeal, every civil-rights and humanist group in the country would be up in arms. Nay, it would arouse every such group in the world. Such groups cannot abide the death penalty even for men convicted of the most heinous crimes. The United States would be castigated in every organ known to Man for its callousness, its brutality, and its lack of respect for human life.

Strangely, those groups have been quite silent about the plight of Terri Schindler-Schiavo. A few have even trumpeted the "right to die" mantra, as if they possessed telepathic time-travel powers that allow them to read Terri's desires retroactively from this point in time.

To tell you the truth, I'm actually more sympathetic to her husband than to the pro-death activists and the judge. He's killing her for money (and also possibly to cover up evidence of previous crimes). This is an exaggerated form of the sort of base evil to which all of us are occasionally tempted (although thankfully the overwhelming majority of us have the moral strength to resist). It is profoundly evil, but it is nevertheless comprehensible. I can see myself in his shoes, although I pray I'd never make his choices, no matter the circumstances.

But to torture this woman (and forced starvation constitutes torture by any recognized definition of the word...even on the Left) purely for the advancement of an abstract principle about the right to die, as the judge and the pro-death activists are doing, is a truly incomprehensible abomination.

It is indeed an echo of the abortion debate, where the issue is so fiercely polarized that pro-choice forces are finding themselves arguing that there's no moral difference between expelling a microscopic clump of cells and killing a viable infant in mid-birth, but that there is a difference between killing the infant during birth and killing it immediately afterward.

In service to their ideology they've entirely sacrificed both reason and humanity. Compared to that, a man who wants to kill his wife for money is easy to sympathize with.

Short of a patient who's sitting up in bed screaming and begging for her life, there really aren't any worse example cases for the pro-euthanasia argument than this one.

Mr. Porretto and I differ in our beliefs about abortion and euthanasia. I believe there are circumstances in which both are acceptable in a least-of-all-available-wrongs sense, whereas he, as I understand his beliefs, does not accept any set of circumstances in which either would be an acceptable choice. I can respect that...especially since my moral views are far closer to his than my pro-choice stand would imply.

But only someone so fanatical about their ideology that they're incapable of true thought or feeling would think that the Terry Schiavo case is anything but an argument against sanctioned euthanasia...and a compelling one at that.

Watching pro-euthanasia forces on the wrong side of Terry Schiavo may well turn me against euthanasia, just as watching pro-choice activists fight for "partial birth abortion" has all but completely turned me against abortion.

The McCain-Feingold Insurrection


Oh, I know. I'm minor. I'm a nonpartisan libertarian. I'm not the sort of person who'd quote or link to a candidate's press releases or a party's site. They'd have to imprison hundreds, maybe thousands of bloggers before my name would rise to the first page of the priority list. And I don't intend to go out of my way to provoke them. Gandhi or Martin Luther King I most emphatically am not.

But I will not submit. The first political controversy in which I ever became involved was over free speech online. That's what taught me that the two major parties are not to be trusted. When I cried foul over CDA, my offline friends and family laughed...they said "oh, no...the First Amendment is about POLITICAL speech...and no one's ever going to attempt to ban THAT...not in AMERICA...and if they did, it would NEVER survive the courts!".

When McCain-Feingold was passed, and I went back to the same people, expecting them to eat their words and join me in charging the metaphorical barricades, the verses changed a bit ("no no no...Campaign Finance Reform is about MONEY...and money isn't speech!") but the refrain was the same ("you're just paranoid...they'll never come after the rights of individuals to speak freely").

Now this. A federal judge has ruled that the law must be applied even to noncommercial internet speech by individuals. It will shortly be against federal law to publicly state your opinion for or against a candidate for office within 60 days of a national election (unless of course you work for a major media conglomerate...THEY got a special exemption).

In some ways I look forward to seeing how those same friends and relatives react to this news. Will they be able to rationalize it and continue to bury their heads in the sand? Do we absolutely have to have martyrs to the cause sent to prison before offline people will realize that the political class is at war against ordinary citizens?

We shall see.

But like the other members of the "McCain-Feingold Insurrection", this is my line in the sand. I won't change the kind of blog I run in order to deliberately provoke a test case, but nor will I censor myself. And if by some (remote) chance they do come for me, I intend to go down fighting.

So help me God.

I haven't actually been reading Kim du Toit or Mrs. du Toit since they had their big CSS change...my broswer doesn't work well with the new stylesheets and so I've fallen behind. But for unrelated reasons, I happened upon this post from February 11 (link is the printer-friendly version, since the regular permalink goes to the wrong place) this evening, and felt a need to reply.

The Social Security debate has always frustrated me because I was never able to figure out why anyone would support the idea. I understand that near to- and retired workers would not want the program to change, but why would younger workers not want reform or to eliminate the program (even if current and near current recipients were protected)?

[...]

It isn’t that they trust the government. It isn’t that they don’t understand that the program has been a boondoggle from the beginning. And it isn’t even that many might also understand that the program will be bankrupt (and they’ll get nothing) in as soon as 20 years. Nope… it’s much more simple than that (and much more difficult to fix).

They don’t trust THEMSELVES.

They don’t trust their ability to save on their own, manage (meaning open the mail and do nothing) their own retirement account, or want to deal with the matter at all. They do not believe they are capable of managing the account, contributing to it, and they don’t want to think about it.

Some of it may be that. Some of it, though, may be a reaction to the anti-reform propaganda.

Even if you discount all altruistic motives (which is silly, but let's grant the premise for the moment), people around my age (I'm 29) have really good reasons not to want Social Security to completely die (which is what AARP et al are implying will happen if any reform is attempted). We know we're getting totally cheated on Social Security. We know there will be no payments to us when we're ready to retire unless we save the money ourselves.

But we're young enough to remember living with our parents, and WE DON'T WANT THEM MOVING IN WITH US! We'll compromise our political principles and economic self-interest to any extent necessary in order to prevent that from happening. I consider myself a more principled person than is typical among my generation, and am adamantly opposed to the present SS system, but if I were presented with a choice between continuing social security as it exists today and having my mother move in with me, I'd choose the status quo in a heartbeat, and not look back. Indeed, if that prospect were weighed against any alternative (except of course for the obvious one...mom being homeless) I would choose the alternative. Higher taxes? Yes. Having to work two day jobs to meet the SS burden? Yes. I honestly think I'd volunteer to give up a limb if it would somehow prevent my mother's Social Security benefits from getting cut.

Now of course some of us are intelligent enough to know that no reform plan that would cut current benefits is being considered, and no hypothetical reform plan which would have that effect would ever get passed in Congress. I suspect that most people perceptive enough to realize that are in the pro-reform camp.

But those who don't know better will listen to the scaremongering of the Democrats' interest groups. And the subtext of that scaremongering (or at least the subset of it that's directed toward my generation) is "Oppose reform or Mom and Dad will have to move in with you, and you'll never be free to enjoy your life again!"

Is there really any wonder that folks who have that message ringing in their heads would be anti-reform?

Professor Bainbridge asks:

Why should somebody who holds those (admittedly extreme) views care whether the libertarians stay or go? To pick up a few extra votes for the GOP? Sorry, but as Young admits, many libertarians defected from the GOP in 2004 to cast protest votes for the LP candidate or even for John Kerry. And it didn't matter one iota.

My point is not that Locke is right in his description of libertarian. My point is that the libertarians need to do a much better job of articulating what they are willing to bring to the table to make it attractive for social conservatives to maintain the old alliance.

It's a question that a lot of social conservatives seem to be asking, lately. But such questions reflect, I think, an extraordinarily short time horizon, both in memory and in prognostication.

If the Democrats collapse before the end of the terror war, the Republican party will fracture into at least two pieces. Along what lines, we can't yet be sure, but it's an absolute certainty that today's GOP coalition is an artifact of opposition to the Democrats. My fondest wish would be to bid farewell to those for whom social conservatism is their primary electoral goal...some of them (such as the esteemed Professor) are reasonable human beings I respect as adversaries, and some of them I even count as friends, but in a just world we don't belong in the same political party, and we're only together in this one because of the threat posed by an opposition that both groups regard as worse.

But let's suppose the Democrats manage to hang on to viability long enough for the war to end. Before things started changing willy-nilly in the Middle East, I'd have bet pretty heavily against this outcome...but I think they've got enough inertia to last until the elections of 2012, and it's increasingly looking like by that time the war may be, if not over, then at least transferred to an intensity level that doesn't promote the fear-of-Democrats that currently prevails.

In that sort of situation, the Republicans will NEED us. The Clinton legacy will be either forgotten or papered over by then, and so without the terror war as a unifying factor, the present era of Republican dominance will come to a swift and crashing end. 2000 (the last national election before the war), if you all remember, was an EC squeaker and a popular defeat. The first national election after the war could be the same, if the Republicans continue to alienate the small-government set.

From Rolling Stone:

For MoveOn, "the work" consists of looking for spikes in e-mail traffic and monitoring online forums to divine the issues that drive its members. Boyd and Blades have bitten hard on the "wisdom of crowds" concept. They believe that strategies posted and rated by fellow activists provide the basis for picking campaigns that members will pay to support. "We've discovered a way to engage people so that they want to open their wallets," says Boyd. "If we can come up with a great campaign, we know it will get funded."

Anybody remember the DotCom boom? Anybody besides me suffer through economic purgatory for years when it collapsed?

Does anybody but me remember WHY it collapsed?

This whole attitude of "get a cool idea, get folks to invest lots of money in your idea because it's so cool, relax because your work is done" seems more than a little familiar.

And you know what? That's perfectly fine if you're running a nonprofit web site pushing political ideas. But these people are taking over a major American political party, and they still don't seem to have realized that for a party, the ultimate currency is not coolness or even donations, but VOTERS. If your hip and cool appeal to the radical fringe of your base pisses off the majority of voters, you'll get...well, what the DotComs got. Which, now that I think of it, looks remarkably like what the Democrats have been getting lately.

I've changed my mind. MoveOn.org and the DNC are a perfect fit. :)

Francis Porretto asks about our opinions on how to respond to North Korean nuclear activity, now that Pyongyang has said publicly that they already have nuclear weapons.

But let's not buy into the North Korean claim without some cogitation. Is it true? Have we the means to verify or falsify it?

Washington hasn't said much. CIA figures have occasionally made statements to the effect that Pyongyang's possession of nukes appears likely, but if verifiable data were available, we'd probably have heard much more.

I don't necessarily agree that "we'd probably have heard much more" if Washington knew for sure that DPRK had functioning nukes...even without trying very hard, I can think of a handful of compellingly good reasons for the US Government to try and keep a lid on the knowledge of how much they know for sure about the situation over there. In the kind of diplomatic and strategic minefield they're facing with Korea, they'd be stupid not to want to play their cards close to the vest.

But either way, North Korea does indeed figure prominently in most of the real nightmare scenarios in current geopolitics. If we can keep China from intervening militarily there's a reasonable hope of getting through this without the kind of mind-numbing carnage that would follow from deployment of strategic nuclear weapons. But, short of violent overthrow of the Kim regime from the inside, it doesn't look like there's any way through that doesn't involve a lot of bloodshed.

As for what I'd want to do if we (and our allies in the region count as part of "we" here) were attacked...well, the same as in any other military situation: the absolute minimum required to reliably accomplish the objective. If a tactical strike followed by an invasion seemed likely to work, then that would be the best way (to not merely prevent unnecessary civilian casualties, but avoid collateral damage to the South that would result from a larger strike...not to mention salvage our only chance to avoid becoming the world's pariah).

But if Kim sells nukes to terrorists or uses them against one of our regional allies and the only effective response option we have is to turn DPRK into glass...well, glass it must be, and may God have mercy on our souls.

It's a whole new world out there. Cold War deterrence worked because, while our enemies may have been evil, they had comprehensible motives that could be exploited to our advantage. But the Islamist terrorists are literally suicidal, and the Kims are insane...and we have yet to find a way to deter either. It may not be possible.

We're a big country. Unlike most of our allies, we could survive the loss of one or two of our largest cities. But we could never survive a failure to retaliate against a nuclear attack. The question would then become, could we survive the guilt if we did retaliate?

Yes, I'm still alive. :)

It's just so much more fun to post comments at other people's blogs than to create new entries here at mine. But today I read a week-old post at Asymmetrical Information and felt an urgent need to write a reply, even though chances are very few people will see a comment posted there today. So I cross-post it here. I'm going to try and do more of that.

(In summary, Jane's post mentions that American labor unions are now pretty much only powerful in industries either run by or strongly tied to government. Manufacturing unions are in decline and service unions are generally a non-factor, and she wonders why. My answer, which principally addresses the original question but was partially inspired by some of the earlier comments as well, is below.)

I have no clue as to who the hell is ever going to read this...but nevertheless I bid you welcome.

I've been spending just about every free moment I get during my "day job" reading blogs and leaving comments. And I've thought, on and off for a while now, that the best choice of all would be to just start my own blog.

Why, you might ask, start a political blog just after the most contentious, divisive, nasty, vicious election in my lifetime?

Well, I could say it's because the issues that matter to me aren't going to stop mattering, just because we now know who'll be occupying the White House for the next four years. The thought is anatema to everyone I know, but frankly the horserace that tops the news every night for a year is less interesting to me than the daily issues that get no MSM attention at all, and often precious little from the blogosphere. And that would be true, as far as it goes.

But the deeper truth is, even that explaination doesn't really cover it. You could imagine an amalgam of the beliefs of the folks on the blogroll I'll be building shortly, and that amalgam would probably come pretty close to describing how I think about the relationship between America and the world, and the relationship between citizens and government. I fear that I seldom have truly new things to say about those questions, and it makes little sense to start a blog if all I have to say is stuff other, smarter, more eloquent people have already said before.

No, I'm here to talk about the social side of my political life. So many people, on both sides of this year's fight, live lives almost completely isolated from those who disagree with them. Conservatives see the extreme left and the moderate left on television, "liberals" might occasionally flip past Fox News and hear a snippet of conservative commentary. But they don't intermix. They don't socialize with each other. They don't become friends. And they certainly don't have any of those kind of people in their families!

Well, not so with me.

I am, as the site title implies, what bloggers of a similar stripe are calling "libertarian/conservative". If you're here, you probably have some idea what that means in context...and if not, I'll surely spend a lot of time over the coming weeks and months talking about my specific opinions.

I live in Chicago...a wonderful city I can't imagine ever wanting to leave...but which presents a man of my political alignment with a lot of problems, and not just because every single elected representative I have below the level of the President of the United States is, of course, necessarily a Democrat (although that does tend to cause political outcomes that I find highly unpleasant). It means that every local friend I have is necessarily a part of the left-wing social culture. (Which probably has a lot to do with why I got hooked on reading blogs. :) ) It used to be possible to disagree with someone's political opinions without thinking they were evil...but no longer, it seems.

My family tree is composed, root and branch, of Yellow Dog Democrats. You could paint their portraits from a scrabook of left-wing cliches...only the police need guns, the best solution to any serious problem is to spend more government money on it no matter how much worse it's gotten since we started spending money on it, there's no excuse for war and we should just apologize for our past actions and hope the world forgives us, all workers should be unionized, tax the rich and give it to the poor...you name it, they believe it. I would be disowned if any of them knew how I felt about such things.

And although I've lived in many places in the short number of years since I was first legally recognized as an adult, I grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Some of you, familiar with the place, are now nodding your heads in recognition of what I'm talking about when I say I'm used to feeling isolated because of my beliefs. Others...well, I doubt you'll ever totally understand (or, if you do understand, believe) me when I tell you that Ann Arbor is the universal Mecca for the secular religion of intolerance which calls itself "tolerance". It is a city that will smile wide at you while it stabs you repeatedly in the back, and then as you lie bleeding to death on the sidewalk, proceed to explain that you people are really supposed to have a bunch of huge gaping holes in their skin hemorrhaging blood and they were really just doing you a favor after all. It is the kind of place where calling yourself a Democrat means you're generally the most conservative person in the room. The kind of place where it simply goes without saying that all heterosexual sex is rape, and school teachers lead the girls in class in discussions about how society might do away with men. The kind of place where absolute blind hatred for anyone who disagrees with the extreme-left party line is not new with the last couple of elections, but rather an integral and long-standing component of the social fabric. The kind of place that leaves scars on a person's psyche that still aren't even close to being healed eleven years after he moves away.

---

And, truth be told, I was not always as I am today.

I started out my adult life, as one might predict, a true blue product of my environment. Not, of course, as far Left as most Ann Arbor-ites, but certainly in line with the views of the world that prevailed among my family and friends. "Conservative" was a synonym for "stupid, ignorant, racist, sexist, and violent", while "Libertarian" was just a gaudy purple word-noise I sometimes heard folks at the Hash Bash using. The Democratic Party was of course the source of all that was right and good and true in American politics, and would never ever do anything to hurt personal freedom...et cetera ad nauseam.

A lot of ex-"liberals" will tell you that the events of 9/11 changed their minds. Not me. I abandoned the left wing of American politics as soon as I deserted the Democratic party and started seriously reading what non-Leftists had to say about the world. And, while post-9/11 events have done a lot to rein in my previously intense hatred of George W Bush and his political allies, my distaste for the Democrats goes back to an entirely domestic incident...the passage of the Communications Decency Act in 1995.

I'm not going to address the demerits of that awful ex-law at this time...the US Supreme Court gave us the definitive word on that subject in '96. But I will say that, for those who either never did believe that the Democrats were the Good Guys(tm), or still do believe in trashing the First Amendment, stifling the growth of the internet, and throwing even more of my colleagues out of work than already got hit by the end of the boom, it will undoubtedly be hard for you to understand the sense of betrayal I felt about that development.

And so I found myself outside the American political mainstream years before things became as they are now. But for four of those eight years, it was still possible to maintain civility between sides. Even though the Senators and Congressmen my friends were voting for had supported a bill that, under certain interpretations, would have sent me to prison forever, I could have rational discussions with them about other things, and still call them friends. Even though I was out campaigning for a party they regarded as a silly distraction from the "important" issues, they could still invite me into their homes and we could have fun together. Just don't go back to Ann Arbor (easy...I'm glad to put that shithole forever behind me), and avoid discussing politics with the family (much harder...especially in my family...but still doable and well worth the trouble), and everything is fine.

But then, of course, came the election of 2000. One wouldn't have thought, going into it, that it would be the beginning of the era of intense hatred we're in today, considering how the Democratic nominee was the most singularly uninspiring candidate they'd had in my lifetime...not exactly the kind of person you'd expect to arouse passionate emotions...especially after having Bill Clinton as president for the previous 8 years. Not that the Republican candidate looked much more interesting...he seemed like a serious lightweight who'd somehow coasted into the nomination ahead of better men on the basis of his family's power...much the way he had for his whole life. Boredom city, really...just cast your ballot whenever you get a few minutes free, and go to bed early. (I didn't hear about Florida until I was driving to work the next morning.)

I think, though, that when the margin of Presidential victory showed up amounting to a measly few hundred votes in Florida, a lot of people got the idea in their heads that if they'd just prosyletized a little harder, they could have pulled it off. A few hundred more votes for your party is a reasonable goal for a single campaign worker, and if elections were going to be as close as 2000, that meant that the outcome of the election might come down to the success or failure of a single person's efforts. And the fervency levels of the average voter began to rise...

And then 9/11 happened. And it reminded us that we are fragile...our relationship with the rest of the world is more important than a lot of us thought. And history isn't over yet.

But if your mind is already occupied with thoughts of how your own personal success or failure in proselytizing your party's philosophy and candidate might alter the outcome of the election, a weird cross-breeding effect can happen. "What I do might make a measurable difference for American national politics" can come together with "The outcome of presidential elections has a real effect on America's safety" and give birth to "I, me, personally, can control the destiny of human civilization, if I just convince everyone I meet to vote for my party next time around...and if I fail, it'll be the end of everything".

I have news for such people.

Yes...if you live in a swing state, you have a massively disproportionate chance of altering the outcome of a national election by your own personal efforts.

But no, if you fail to do so, it will NOT be the end of everything. The United States was run by Republicans for 12 years in my childhood, and other than a mind-numbingly staggering national debt we came out of it pretty much OK. Even if you're right about the issues (I don't think you are, but I'll temporarily concede the point for the sake of argument), we will still be just fine in 2008.

And no, strident prosyletizing is not a good strategy. Bible-belt revival preachers may get donations by screaming at people that they're horrible sinners and going to burn in hell (I still haven't figured out how that psychological dynamic works...but it seems to), but the results in '02 and this Tuesday ought to prove to you once and for all that telling voters that they're stupid redneck bigots is not the way to make friends and influence people. Nor, for that matter, is disassociating yourself from your differently-believing friends turning out to be a good strategy.

I have exactly two issues on which I agree with the Republican party...and I have more than two on which I agree with at least the stated platform of the Democrats. Do you want to know why it is that I'm happy to see Bush re-elected, and would have been unhappy to see Kerry win, in spite of agreeing with more planks of the Democratic platform than the Republican one? Do you really want to know?

It's because I don't trust people who are as self-important as Democrats have become in the last four years. It's because we're at war now, which gives the government all the political cover it needs to do some really phenomenally evil shit domestically. It's because the Republicans I know regard Democrats as opponents and Libertarians as wayward would-be allies...whereas the Democrats I know regard any non-Democrat (Republican, Libertarian, or even Democrat-except-moreso Green) as a blood enemy.

People like that cannot be trusted with control of a government that was already too powerful even before the war, and is even more powerful now. They're not like drunk drivers so much as they're like drivers who scan the streets cold sober looking for pedestrians they can run over.

I've seen Democrats talk of mass defections in response to a Republican victory. I've even seen talk of rioting or civil war. And, while thankfully the blood hasn't run in the streets as some thought it would (and even should!), everywhere I turn I see Democrats once again ratcheting up the divisiveness, ignoring the plainly obvious lesson of the last four years, and pounding away in a ceaseless attack on the national morale and sense of self-worth.

Have they no shame? When the career politician from the most left-leaning city in the most left-leaning state in America, who just personally lost his chance to become President of the United States is on TV conceding defeat and calling for unity and the man-in-the-street Democrats are STILL screaming about how the election was stolen from them, are their supposedly cosmopolitan senses utterly deaf to the jarring irony? John Kerry had nothing whatsoever to gain (and potentially a lot of lucrative speaking engagements to lose) by conceding quickly and saving the country another nightmare of litigation and recrimination. Going the Gore route would have been a good choice for him personally. He chose to be a better man than that...and being moderately familiar with his history, I can say with a reasonable degree of confidence that it's the most noble decision he's ever made. The Democrats could do a lot worse than to pay attention and learn from that.

But they won't. They seem to be uninterested in admitting their failures and learning from them. They seem to believe themselves incapable of true failure.

The fact that the Republicans are not, at present, suffering from the same delusions is the one thing that makes me truly happy to see them win.

But I'd like to see America's Democrats recover from this problem. I'd like to get my friends and family back. I'd like to be able to open my mouth without fear of dire social consequences if a Democrat is in the room. In short, I'd like a return to national civility.

Can I get that? Please?