Dear Joe,
I appreciate the work that you do, but I’m having trouble with the idea of civility. I’m tired of being civil with people who aren’t. I have a number of friends who say that civility is a useless strategy to deal with the problems of our times. I’m beginning to believe them. But there’s a part of me that still wants to believe that there are peaceful and nonviolent ways to deal with what’s going on. I’ve had enough of the fighting and aggressive ways we are relating to one another. Any ideas?
Split
Hey Split,
I appreciate your dilemma. The issues you raise have been at the core of my work for decades. How do you confront a bully without becoming a bully? How can you respond with courage instead of becoming passive? How do you speak your truth in a public forum when you know you risk getting “canceled” or having your life threatened? How do you confront incivility without becoming uncivil?
It seems that the lack of civility has become mainstream worldwide. Whether it be at a family dinner, in political town halls, at protests or at work, the loud-and-crass approach appears increasingly to get the most attention. But, when I read between the lines in your question, I suspect that you have insight into a deeper set of truths: that a loud voice may not be a strong voice, that both sides can win at the same time, and that the need to be right may not be the best path toward finding common ground and new solutions to our current problems.
Why is being civil not working? I believe we are working with an outdated operating definition of civility; we need an approach to civility that invites powers like strength, confidence, skill, courage, resilience and assertiveness. These powers, when used in a respectful, balanced way, could help neutralize the aggression, lack of listening, othering, breaking and polarization that hampers our interactions. So, in order to confront the level of animosity and distress we are facing, we all need to revise and “upgrade” our current skills, strategies, fortitude and resilience.
The first step in this process is to let go of a condition I call “chronic niceness.” Chronic niceness happens when we hold an archaic notion of civility, complete with a “big smile mask,” refined niceties, and where our messages of charity, mercy, and inclusivity, may not be in alignment with our actions. For example, when you say yes but you should have said no, or when you say no but you should have said yes, you may suffer from this chronic need to be nice. And, when it comes to chronic niceness, we all pay the price.
Consider this: When you witness friends marginalizing others, your place of worship or political party justifying violence for their cause, or your social media groups and friends destroying someone’s reputation before considering all the facts – and you say nothing – you are contributing to the debilitating effects of chronic niceness.
When you let go of chronic niceness and the false sense of civility, you open to the fierce power of kindness. Let’s distinguish the difference between kindness and niceness. Niceness is an external façade that creates distance and gives us permission to justify our harms; kindness is a quality of the heart that requires courage, empathy and compassion, respects the dignity and value of self and others, and leads to actions of nurturing and protecting others. Kindness transcends our limited views of each other and has the potential to bring about peace, healing and reconciliation.
What if we let go of our chronic niceness, stepped into our highest qualities of openhearted fierceness, and called ourselves and those we encounter to our highest values?. We step into our fierceness when we stand face to face with our challenges, bullies and aggression with empowered vulnerability. We become both nurturers and protectors for ourselves and others.
Fierce Civility is the approach I use to learn these upgraded skills. It trains you to shift your viewpoints, habits and behavior so that you can:
- Stay regulated in times of high tension so you don’t fall into patterns of aggression or passivity.
- Determine your level of safety in every moment and set clear boundaries.
- Treat others as you would like to be treated.
- Hold yourself and others accountable to our highest values.
- Seek out results that honors the dignity of all involved.
- Collaborate to find solutions that include the needs of all involved.
Success may not be guaranteed, but pursuing this course of action may support you in cultivating the resilience, grace, patience, skill and courage needed to stay in the challenges, and grapple with the twists and turns of these encounters, with a higher probability of a successful outcome. This upgraded form of civility may be what’s needed to shift from volatility to lasting peace.
With fierce respect for you and your exasperation,
Joe Learn more about Joe Weston and his work here. Make sure to c heck out Joe’s bestselling book Fierce Civility: Transforming our Global Culture from Polarization to Lasting Peace, published March 2023.
To Ask Joe, please submit questions to: AskJoe@Fulcrum.us.
Eric Trump, the newly appointed ALT5 board director of World Liberty Financial, walks outside of the NASDAQ in Times Square as they mark the $1.5- billion partnership between World Liberty Financial and ALT5 Sigma with the ringing of the NASDAQ opening bell, on Aug. 13, 2025, in New York City.
Why does the Trump family always get a pass?
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche joined ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday to defend or explain a lot of controversies for the Trump administration: the Epstein files release, the events in Minneapolis, etc. He was also asked about possible conflicts of interest between President Trump’s family business and his job. Specifically, Blanche was asked about a very sketchy deal Trump’s son Eric signed with the UAE’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon.
Shortly before Trump was inaugurated in early 2025, Tahnoon invested $500 million in the Trump-owned World Liberty, a then newly launched cryptocurrency outfit. A few months later, UAE was granted permission to purchase sensitive American AI chips. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, “the deal marks something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.”
“How do you respond to those who say this is a serious conflict of interest?” ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked.
“I love it when these papers talk about something being unprecedented or never happening before,” Blanche replied, “as if the Biden family and the Biden administration didn’t do exactly the same thing, and they were just in office.”
Blanche went on to boast about how the president is utterly transparent regarding his questionable business practices: “I don’t have a comment on it beyond Trump has been completely transparent when his family travels for business reasons. They don’t do so in secret. We don’t learn about it when we find a laptop a few years later. We learn about it when it’s happening.”
Sadly, Stephanopoulos didn’t offer the obvious response, which may have gone something like this: “OK, but the president and countless leading Republicans insisted that President Biden was the head of what they dubbed ‘the Biden Crime family’ and insisted his business dealings were corrupt, and indeed that his corruption merited impeachment. So how is being ‘transparent’ about similar corruption a defense?”
Now, I should be clear that I do think the Biden family’s business dealings were corrupt, whether or not laws were broken. Others disagree. I also think Trump’s business dealings appear to be worse in many ways than even what Biden was alleged to have done. But none of that is relevant. The standard set by Trump and Republicans is the relevant political standard, and by the deputy attorney general’s own account, the Trump administration is doing “exactly the same thing,” just more openly.
Since when is being more transparent about wrongdoing a defense? Try telling a cop or judge, “Yes, I robbed that bank. I’ve been completely transparent about that. So, what’s the big deal?”
This is just a small example of the broader dysfunction in the way we talk about politics.
Americans have a special hatred for hypocrisy. I think it goes back to the founding era. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in “Democracy In America,” the old world had a different way of dealing with the moral shortcomings of leaders. Rank had its privileges. Nobles, never mind kings, were entitled to behave in ways that were forbidden to the little people.
In America, titles of nobility were banned in the Constitution and in our democratic culture. In a society built on notions of equality (the obvious exceptions of Black people, women, Native Americans notwithstanding) no one has access to special carve-outs or exemptions as to what is right and wrong. Claiming them, particularly in secret, feels like a betrayal against the whole idea of equality.
The problem in the modern era is that elites — of all ideological stripes — have violated that bargain. The result isn’t that we’ve abandoned any notion of right and wrong. Instead, by elevating hypocrisy to the greatest of sins, we end up weaponizing the principles, using them as a cudgel against the other side but not against our own.
Pick an issue: violent rhetoric by politicians, sexual misconduct, corruption and so on. With every revelation, almost immediately the debate becomes a riot of whataboutism. Team A says that Team B has no right to criticize because they did the same thing. Team B points out that Team A has switched positions. Everyone has a point. And everyone is missing the point.
Sure, hypocrisy is a moral failing, and partisan inconsistency is an intellectual one. But neither changes the objective facts. This is something you’re supposed to learn as a child: It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing or saying, wrong is wrong. It’s also something lawyers like Mr. Blanche are supposed to know. Telling a judge that the hypocrisy of the prosecutor — or your client’s transparency — means your client did nothing wrong would earn you nothing but a laugh.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.