When Civility Became the Crime

There’s something deeply wrong with the moral compass of our moment. Not wrong in a subtle, nuanced, academic way. Wrong in a “what are we even doing“ kind of way.

Somewhere along the line, we decided that calling for basic human dignity is suspect. That building a table where people with wildly different beliefs can sit down and talk, without contempt, without performance, without needing to destroy each other, is somehow sinister. That the real act of courage isn’t bridge-building. It’s burning the bridge down and celebrating the fire.

We have inverted something essential.

Abraham Lincoln, in the darkest hour this country has ever faced, stood before a divided nation and said, “With malice toward none, with charity for all.” He wasn’t being naive. He wasn’t softening the stakes. He was insisting that even in the middle of catastrophic disagreement, the way you treat your opponent reveals something about the kind of nation you’re trying to build.

What are we building right now?

When organizations dedicated to cross-partisan dialogue get accused of being fronts for shadowy ideological forces, it’s worth pausing. Not to dismiss the concern outright, but to ask: what does that accusation reveal about us?

It reveals that we’ve reached a place where civility itself is treated as a trojan horse. Where the act of sitting across from someone you disagree with is read as betrayal. Where the assumption isn’t maybe they’re operating in good faith, it’s what’s the angle? That’s not healthy skepticism. That’s a broken epistemic culture.

And here’s the thing: broken epistemic cultures don’t just make us mean. They make us wrong. Constantly. Because when your framework filters out every piece of information that doesn’t confirm your worst fears, you stop being an investigator of truth. You become a curator of grievance.

Viktor Frankl, who survived the unimaginable, wrote that “between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response.” We have collectively decided to eliminate that space. To react before we reflect. To accuse before we ask. To assume the worst because assuming the worst feels like wisdom. It isn’t wisdom. It’s exhaustion dressed up as conviction.

Here’s what I know to be true: you cannot hate someone into believing what you believe.

Not one person in the history of human civilization has been shamed, mocked, or demonized into genuinely changing their mind. What contempt produces isn’t conversion, it’s entrenchment. It makes people grip their beliefs tighter, trust fewer voices, and see every outstretched hand as a trap.

So when an organization explicitly committed to reducing contempt across partisan lines gets labeled as a vehicle for censorship, for the act of teaching people how to disagree without dehumanizing, we have to call that what it is. We’ve confused lowering the temperature with surrendering the argument. They are not the same thing.

And I want to be direct about something, because this charge comes from both directions: depolarization is not a call for a mushy, spineless uniparty where everyone agrees and nobody stands for anything. I am a conservative. I have strongly held convictions. I am not asking you to abandon yours. The goal was never ideological surrender. It was ideological honesty. The ability to make your case without dehumanizing the person who disagrees. To hold your ground without burning theirs.

Thomas Jefferson and John Adams disagreed on virtually everything about how this republic should be governed. They argued fiercely, sometimes bitterly. But they also wrote letters to each other for decades, grappling with the great questions of self-governance as intellectual equals. That’s not Kumbaya. That’s the hard, dignified work of a functioning democracy. We used to know the difference.

Disagreement is not the enemy. Contempt is. And we’ve stopped telling the difference.

The irony is almost too much to hold. We live in a culture that will tolerate, even celebrate, the open demonization of entire groups of people based on how they vote, where they live, what they believe. But ask those same people to engage with someone across the aisle without mockery, and suddenly that’s the ideological overreach. That’s the real manipulation.

Frederick Douglass put it simply: “It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.” The same logic applies to societies. It is far easier to build a culture of good-faith disagreement than to repair the damage done by years of treating fellow citizens as enemies. We are in the repair phase now. And repair is slow, unglamorous, and perpetually misunderstood.

None of this means every institution deserves blind trust. Scrutiny is healthy. Accountability matters. But there’s a difference between scrutiny and smear. Between asking hard questions and declaring verdicts before the evidence is in. Between holding organizations accountable and torching them because they refuse to pick a side in your war.

Sitting across from someone you disagree with isn’t weakness. It isn’t compromise. It isn’t a sign that your convictions are for sale. It is, in fact, one of the harder things a person with strong convictions can do, because you have to trust that your ideas are sturdy enough to survive contact with opposition. Most ideas that are worth holding are.

The people willing to do that, to say “I disagree with you and I still think you’re a human being worth talking to”, those people aren’t compromised. They’re the ones trying to save something.

And maybe that’s the most telling sign of where we are: the people trying to lower the temperature are the ones getting burned. That should bother all of us. Quietly, seriously, in that space between stimulus and response, the space we keep giving away.

We need to take it back.

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Wilk Wilkinson is the host of Derate The Hate. He writes about civic courage, human dignity, and the underrated art of not losing your mind in a polarized world.