Concordia Augusta, marble, from the Eumachia House in Pompeii, 1st century AD, Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli
1,355 words
Based on various polls, around 90% of Americans have observed a decline in “civility.” Similar numbers believe that civility is necessary for the functioning of American society. Thus the decline in civility can only be harmful to America.
Interestingly, even though most people feel that civility is eroding, most people also think that they are adequately civil, and that the decline of civility is the fault of others. If civility requires an ability to look at things from other people’s perspective, this attitude is itself indicative of the decline of civility.
“Civility” means more than mere politeness. Civility is a political virtue governing disagreement with others in the same community. Civility allows us to disagree while preserving community. We disagree civilly with people because we wish to remain in the same community. To borrow a phrase from Angelo Plume, civility allows you to make your point without making an enemy. When you do not care to remain civil to someone, that’s because you don’t envision yourself as being in the same community.
“Civility” comes from the Roman Latin “civitas” (city) and “civilitas” (citizenship). “Civitas” is a translation of the Greek “polis,” and “politeia” is the equivalent of “civilitas.” For the ancients, the basis of civility was “homonoia” (Greek) or “concordia” (Latin). Homonoia means “oneness of mind” or unanimity, while concordia means “oneness of heart,” which is basically the same thing. Political life is based on common ideas and sentiments about the most important things.
Today’s idea of civility as, basically, “agreeing to disagree” so we don’t start killing each other, is a modern liberal invention necessitated by the centuries of religious conflict following the Reformation. At the root of modern civility, therefore, is the recognition that diversity is a problem: a weakness, not a strength.
The leading causes cited for the breakdown of civility are the rise of the internet, especially social media, and increased political polarization.
The uncivil attitude of “Who cares what he thinks? You’ll never see this person again,” only makes sense in a big city. You don’t belong to the same community if you can reasonably assume that you will never see a given person again.
The internet fosters incivility because it is the biggest city of all, with all the anonymity that implies. Beyond that, the internet allows one to operate behind masks. So even if you do bump into the same person, neither of you might recognize the other.
You can buy Greg Johnson’s The Trial of Socrates here.
It is now commonplace to meet online lions in real life and discover they are actually pussycats. It makes sense: online, there is no accountability for incivility. In real life, you could get punched in the mouth.
That said, online incivility is a small price to pay for the political benefits of the internet. Social media and anonymity have made it possible to destroy liberal and globalist hegemony and unleash nationalism and populism, which brings us to the second reason for the breakdown of civility: increased political polarization.
Political polarization is happening because people increasingly see through the false alternative of post-World War II center-Left/center-Right power sharing arrangements, largely due to the internet.
The emerging polarization is between liberal democratic elites and the masses, who have discovered that the “liberal” in liberal democracy means minority rule and not giving the people what we want.
What we want, for the most part, is a socially conservative society with an activist state that intervenes in the economy and sides with the working and middle classes against the oligarchs. We want nationalism and populism. What the elites want is globalism—including global capitalism—and social liberalism.
The current system gives the elites what they want, not the people.
When the center-Right fails to promote conservative values (which the people want) but promotes more globalization (which the elites want), popular discontent is used to elect the center-Left, which then fails to promote populist economic policies (which the people want) while promoting social liberalism (which the elites want). Then popular discontent is used to put the center-Right back into power. Rinse, repeat.
This is how we have arrived at the system that Jonathan Bowden described as Left-wing oligarchy.
It worked for decades in a world with only a few television networks and wire services determining what everyone thought. The internet ended that world. Nationalism and populism have been rising forces for more than a decade now.
I remember when liberals began complaining about “incivility” back in 2015 during the glory days of the online Alt-Right. Yes, a lot of the discourse was “uncivil.” But most of the whining was the outrage of a privileged class that had never been talked back to and were disconcerted to find that they weren’t as clever and well-educated as they thought.
When they were challenged, did the Left respond by showing us examples of “civility”? Of course not. Instead, they uleased wave upon wave of censorship and deplatforming. Civility is how we disagree with people in the same community. Since they could not answer or abide our views, the Left—and the establishment Right that creeps behind them like a shadow—simply tried to exclude us from the community.
It reminded me of my days in academia, which makes sense, because academia is the citadel of the far Left. Political correctness and “wokeness” were invented there and remain entrenched to this day.
Recently a friend drew my attention to a new book: Curtis Dozier, The White Pedestal: How White Nationalists Use Ancient Greece and Rome to Justify Hate (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2026). Dozier is one of my academic stalkers, a guilty, mopey “straight white male” who teaches classics at Vassar College. His book has the following note at the beginning:
A Note on White Nationalist Sources
White Nationalist Intellectuals Seek academic legitimacy by imitating the conventions of scholarly discourse in their publications. To cite these publications in the same manner that I would cite other scholarship would confer such legitimacy, as well as visibility. Therefore I do not cite publications from white nationalist websites in my notes. Interested researchers will be able to locate them from my descriptions.
When I first read this, I was at a loss for words (well, aside from “faggot”). This shockingly petty gesture encapsulates a whole apparatus of academic oppression and exclusion and foreshadows Bolshevik-style measures should people like this ever gain the power to enact them.
You can order Greg Johnson’s Tyranny and Wisdom here.
Then the word hit me: this is incivility. Dozier doesn’t want us in the same society. He can’t imprison or exile or kill us. But he’s sure as hell not going to cite us.
Incivility communicates enmity which foreshadows all manners of exclusion, including such Leftist favorites as a bullet in the back of the skull.
There is quite a bit of Leftist literature explicitly attacking civility today. Civility is bad because we can’t tolerate racists, sexists, and homophobes: basically, the heretics the Left wants to destroy, first in effigy, then in reality.
This is why I defend the somewhat shocking idea of treating American higher education like Henry the VIII treated the Catholic Church. Most academics in the humanities and social sciences need to be given early retirements. Entire grievance studies departments should be shuttered. Woke scholarship needs to be put under lock and key in special library collections. Many colleges and universities should probably close entirely, because there are too many credential mills. In short, we would need extremely illiberal measures simply to return to old-fashioned liberalism. And why stop there?
This is why I don’t mourn the death of civility. Incivility is simply the recognition of reality: namely that America is now two nations sharing the same territory and government. This is an inherently unstable situation that may eventually lead to civil war, which will make us pine for the days when the worst thing we had to endure was harsh language. The sensible solution is separation.
In the present context, trying unilaterally to repair civility with our enemies makes no sense. Civility is how we treat friends, not enemies. Pretending otherwise is folly.
But if we really envision creating a new community with the people on our side, it wouldn’t hurt to cultivate some civility there.
37 comments
Mockery works shockingly well, expressing outright contempt and just laughing at them cuts them deeper than getting directly aggressive with your words. Make it clear they’re an unwanted part of our future and our desired society just doesn’t even have them. The multiculturalists want this to be some Manichean struggle where the meano racists rage war against the interracial kumbaya, where for us it’s more “lol, we don’t want to think about you at all”. Their intersectional philosophy is literally predicated on there being a scapegoat outgroup (straight, white men) who get discriminated against. All the stuff about white nationalists scapegoating minorities is absolute projection, that’s their philosophy. We want blacks to go back to being the curious thick lipped tribesmen in our kid’s picture books, a place where Tintin goes for another adventure. There’s no hate there, only curiosity and indifference.
> In the present context, trying unilaterally to repair civility with our enemies makes no sense. Civility is how we treat friends, not enemies. Pretending otherwise is folly.
“The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.” ― Elie Wiesel
When someone cuts off a friend or a family member, or goes through a divorce, the hate is often over. When the decision is made, a mixture of pity and contempt sets in, followed by indifference. Fighting and hatred is typically only when you’re trying to make it work, despite the differences. The Judenhass of the 19th century building up was because the Germans were getting sick of the double standards and jews failing to keep their end of the assimilation in exchange for emancipation bargain. It’s typically the undesired partner in a relationship that wants to frame it as hatred and conflict (jews then, minorities today… and also jews today), while it’s the one wanting to end the relationship being pretty open that they’re just exhausted and want to be left alone.
I argue that enmity should always be framed with the endgoal (total remigration, white ethnostates) in mind that ends enmity and brings about that beautiful past indifference. Remigration to their homeland absolves non-whites of their collective sins towards us, and is on our part a beautiful act of charity, a gift of undeserved grace.
I agree. Once enmity is unmasked, the preferred solution is separation.
Chud: that was a brilliant piece. So much I agree with. Thanks from the disintergrating shithole of formerly great Johannesburg.
Definitely agree with: it’s more “lol, we don’t want to think about you at all”. On target there.
Regarding academia, Robert Sapolsky, a Jew and professor of biology, neurology, and neurosurgery at Stanford University, a very sharp man whose book Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst I enjoyed reading, is a Leftist who opens his book with the following paragraph:
“And this is where the medal-of-honor version of the fantasy ends and the imagery darkens. What would I do with Hitler? The viscera become so raw that I switch to passive voice in my mind, to get some distance. What should be done with Hitler? It’s easy to imagine, once I allow myself. Sever his spine at the neck, leave him paralyzed but with sensation. Take out his eyes with a blunt instrument. Puncture his eardrums, rip out his tongue. Keep him alive, tube-fed, on a respirator. Immobile, unable to speak, to see, to hear, only able to feel. Then inject him with something that will give him a cancer that festers and pustulates in every corner of his body, that will grow and grow until every one of his cells shrieks with agony, till every moment feels like an infinity spent in the fires of hell.
That’s what should be done with Hitler. That’s what I would want done to Hitler. That’s what I would do to Hitler.”
He asks readers to imagine knowing everything biologically relevant about Hitler at the moment he made genocidal decisions – his brain activity seconds before, his hormone levels, his childhood experiences, his prenatal environment, his genes, and even the evolutionary forces shaping human tribalism. If we could trace every causal factor backward in time, would we still say he simply “chose evil”?
Sapolsky’s point is not to excuse Hitler. Instead, he uses this extreme example to push a hard question:
If every behaviour has biological and environmental causes stretching back in time, what does that mean for blame and moral responsibility?
At any rate, despite being a staunch opponent of the death penalty, Sapolsky has detailed vivid, violent fantasies about killing Hitler, which he uses to illustrate the conflict between human compassionate and destructive impulses. But my thoughts as I was reading the book was what if someone on the Right had written something similar about someone? Would the book even have been published?
Robert Sapolsky hates Hitler, but not Stalin or Mao. During the first 20 years of the USSR (1917-1937), Jews ran the Cheka and NKVD political police, which murdered millions of Russians and Ukrainians. Sapolsky approves of that, because he is a Jew. He supports of the genocide of the White race. He is another Jeffrey Epstein and Noam Chomsky.
What the hell has the “oh he hates Hitler but he doesn’t hate Stalin and Mao, such hypocrisy” finger wagging gotten us the any number of decades it’s gone on?
Impeaching the credibility of political enemies is a good thing, actually.
Now that is one screwy fruit bat!
This is why I have to totally reject “turning the other cheek” and the “loving one’s enemy” advice from Christianity. In my interpretation of Christianity, the warning against giving pearls to swine (Matthew 7:6) would null and void any self-destructive foolishness. Christ aggressively drove out the money changers from the temple. He didn’t practice flower power. The world is filled with malicious people like Robert Sapolsky. They are swine. No pearls for them. And drive them out of academia.
Victory first — meaning separation — civility later, with people who will actually reciprocate.
Zarathustra, quoting the “intellectual” Jew, Sapolsky: February 13, 2026
“What would I do with Hitler? The viscera become so raw that I switch to passive voice in my mind, to get some distance. What should be done with Hitler? It’s easy to imagine, once I allow myself. Sever his spine at the neck, leave him paralyzed but with sensation. Take out his eyes with a blunt instrument. Puncture his eardrums, rip out his tongue. Keep him alive, tube-fed, on a respirator. Immobile, unable to speak, to see, to hear, only able to feel. Then inject him with something that will give him a cancer that festers and pustulates in every corner of his body, that will grow and grow until every one of his cells shrieks with agony, till every moment feels like an infinity spent in the fires of hell. That’s what should be done with Hitler. That’s what I would want done to Hitler. That’s what I would do to Hitler.”
Duh. So the Jew hates Mr. Hitler but not our former Bolshevik Ally Stalin. Fuck him!
Racial nationalists should ignore alien Jew intellectuals, preferring this Cosmotheist comparison of Hitler to Stalin by one of their own (throwing in Roosevelt and Churchill), by William Pierce (April 1989): “The Measure of Greatness” at nationalvanguard.org
Political polarization is the main cause of incivility today. It is 100% a leftwing phenomenon. The Leftwingers know they are degenerate. We saw that on display in Minneapolis recently.
Leftwingers refuse to debate, because they know they’re wrong. Instead of rational discourse, they use obscenities, censorship and violence. Especially violence. Democrat judges are the worst offenders. They are not “judges”, but political commissars.
The Left supported the assassination of Charlie Kirk, because he defeated them in debate. Kirk had no academic credentials, yet he could easily beat leftwingers with their phony post-graduate degrees. He beat them so regularly and so often, that they had to kill him.
The crisis of incivility started with the Left. It was hatched in academia, the stronghold of the Left, the Wuhan lab of the woke mind virus.
Curtis Dozier is a leftwing loony. He is anti-White. Such creatures should be banished from civilized society.
In the Feb 2026 issue of Commentary, they review his book, most unfavorably. They say it will only help White Nationalists. That is true. It’s another own-goal by a leftwing loony.
Here is the link: https://www.commentary.org/articles/spencer-klavan/curtis-dozier-anti-classicist/
Thanks for the link. That was an entertaining review.
Thank you for posting that link. That review is so brutal it’s embarrassing to read.
Given this “scholars” flipflop regarding the overall value of classical thought–a flipflop due entirely to his own political agenda–within the academic community all of his “contributions” should be dismissed as irrelevant.
Klavan’s review is a case of “woke more correct”. Both White Nationalists and honest leftists like Dozier (at least in his new book) know you won’t have European civilization if you replace Whites with non-Whites. The only thing we disagree on is whether that is a good thing or not.
Klavan, who represents the civic nationalist centrist position, is actually more confused than either White Nationalists or leftists. He is purporting that Western civilization will be able to continue even if Whites become a minority in our countries. Keep in mind he is writing this in Commentary, a Jewish neo-conservative magazine that heavily promoted mass non-White immigration into the United States through the decades while simultaneously aggressively supporting Israel as a Jewish ethnostate. Klavan himself is half-Jewish himself through his father.
As an illustrative example of why Klavan is confused, consider the controversy over statue removal a few years ago when wokeness was more prominent. Klavan’s position would be to oppose taking down statues of people like Winston Churchill and George Washington on the basis that they are foundational figures in Western history, while simultaneously vigorously opposing the racist beliefs these men held. The leftist position is actually much more coherent: these were racist men, and racism is bad, so we should remove their statues. Also, why should the rising tide of color care about these dead White men? Klavan’s plan is to try to convince non-Whites that they should care about these dead White men.
Basically, Klavan is a con artist who is trying to convince Whites we can survive a mob attack through an individualist strategy. When honest leftists like Dozier make clear they will take everything that is beautiful about our history and crush it unless we collectivize, Klavan’s con gets significantly harder to pull off.
For quite a long time, I’ve been thinking similarly. When people are online, they can just pop off and talk trash if they feel like it. In the real world, there’s at least a small chance that they’ll get their attitude adjusted percussively. FAFO and all that.
Refusing to cite sources one disagrees with is absolutely hilarious, but if Dozier describing and responding to specific White Nationalist articles in his book without citing them, how is that not just plagiarism?
And does he realize how dirty it makes him look to say to his readers: “I’m going to tell you what my opponents say but am intentionally making it difficult for you to read their work for yourself.” Any semi-intelligent high school student should immediately be suspicious that the author is misrepresenting, if not outright lying about, the people he claims to be refuting.
He’s conditioning intolerance & othering. The normal rules don’t apply.
And the young leftist cadres, raised with a fear of words that we Cold War babies can’t comprehend most likely agree with him.
Yes, omitting citations clearly allows him to take liberties with material he discusses.
This is why we have citation in the first place.
There is a great deal of fraud in academia. But to dispense openly with one of the conventions created to keep scholarship honest is to abandon even the pretense of scholarship.
Honestly, Dozier should be fired for this.
Another great article, Greg. Your weekly Nationalism This Week article has become one of the highlights of the week.
Extending civility to the Left is delusional at best and suicidal at worst. Incivility toward our existential enemies is the LEAST we should do.
This is why I defend the somewhat shocking idea of treating American higher education like Henry the VIII treated the Catholic Church.
Such treatment of American academia is completely warranted. It is the root of the cancer that plagues us; it is therefore entirely necessary to excise it with the maximum force sufficient to do so. Let the woke academics lose their cozy sinecures and instead be forced to clean streets, sidewalks, and toilets. Some deserve worse.
Thank you for these kind words.
I agree with everything, except sending the academics to do menial work. Although after mass deportations, we will need cabbage pickers and toilet cleaners.
But academics typically have generous pensions. Just give them early retirements.
That would be the nicer way to do it. I have a more punitive streak. Deport the non-White ones. There is a certain poetic justice to forcing the White ones to do menial labor for betraying our race, and symbolically cleaning up all the filth that they have tolerated for so long.
My most effective proposals need not be mentioned here but perhaps as a start pulling rickshaws for Kramer and Newman.
It’s only a matter of targeting the Enemy’s ideological power base. Liberal Academia is where the janissaries are produced and where the failsons and faildaughters of the elite are cycled before they fill the ranks of Antifa or taxpayer-fueled NGOs.
Vast amounts of woke scholarship needs to be put under lock and key in special library collections.
Great article! Woke scholarship should be destroyed, or the paper recycled. 🙃
We need to keep it around for scholars to study so we don’t get fooled again.
The incivility is also being enabled by the kind of supporters the Liberal-left consensus is mobilizing for their causes. From the degenerate thugs and mental basket-cases to the AWFLs/”Karens” whose view of politics remain deeply parochial despite their “elite” status-signalling, the aggression and vulgarity have been encouraged by mob-based politics. The populist Right has simply followed the already blazed trail.
Multiculturalism destroys civility in many ways.
“Diverse” groups are exempted from having to see the other person’s point of view because they are supposed to be militantly advancing their own, based on their non-White race, their “gender,” or their privileged perversion.
Whites, especially straight White males, are also not supposed to see the other person’s point of view accurately and respond to it realistically; instead they are required to take a false view that flatters the non-White or otherwise “diverse” “other,” and that leads to supplicating, tacitly submissive attitudes that encourage and reward antiwhite insolence, hostility, and aggression.
Either way, civility based on real understanding is not in the conversation.
Good comment. Thanks
It sounds like this guy Dozier may be guilty of plagiarism. A buddy of mine is doing a PhD and done of his advisors said there was no need to cite a certain author because ehis method is so well known but also because he wad a “racist.” She had no problem citing other old dead white men provided they weren’t racists. I’ve read scientific works before and I think what sets apart good papers from great papers are the ones that set the stage by name dropping all the Pioneer papers in the field. This just comes off as petty at best and at worst as I said before a wanton case of plagiarism.
I enjoyed your “faggot” remark. It reminded me of the Lewis C. K. sketch about reclaiming the word faggot to not be a perjorative against gays but to describe someone really stupid.
It was the word that came to mind. It is such a great insult, it would be a shame to confine it simply to gays.
I see my elaboration on the Lewis C. K. sketch got the “Vaudeville hook.” I’ll keep things more tasteful on here.
It does have perlocutionary force.
“The great victor and in every respect very virtuous Constantine reunited the entire Roman Empire, as it had been before. He subjugated all lands from sunrise to sunset, from north to south, to his power, both by the sword and by peaceful means. All good people were now free from fear of those who had previously oppressed them. Ungodly behavior was punished. People celebrated with all the pomp and circumstance. Joy reigned everywhere. Those who had previously been beaten now smiled at each other. With festive songs and hymns, Christians in cities and rural areas praised God and the pious emperor. His just decrees and laws were now posted everywhere, proving his goodness and his true fear of God. Thus ended the power of the tyrants. The memory of old sufferings disappeared. People now looked joyfully to the future.”
Eusebius of Caesarea on Constantine the Great
” “Civility” means more than mere politeness.”
I appreciated the article, but I have hoped for a while that people in our sphere could have a conversation about the real decline in manners and tastes that has affected our race. It is an observable reality that with each successive generation in our race, there is less appreciation for good manners and taste, and a greater appreciation for base and ugly behavior. It is not only online. There is a growing attitude, especially among the young, that good manners are for “suckers” (I’m sure that’s a dated term), and true success in life is being able to act like a tyrant to those around you and get away with it.
The modern perception of our race among others is that we’re a race of slovenly, rude, selfish sensation seekers. I am sure there is some resentment behind that perception, but seeing the way that a lot of white people act while traveling overseas, it’s understandable.
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