A Polite Society that Wasn't

The problem with polite society is that it mistakes silence for civility

The Slide: How Polite Society Paved the Way for Trump

We didn’t fall off a cliff. We slid—one polite compromise at a time. Too many blame Trump for all that ails us.

The problem with polite society is that it mistakes silence for civility.

As I watch Donald Trump tear down norms—weaponizing the Department of Justice, threatening political opponents, turning the National Guard and ICE into tools of intimidation—I keep asking myself how we got here. Most people think we fell off a cliff. That one day, democracy just collapsed under the weight of his lawlessness.

But we didn’t fall. We slid.

We slid slowly, over decades, down a slope greased by the rituals of polite society—by the habit of pretending everything was fine so long as the right people were doing the wrong things.

Polite society made peace with violence as long as it was directed outward or downward. We could invade countries, topple governments, back dictators, and call it “spreading democracy.” We could imprison more of our own citizens than any country on Earth and call it “law and order.” We could run COINTELPRO operations that surveilled and harassed civil rights leaders, and the Philadelphia police could drop a bomb on the MOVE compound, killing eleven people including five children, and polite society barely flinched. We built a system where police could raid your home, seize your property through civil asset forfeiture without even charging you with a crime, and take your freedom with minimal due process. And polite society didn’t care—because the victims weren’t them.

That’s the real slippery slope. It was never gun control or socialism. The real erosion of liberty came from our willingness to accept selective violence. To look the other way when rights were trampled, as long as they weren’t our rights. To mistake the quiet hum of injustice for the sound of order.

So when Trump came along and started using the same tools—against journalists, political opponents, migrants, and protesters—he wasn’t breaking the system. He was just using it honestly. Without the mask.

And here’s the thing: it wasn’t just political violence that polite society ignored—it was economic violence, too. For fifty years, both parties sold the working class a lie. They told us globalization, deregulation, and privatization would make everyone richer. That free markets would lift all boats. What they really did was sink the American worker.

Democrats and Republicans alike embraced corporate trade deals, financial deregulation, and union-busting laws that gutted wages and shipped our factories overseas. Clinton repealed Glass-Steagall and signed NAFTA. Obama bailed out the banks, not the homeowners. Republicans pushed trickle-down economics that never trickled past the boardroom.

Polite society called this “modernization.” It called it “progress.” But what it really was—was extraction.

We even measured that extraction as if it were growth. GDP went up. The stock market soared. Corporate profits hit records. Meanwhile, real wages stagnated, costs exploded, and the middle class was hollowed out. When workers in Ohio or Michigan complained that their towns were dying, polite society told them to “learn to code.” When families said they couldn’t afford healthcare, housing, or college, polite society told them inflation was low and the economy was strong. It was another form of gaslighting—another polite lie we told ourselves to avoid confronting how far we’d let things slide.

So you have this political rot and this economic rot, both covered up by the same polite lies. You’d think the institutions meant to protect us—the courts, Congress—would have been the guardrails. But they were part of the slide.

The Supreme Court was supposed to be the steady hand. Instead, for decades it’s expanded the tools of the police state—upholding civil asset forfeiture, gutting labor rights, declaring money equals speech. And when its members weren’t shaping law from the bench, some were cashing in on it. Justice Clarence Thomas took undisclosed luxury trips and gifts worth hundreds of thousands from billionaire Harlan Crow. Justice Samuel Alito went on fishing trips to Alaska courtesy of hedge fund manager Paul Singer, who had cases before the Court. Justice Neil Gorsuch sold property to the CEO of a law firm that regularly argues before the Court and didn’t disclose the buyer’s identity. The Court still has no binding ethics code with real enforcement. They judge themselves, literally. It’s no wonder public trust has collapsed.

Congress, meanwhile, has become a theater set. In the 1970s, it passed over a thousand bills per session. Today, it barely manages a few hundred. The filibuster is weaponized, incumbents win 90% of their races, and lobbyists write most of the legislation that actually does pass. We’ve built a government that can’t build anything. And polite society just shrugs. “That’s politics.”

But it isn’t. It’s capture. It’s decay disguised as gridlock.

When a system is that broken, when it’s so obviously captured and decayed, what do you get? You get someone like Donald Trump. People need to understand, he didn’t invent the corruption, or the abuse of power, or the contempt for law. He just dropped the pretense. He stopped pretending America was a nation of laws and revealed it for what it had become: a nation of loopholes.

Everything he’s doing has roots in decisions polite society endorsed: mass surveillance, indefinite detention, asset forfeiture, unchecked police power. The tools of authoritarianism were all there—he just picked them up and pointed them in new directions. The Constitution wasn’t shredded in 2016. It’s been unraveling for decades, one bipartisan thread at a time, while polite society clapped along, congratulating itself for its civility as the foundations cracked.

That’s what makes this moment both terrifying and full of potential. When the mask slips, you can finally see the face underneath.

Trump’s boldness has clarified the choice in a way polite society never could. We’re at a fork. One path is to keep sliding—to accept that democracy was always theater, that corruption is inevitable, that extraction is just how the economy works. The other path is reconstruction: to build a country that actually delivers for working people, holds the powerful accountable, and makes democracy functional instead of decorative.

The violence polite society ignored is now visible. The corruption it excused is now undeniable. The institutions it worshipped are now discredited. For the first time in decades, there’s no going back to the quiet dysfunction. The choice is becoming clearer every day.

But only if we stop trying to go back. Because the old normal wasn’t normal—it was just quiet.

The path forward isn’t nostalgia. It’s reconstruction.

Not vague promises or symbolic gestures, but concrete commitments around three things: making life affordable through real competition, accountability for everyone including the powerful, and democracy that actually functions.

I’ve laid out the full plan here—a binding pledge and governing strategy built around these principles, with the polling data that proves it’s what voters across the spectrum actually want. It’s designed for candidates willing to commit in writing, organize as a bloc, and challenge the failed status quo in primaries if necessary.

Because here’s what’s different: it requires candidates willing to commit to these things in writing, publicly, before they get elected. Not campaign promises they forget the day after inauguration—but binding pledges to vote together as a bloc, restore public ownership, and prioritize a shared agenda over party deference, with real consequences for breaking turning their back on the mission. The full pledge is here.

And here’s the thing about power—it doesn’t care about good intentions. It responds to numbers. One person calling for change gets ignored. Ten get dismissed. But fifty? A hundred? That’s a bloc. That’s leverage. That’s the difference between begging for scraps and writing the menu.

You start with affordability because people feel that in their bank account every single day. You prove it works. You build trust. Then you tackle the harder stuff. It’s not magic. It’s math.

This is a reckoning—not just for Trump, but for the system that made him possible. For every president who bombed without authorization, every senator who sold out to Wall Street, every judge who cashed favors from billionaires, and every administration that told us to “look forward” instead of holding the powerful accountable.

Polite society thought it could bury the rot under ceremony and civility. Now the rot’s out in the open.

We can’t go back to pretending we tripped. We’ve been sliding for a long time. But slides work both ways. You can slide down. Or you can stop, turn around, and start climbing back up.

Together. Loudly. Impolitely. And for real this time.