Last week, Washington elites, including political insiders and journalists alike, decided the First Amendment was getting a little too much of a work out. In the name of civility, they came to the defense of Trump Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders—a woman who has done more to weaponize the White House podium against the American people than any of her predecessors, bar none.
She not only lies more effortlessly and with less compunction than the initial public face of the White House, Sean Spicer, she also never hesitates to use her perch to deliver deadly blows to individual citizens. Like when she took time in April to read a scathing pre-written (i.e. pre-meditated) takedown of former FBI Director James Comey, who was in the midst of launching his recently released book. Sanders called the launch "a poorly executed PR stunt" by Comey, who was trying to "desperately rehabilitate his tattered reputation and enrich his own bank account by peddling a book that belongs in the bargain bin of the fiction section." Comey, she said, would be "forever known as a disgraced partisan hack." Projection, perhaps?
Sanders also deployed her professional Twitter account against the private citizen who sparked furor among Washingtonians by asking Sanders to leave the restaurant she owned. After specifically name checking the "Red Hen in Lexington, VA" for asking her to leave, Sanders gave her 3 million followers a lesson in principled public service. "I always do my best to treat people, including those I disagree with, respectfully and will continue to do so," she wrote.
The restaurant, which is set to reopen Thursday, was forced to shut down for two full weeks after Sanders' respectful treatment of it. Perhaps the eatery would have experienced backlash anyway, but Sanders’ self-serving tweet from her professional account all but ensured that it would.
Washington elites were quick to label the Sanders-Red Hen incident along with the heckling of other Trump administration officials as a "crisis in civility." But the person who got it right was New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg, who framed the situation as a "crisis in democracy."
In fact, what we are witnessing is not a breakdown in civility but rather an uprising against unrepresentative democracy. The passions that move people to engage in uncomfortable acts of civil disobedience are always driven by injustices that simultaneously shake them to their core and in their view aren't being addressed. Protesters are spurred to action precisely because they feel their elected officials are entirely failing to address their urgent concerns. In present times, those concerns are fueled by one political party that has entirely abdicated its constitutional duty to provide a check on executive power while another party fails to adequately demonstrate the anguish felt by its constituents.
People protest and heckle and demonstrate when they feel they have no other avenues left to them to adequately express their views. Private citizens are afforded such peacefully undertaken rights of expression by the First Amendment, and direct actions are expressly intended to make the powerful on the left and right uncomfortable and, ideally, more responsive to the cries of the people.
Instead, Trump predictably used his platform to demonize the Red Hen while many Washington journalists circled the wagons around Team Trump and political operatives of all stripes decried these pedestrian tactics—which are nothing less than the well-honed tools of every single great civil rights movement in our nation's history.
It's cute that Washington elites think they can look down from on high and tell everyone what do, but that's not how protest works. As the owner of the Red Hen told the Washington Post: “I would have done the same thing again. We just felt there are moments in time when people need to live their convictions. This appeared to be one.”
That's called using whatever nonviolent means possible to send a message. That's called standing on principle—something many Washington elites have apparently lost touch with. And yes, that's called democracy.