Last night as I'm sure you've heard, Mike Pence attended the show Hamilton on Broadway. He was booed a lot by much of the audience and he was addressed by a cast member from the stage. If you haven't seen the video, I'll embed a copy at the end of this post.
This morning, you have people like Rob Dreher scolding the booers and the cast for rudeness or inappropriate behavior. At the same time, I've been getting e-mails from a couple of Trump-backing friends imploring "us" to show respect for the election results, give the new team a chance, bind the nation's divisions, "Let's all work together to make this a better country," etc.
This gives "us" an awkward decision that all of "us" ("them" included) encounter in life: Do you play fair with people who you feel haven't played fair with you?
Whether they'll admit it or not, what they're essentially asking us is: Don't act like we did when your guy won. It would be bad for the country.
This is a tough position to be in. The friends who wrote me didn't themselves loudly boo Joe Biden or question Barack Obama's legitimacy but they didn't see all that much wrong with it…and they sure cheered on those who vowed to obstruct every single thing the Democratic administration did. That was acceptable behavior to them. So there's the obvious temptation to just give it back to them. Even they understand that.
But they're also right that it isn't fair and could be bad for the country in some ways. So there's also the temptation to show that we're better than that and to not sink to their level and tactics. I also wouldn't like the feeling that I was that rude or that prejudiced.
Now, in the Hamilton incident, I think Dreher and others like him are demanding a civility that they never demanded of their own. I also think this is a minor incident that they're blowing out of scale.
Booing the Vice-President Elect: Well, that doesn't bother me all that much. Every prominent politician gets booed if he or she goes to the wrong baseball game or other public event. Yeah, it's disrespectful. That's why you boo — to show disrespect. I think Mike Pence has been enormously disrespectful to women, gay folks, those not of his own party or religion, etc., and he's done a lot worse than boo them. He's tried to deny them basic human rights.
Booing isn't violence. It isn't even all that effective. Booing doesn't strip away someone's right to marry or get proper medical care or equal pay or anything. It doesn't even rise to the level of "Lock her up!" and more hateful chants that were heard at Trump rallies with Trump up there loving every minute of them. You might even say that booing is free speech, especially if they boo, express their opinion and then shut up. That audience at Hamilton sure wasn't about to disrupt the event, as some protesters do. They paid a helluva lot of money to see that show.
And I thought the statement from the stage, which had not a hint of threat in it and which was in keeping with the spirit of the show, was perfectly appropriate. What Dreher doesn't like is that those who opposed Trump-Pence in the election are showing no signs of acting defeated, impotent and accepting of their new overlords. Dreher himself is one of the more reasonable Conservatives at times. He was critical of Trump's vulgarity and lying. But now, like a lot of them, he's hopeful that this means a lot of the Conservative agenda happens and doesn't want to see it obstructed…like, say, the way Republicans obstructed Obama's.
But I still don't know how I feel about this urging to work with them, give them a chance, etc. I don't like the idea of any leader I'm counting on to advance my views behaving like Mitch McConnell or of the pundits who represent my views acting like Sean Hannity. Then again, part of me thinks, "Well, maybe that's what it takes these days. Maybe we have to do that to save Medicare and health care reform and gay rights and to keep more people like Trump out of power." Installing Rudy Giuliani as Secretary of State is like…well, I don't even have an analogy for that. The best I can do is steal Tom Lehrer's joke about the necrophiliac who was appointed Coroner.
If you've read this far waiting to see me come to some firm conclusion, I'm sorry. I don't have one. I don't like the idea of "my side" being as destructive and obstinate and nasty as Republicans were to President Obama for eight years, commencing well before Day One. I also don't like the idea of "my side" being held to some standard of civility and cooperation by folks who never felt it applied to them and who will not adhere to it the next time a Democrat wins.
This is, for me, an unsolvable problem. One approach gets you the right results by doing the wrong thing and the other gets you the wrong results by doing the right thing. I'll probably decide that the wrong results are so wrong that the wrong thing becomes the right thing…but I'll never feel it's that right. Here's the Hamilton video…