Lessons from politics
I remember as a kid in civics class learning about Theodore Roosevelt’s bully pulpit. This was in the context of high school level American history, a curriculum which put a positive spin on our presidents. America only sat under a bright light in the textbooks. My reaction was confused. Did the text and the teacher mean that Roosevelt was acting like a jerk, hammering on people unfairly? Obviously not. They clearly intended to have students come away with a favorable picture of the president. Roosevelt was a bully for good, as counter-intuitive as that sounds.
The word “bully” in the history of English has had meanings at cross purposes. A few centuries ago, it was likely more positive than negative, being associated with affection and social responsibility. In contemporary mid 20th century continuing through today, the meaning is decidedly negative. Hence, my confusion about Roosevelt.
English centuries ago presumably borrowed the word ‘bully’ from Middle Dutch ‘boel,’ where it meant a male lover, maybe even further back just a male relative or provider. In modern Dutch, it came down as ‘bul’ meaning a ‘little man.’ As often happens with words, ‘boel’ took on even in Middle Dutch the negative meaning of an adulterer. It was a term that perhaps connoted the appeal or power that a man could exert over someone, in both good and bad senses. The word also shares a root with the word ‘phallus,’ which English borrowed from Greek. So, no surprise, the power wrapped into the word was likely associated with sexual prowess.
The positive sense of ‘bully’ is mostly absent now, though it survives a little in the dated expression “Bully for you!” — “Good going and congratulations.” The negative sense has blossomed and expanded and, now, as both a verb and a noun, it’s come to be associated with the intent to humiliate, torment, or denigrate someone weaker, and, moreover, to do so habitually. There’s not a lot of love left in the word.
Bullying as a behavior is now something we especially talk about in school environments, where for kids victimized by bullying it’s seen as an impediment to learning, a risk factor to their health, and a provocation to suicidal ideation and actual suicide. For kids who hate school, who fail, who fall into self-destructive behaviors, bullying can be a significant causative factor.
Social scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have established this connection between health impacts and bullying from extensive study of the issue. Because of this attention, schools have become sensitized to the issue; teachers and administrators are trained to recognize bullying and to intercede when they see it. And that means intercession on the behalf of the victim. In past decades, teachers and administrators could be complicit in the bullying by telling victims to essentially turn the other cheek. That was the easier way to restore some semblance of order, because it was much harder to get the bully to stop bullying. It’s kind of still that way.
What’s different now, though, is that in all states there are laws against bullying in schools. In West Virginia, for example, our state legal code specifically includes in Chapter 18: Education definitions and prohibitions against bullying. Still, the statistics, reported each year on the incidence of bullying, show that the problem persists year to year. So the question is why doesn’t it go away in the face of laws, policing and other efforts?
Reasons that school bullying persists may have two causes. First, the regulations don’t deal specifically with how to confront or remediate bullies. Regulations instead tell victims how to respond and cope, and tell parents and school staff how to help. But here’s an interesting pair of statistics. About 22% of high school students report being bullied in each of the years the CDC has collected data directly from students. But the number of students who have directly observed bullying taking place rises to about 60%. That strongly suggests that bullying is out in the open, not only done behind closed doors, a fact that speaks to its being socially embedded.
And the fact of social embedding we may suppose is the second major cause of bullying’s persistence. It’s because its more widely distributed in society; it doesn’t just occur in schools. It’s taking place in families, businesses, sports organizations, even churches. And importantly, you find it in our politics. Every parent, every boss, coach, pastor, or politician who labels a Black or Latino person, an Asian, a Muslim, a Jew, a woman, an LGBTQ person, a disabled person as weak or damaged or defective or alien, licenses someone else to treat those people as unworthy and deserving of abuse.
There’s an explanation in this cycle of abuse for why bullying persists. Victims of bullying may internalize the lesson of being victims and pay back society by becoming bullies themselves. It doesn’t always happen, but according to a report from the University of Washington, children exposed to violence in the home are more predisposed to become bullies in school. Bullying can cross generations.
What’s somewhat less understood is the effect of politicians who use their bully pulpits to actually bully other individuals or groups. Is it possible that abusive politicians create abusive citizens? Is political bullying increasing the volume of hate messaging and threats we see happening across media? Is the bully pulpit of Roosevelt, which served him as an platform for positive social change, a thing of the past? Is political bullying a symptom or a cause or both?
The Stubblefield Institute at Shepherd University in Shepherdstown, WV has a mission to make discourse civil. At a recent Institute panel discussion on bullying, the discussants did not directly implicate politics in bullying. But they did make the following points:
- Bullying starts at the top and must be stopped at the top.
- Bullying reduces productivity. It destabilizes organizations.
- Anti-bullying policies don’t always produce enforcement.
- Do nothing bystanders implicitly endorse bullying.
- Bullying is cruelty and it’s purpose is to harm people. It is not innocent.
It doesn’t take much effort to find instances of how certain politicians in today’s polarized America display each of these characteristics. If politicians sit at the very top of our social hierarchy, then that’s where we need to focus to actually break the cycle. How about putting civility back into civics?