In a recent op-ed excerpt from his forthcoming book, former Vice President Mike Pence made a familiar plea: “the next generation of conservative leaders must embrace civility.”
Democracy, he argues, depends on “heavy doses” of it, avoiding personal attacks, modeling restraint, and pursuing principled compromise.
Pence’s call echoes a longstanding strain of institutionalist conservatism that values decorum and process above all.
Yet in the current political and cultural climate, this vision feels not just aspirational but dangerously detached from reality.
I argued during President Trump’s first term in “The Trump Administration’s Disruptive Reform of Political Communication,” that traditional political discourse had become a genteel game that preserved a corrupt status quo. The old rules, polite euphemisms, carefully calibrated rhetoric, and refusal to name enemies plainly, rewarded stasis. They allowed entrenched interests in Washington, the media, academia, and the permanent bureaucracy to maintain power while ordinary Americans watched their borders dissolve, their jobs shipped overseas, their culture eroded, and their children’s futures mortgaged.
Trump’s breakthrough was not just bluster; it was a necessary disruption that reframed communication as a tool for reform rather than ritualistic preservation of elite norms. Conforming once again to those old conventions today would signal surrender, not strength.
Verbal civility and measured debate are luxuries afforded by functional systems operating in good faith. When the stakes involve systemic betrayal on a massive scale, they are meaningless instruments of defeat.
Consider the evidence all around us.
We have witnessed open and organized resistance to law enforcement, the threat of eliminating law enforcement altogether through “defunding police,” violent protests that obstruct and risk the lives of ordinary citizens (every street obstructed by protesters risks the life, health, or safety of a person awaiting emergency services), and riots that destroy communities, only for political leaders and media allies to excuse or minimize the destruction while taxpayers foot the bill for rebuilding.
Billions wasted on corrupt boondoggles line the pockets of insiders with no real consequences. Endless ill-conceived policies, whether green energy fantasies, open borders, or regulatory strangulation sacrifice American jobs and futures while their architects face neither political reckoning nor legal accountability. Prosecutors and judges repeatedly return violent and dangerous criminals to the street and shrug at the predictable carnage.
Nowhere is the righteous indignation more justified and evident than in the battles over our children.
Across school board hearings nationwide, parents have voiced raw outrage at teachers and administrators who betray their trust by facilitating social transitions of minors without parental knowledge or consent. Academia repeatedly surrenders our youth to incompetent, ill-conceived, or indoctrinating programs and practices that leave them vulnerable, broken, and incapable while blaming parents for “teacher’s” hurdles. Young girls are forced to compete against biological males in sports, their dreams crushed and their voices silenced by accusations of “hate” for stating biological reality.
This is not policy disagreement; it is a profound moral violation that strikes at the heart of family, community, epistemic cohesion, and fundamental fairness.
The bureaucratic cruelty is on display in places like California. Los Angeles, under Mayor Karen Bass, provides another stark example. After California failed to competently prevent or prepare to fight devastating wildfires, its leaders heap insult and political castration on injury with years of bureaucratic obstruction.
Citizens who lost everything are prevented from demolishing ruins and rebuilding homes, despite the pleas from a sitting president to slash red tape, and they even tried to prevent them from voting if they had to move away temporarily and didn’t file the right paperwork.
Whether directed at the president or the poor citizen, the lesson is one of power politics. “You don’t have the power, and you can’t make us.”
A whole party deploys the power dynamics of an elementary school playground, with similar results. A political system riddled with corruption that impairs basic governance demands more than gentle words. Polite petitions have repeatedly failed. Blunt exposure of failure is required.
We are still learning how deep is the rot caused by decades of appeals to identity and “truth to power” politics to corruptly achieve and retain power.
Only recently we learned that institutions like the Southern Poverty Law Center, which weaponized “hate” labels to smear dissenters, actually paid to perpetuate the hate it ostensibly opposes. In Minnesota, social services were managed with patterns of willful ignorance or worse, risking harm to vulnerable children and families through wanton misuse of resources. All accomplished under the watch of those in power.
These aren’t isolated missteps but symptoms of a cesspool too wide and too deep for civility to bridge. Some wrongs are so fundamental that responding with mere civility minimizes the scope of the damage and risks admitting defeat. Some betrayals cannot be condemned politely. When one side has abandoned reason, civilized norms, and the pursuit of any common good beyond retention of raw power, “heavy doses of civility” function as unilateral disarmament.
The Democrat party’s trajectory, prioritizing power over governance, identity hierarchies over equality, and institutional capture over reasoned debate, has so betrayed the interests of working and investing Americans that traditional debate is obsolete. They do not seek compromise; they seek conquest of the culture and permanent dominance.
“Hell No!” is the gentlest possible rebuttal.
The political and cultural war we face requires realism and strength. Conservatives must prioritize the best interests of U.S. citizens through secure borders, secure elections, economic opportunity, parental rights, rule of law, and national sovereignty, over performative decorum that the other side exploits.
Trump’s disruptive style proved that bold, unfiltered communication can break through institutional inertia, and contrived conventional wisdom and reconnect politics with the people. His governance has been real rather than performative, offering actual solutions rather than excuses and blame The next generation of leaders should not retreat to the comfortable rhetoric or timid governance of yesterday. They must confront systemic corruption head-on, with the clarity and urgency the moment demands. In an age this uncivil, only truthful disruption offers a path to genuine reform.
May 28, 2026
Source: Civility in an uncivil age: Why polite rhetoric cannot reform a corrupt system – American Thinker
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