https://www.frontpagemag.com/our-constitutional-rights-and-freedoms-trump-manners-and-civility/
Long before Donald Trump berated Ukrainian president Volodymir Zelenskyy, the president has been criticized for his lack of decorum, manners, politesse, and political “norms.” From snubbing Hillary Clinton during his first inaugural address, to discarding “diplomatic niceties” when talking with foreign leaders,” as the AP put it in 2019, Trump’s boorishness and vulgarity has been the Dems’ go-to smear.
But complaints about manners and proper behavior generally reflect the mores and sensibilities of privileged elites defined by birth, wealth, and credentials––all policed by professional and political guilds. In a democratic republic in which all citizens are politically free and equal, such rules often function as gate-keepers to keep hoi polloi in their place, at the expense of crafting policies that serve national interests and security. Worse, they are tools for silencing rival factions’ free speech rights by question-begging labels like “misinformation” or “hate-speech.”
Ever since the birth of democracy in ancient Athens and its enfranchisement of the poor and uneducated, the issue of free public speech had been contested. Indeed, empowering the citizen masses to vote in elections, openly deliberate and speak out about policy, and hold office, was the heart of democracy, the public confirmation of the citizens’ freedom and equality––as the extant ancient antidemocratic complaints from antiquity illustrate.
Moreover, to protect the right of free speech the Athenians had very few restrictions on insults and mockery. Ancient comedy, performed at state-sponsored religious festivals, and managed by citizens, was also a political institution unbridled by rules of decorum. Classicist K.J. Dover writes of comedy in the 5th and 4th centuries B.C. that “every Athenian politician we know of from historical sources was accused by comic playwrights of being ugly, diseased, prostituted perverts, the sons of whores by foreigners who bribed their way into citizenship.”
Nor was it just poetic license: political debate in the Athenian Assembly, the legislative body of the state, was just as vulgar. Sordid sexual practices, disreputable parentage, and taking foreign bribes were standard charges made in speeches, including in trials. As the philosopher Democritus said, “Freedom of speech is the sign of freedom.”