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"You're so Nice. You're not Good, you're not Bad, you're just... Nice."
Into the Woods is a 1987 Sondheim musical (and a 2014 live action movie), throwing together a bunch of Brothers Grimm fairie tales into a stew, and then asking what happens after happily ever after. While later pieces in the same genre would often re-invent, twist or just completely invert the morality and drives of their main characters to provide a more morally 'complicated' story, Into the Woods is a good bit more restrained in its re-imagining. The heroes remain protagonists and the villains jerks; it's just what this does to them and those around them that changes.
In particular, the tweaks here recognize that one good day does not make for a happy life, nor does everything that is heroic end up being good. Because this is a musical, and subtlety is for cowards, this is explicitly stated in song, with the villainous Witch belting out complaints about how the protagonists are Nice. And this predates the Nice Guy discourse; she's complaining that they are the sort of people who end up being protagonists.
Mitt Romney released a self-titled biography recently, and did a related media tour, as he
saw the writing on the wallretired, and there were certain parallels that hit my brain and wouldn't leave since, nor have been left unassisted by other events since. Like no shortage of claims from him and his allies, quite a lot of the focus is on how his particular brand of Dignified, Professional, and Polite conservatism is important, and how its federal prominence has recently and near-completely collapsed. I can get some specific quotes for those interested, but chances are very good you've heard them before, and it's far from specific to Romney or even to conservative critics of populism. There's no shortage of politician, political, and non-political actors that really develop a personality and identity as being nice, above all."I'm not Good, I'm not Nice, but I'm Right."
While the play follows several different viewpoint characters, much of the connecting force and impetus for events comes from the Witch: in the first act, she needs the Baker to collect items to cure her curse of ugliness, she took away Rapunzel in her tower, her magic beans get Jack to the giant's tower, so on. While the second act is more about the consequences falling from those decisions, she still plays a serious role. Even up until her removal from the play in the final act, she's the one with ideas.
And she's not a good person, and they're not exactly nice ideas! She's gets the Baker to cooperate with the aid of a curse she placed on his house decades ago, she took Rapunzel from the Baker's father, she's just an all-around unpleasant (if funny) person to be around. Her final demand is to have Jack, to let him be crushed by the Giantess. If it weren't for how important those ideas were, no one would stand her.
For conservatives, especially the sort of conservatives who complains a lot about Romney being a RINO or use the phrase 'controlled opposition', there's a lot to complain about important and truthful ideas that either weren't getting voiced, or are only given enough attention to disclaim or throw under the bus. In many cases, it is that niceness that acts as an argument against recognizing even the strongest version of these positions; but even the strawman version where the bloodless (as far as the death of a child can be bloodless) story gets no attention and justifies the cruel story exists. I've pointed before to VanDyke as presenting vital information about procedural gamesmanship -- not despite, but because of the very traits that lead to him being seen as unqualified by the ABA.
... but the Witch is not always, actually, that right. The Last Midnight (and the Witch being literally eaten by the earth in the film version) is driven by her demand, and the rest of the cast's refusal, to surrender Jack to the Giant's Wife, who is currently in the process of stomping half the kingdom and much of its subjects flat. That demand might be ethically justifiable given Jack's killing of the Giant, but given that the Giantess is nearly blind and squishing much of the populace of the kingdom by accident or indifference, very far from clear that it'd actually salve her anger (especially in the film version). Even small asides, like the growled promise that the Baker will never find his sister who can never be reached, often end up wrong. Her prophecy about the protagonists being doomed to repeat their sins and the sins of their forebears, unsurprisingly, doesn't last to the curtain call.
The obvious metaphor today would be to point toward "they're eating dogs", which lacks even Vance's deniability of 'heard reports of' or the memeability of the oral sex joke. But that's just recency bias, and it wasn't even the most recent one at the end of that debate night: he and his quite willing to throw out the implausible (bluetooth earrings!) with the at-least-precedented (leaked debate questions) to the overt and obvious (ABC 'factchecking' things wrong). Call it bullshitting if you want, but at best it's distracting, and more often it's only defensible at all by pointing to the rest of the politician populace -- ie, no defense at all. And it's not like he's alone, here. I'm not a huge fan of Ken White of PopeHat calling everyone he doesn't like a dogfucker or shoot up federalist society meetings, but it'd even more damning when he yells those sorta things and also can't be bothered to take his 'serious' writings seriously.
((For a lighter-weight comparison that everyone involved would absolutely loathe, Neil deGrasse Tyson's schtick has increasing focused on what would charitably be called improving awareness of
nitpickinglyspecific scientific knowledge, at the cost of coming across as obnoxiously uncharitable... and also doesn't even do that.))"You're all liars and thieves... Oh, why bother? You'll just do what you do."
Except... one of the Witch's mistakes is claiming that the protagonists and their fellow travelers are nice. The Baker steals Red Riding Hood's cape and tricks Jack out of his cow, his wife cheats, Cinderella is gormless, Rapunzel has no idea how to interact with normal people, Red Riding Hood's turned her trauma from the wolf eating her not into grl pwr but into oft-unchecked aggression, Jack's a sociopath and a thief, the princes are "charming, not sincere". Again, no small part of the play is pointing out that the acts needed to turn a wish true don't come free, and also that they're often not exactly nice things to actually do. At best, the protagonists are willing to rationalize or excuse their faults and bad acts; at common, they project them on each other; at worst, they just don't want to have to think about it. There is literally a song of nothing but that!
(tbf, not one of the better ones)
Romney portrays himself as a man of dignity and kindness, and no small number of his biggest fans can't help but agree... at the same time that Romney gives constant asides about what specific person he disrespects most, or tells stories about how he and his political allies "burst into laughter" as soon as the target of that laughter left the room. The famous 47% gaffe might have played particularly poorly in Peoria, but it's not like the man was slow to. It gets worse if you look at the guys who tried to work for his campaign.
And, of course, it's not limited to Romney -- the currently sitting President who ran on his moderation also released a first-party political ad including an innocent citizen as a "white supremacist", still up on twitter, the people opposed to Romney -- or even to politicians. I have and will complain at length about pundits who have strong words and split the finest hairs about extremism in pursuit of virtue, and then lose track of the topic entirely as soon as there own vice comes to challenge. This sorta perverse combination of Abilene Paradox and whisper-or-not-so-whisper cruelty campaign is frustratingly common even down to small-scale organizations.
There's an excuse that the Kind get outsized and
meanoutspoken response, and that's what drives people who made it their brand to occasionally fall to snark and crude response. At best, it's an excuse for incivility; more often, it's an excuse waved before slapping someone for placing the last straw. Kindness has its limits"Oh, why bother? You'll just do what you do."
Unfortunately, this stanza is about where the metaphor falls apart: the Witch decides she's rather exit the stage than continue to deal with these putzes, throwing away her magic beans and inviting every and all curses just to get away from them. The odds of Trump ever deciding to voluntarily be anywhere but the centre of the spotlight is about nil. Nor would Trump be willing to act
the scapegoatresponsible, as the Witch offers when she gives her ultimatum -- she'd take all the blame, be responsible for all their faults, if only she gets to try to make the problem go away. And the problem is far broader than him. We're not getting away from this just because one politician retires.Even before we get to the problem of exploring the chasm between “I for one welcome abandoning anything remotely conservative” and “I must be the most belligerent man to walk the face of earth if I want to be based”, is it even possible to get kind Abileners or honest belligerent assholes? I'm not saying that would be good, but it's bad when the bad option can't live up to its own awful marketing! Forget a Buddha-like calm detachment; it's hard to avoid calling morons morons no matter how much you know it's not worth it, and many of the important things for belligerent assholes to discuss are hard or impossible to really 'know'.
Is there a space in between those two points, even theoretically? Even before we get to the pragmatic considerations or human failings, is there even theoretical space where one could be a polite and civil critic who still takes likely-but-unpleasant discussions seriously? (Not just the right: can the progressive movement surface its more serious critiques, without #KillAllMen or Guillotine Rose fandom tagging along?) I'd say it was one a goal for the rationalist movement, but that's just an indirect way of saying it's not gonna happen.
If not at the individual level, are these perhaps organizational workarounds? One can at least imagine a straight-man/wise-guy combo that distributes responsibility such that the overt temptations are at least not as present, and that's historically been no small part of the role of public relations, but does that actually buy you anything? Or does this just drive the problem one layer earlier, where the organization instead will be either compromised or ripped apart?
I recently read the full Abolition of Man for what might be the first time in 15 - 20 years and it struck me just how contemporary a lot of it felt.
Lewis spends the bulk of the book arguing against the postmodernism in general and the deconstructionist mindset in particular on the grounds that it is fundementally anti-enlightenment and anti-western. The core argument being that these impulses "must inevitably dissolve into moral absurditity" and it's hard not to read the absurdities he describes in both your post and @RenOS's below. Granted he's writing this in early 1943 so theres a whole load of extra shit going on that goes unmentioned in the book but it's interesting to see a prototype/precursor of later internet arguments over whether aithiests can be moral actors in the idea that totalitarian dictatorships like Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia are the default endstate of unrestrained liberalism because if being polite and rational are your only values, you'll go along with anything (including tyranny and mass murder) and anything can and will be rationalized.
Bringing this back to your post. Romney in 2012 was very much a compromise candidate. The go to example on both sides for "reasonable centerist" and it did not protect him from having his name dragged through the mud. The lesson the GOP-base took away from 2012 is that being a "reasonable centerist" gains you nothing, the democrats will hate you regardless.
A common sentiment you'll see in a lot of conservative spaces is that for too long people like Romney, the Cheneys, French, Et Al. have been putting politeness and "not rocking the boat" before anything else, and this has led them to regularly enable and defend numerous bad actors. "Trumpism" is, if anything, a reaction to this percieved tendency.
This is probably a post in itself, but something Lewis gets into is how being "nice" is not the same as being "good" and being "meek" doesn't mean being spineless despite the efforts of postmodernist thinkers to confate the two.
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