Alex Wagner

A call for civility after the president of the United States directed 800 or so of his top generals to focus on what he now calls, quote, the war from within.

How can we be civil here when the politics are so violent?

Writer Roxane Gay has an answer.

We can't.

She argues that civility in a country where one party is working to erase the rights of anyone who doesn't fit into a narrow and predominantly white male conservative vision of America, that that is a fantasy.

This week, we're going to dive into her analysis, the myth of civility, the government shutdown, feminism in the red pill apocalypse, and a lot more.

Here's my conversation with Roxane Gay.

First of all, thank you for doing this.

It's great to have you.

Well, it's great to get some time from you to talk about the state of the world.

I guess I want to start, Professor Gray, Roxanne, with the article that you wrote in the New York Times a few weeks ago about the myth of civility in American politics.

Maybe you can start by explaining what civility is in your estimation and why it's a fantasy.

When you talk about the people who believe in the possibility of civility at this moment, are they sort of more simply put, just people who don't understand oppression and haven't experienced it firsthand?

Yeah, it's like they're so threatened by criticism that they have to take the TV shows off the air.

They're so threatened by criticism in the form of the judicial system that they need to shutter the law firms or threaten them with lawsuits themselves.

They have to threaten the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times and they have to excise the language from the history books and the textbooks.

And it's all to defend their delicate sensibilities around, you know, feeling threatened about both their history, their present and their future.

I guess when you talk about incivility, I want to get to the essence of that because in the piece, in the Times, you say it's the refusal to surrender to hatred.

What do you say to people who believe that incivility as a concept is the promotion of violence?

Can I use, you mentioned in the piece, you use historical examples of the Freedom Riders in the 1960s.