Civics and civility: A darn on threadbare fabric or the fabric itself?

• Published date: 01 January 2023
• Author: Jeremy L. Hall
• Date: 01 January 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.13591

EDITORIAL

Civics and civility: A darn on threadbare fabric or the

fabric itself?

Jeremy L. Hall

University of Central Florida, Orlando, Florida, USA

Correspondence

Jeremy L. Hall, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL, USA.

Email: jeremy.hall@ucf.edu

The commencement of volume 83 signals the beginning

of the end for my editorial team; our stop is fast

approaching, and by year’s end, we will disembark this

vessel and surrender it to another team to carry on PAR’s

legacy. As this particular page turns, it is cause for reflec-

tion about where we were at the beginning, and where

we are today. We began this journey during the summer

of 2017, six months before the launch of our first issue,

78(1). Donald Trump had been inaugurated president that

January, and Trump Derangement Syndrome was spread-

ing like wildfire. Funding for the Southern US Border Wall

was passed. Confederate monuments were targeted for

removal, and their removal protested. Race riots took

place in cities all over the United States, along with

marches, protests, and other forms of demonstration as

frustrations with social injustice heated up and boiled

over, drawing our attention to justice and equity in deep

and meaningful ways (Battaglio & Hall, 2018; Hall, 2022;

Pandey, Bearfield, & Hall, 2023).

Those events seemed significant at the time, but we

were in store for so much more than we could imagine.

Just as things were really starting to pick up—gas was

cheap, the economy was sound, and people were happy

as long as they turned off the news—we got a big kick in

the seat from COVID-19. The influence of the COVID-19

pandemic tested our collective patience and opened a

window of opportunity through which hosts of policy

entrepreneurs jumped headlong in efforts to defund

police, open the border, and generally get us all “woke.”

Police were defunded. School boards were subjected to

onslaughts from angry parents upon discovering the

inclusion of Critical Race Theory (CRT) in the curriculum.

Two years of off-the-rocker craziness surrounded us in the

confusion—craziness that has fought, scratched, and

clawed for the past year to slow our return to normalcy.

Or, rather, our arrival at whatever new normal will result

when the dust finally settles. We seem to be entering a

period of retrenchment against many of the extreme pro-

gressive policies that were institutionalized during the

pandemic. Policy inaction has spoken more loudly than

policy action during this time. All the laws in the world

can be passed, but the decision not to enforce an existing

law, or to enforce one selectively, wields far greater

power. Just as it takes several swings for a pendulum to

finally come to rest, it will take a few incrementally smal-

ler passes back and forth before we figure out exactly

where things stand.

Since 2017, we have collectively been desensitized to

extreme positions and actions. Decorum has been

replaced by despotism in the halls of government. The

media—including social media—takes sides unabashedly.

Politics has become downright ugly. Joe Biden lauds him-

self as the greatest president of all time (Wehner, 2022),

while the economy suffers the crippling effects of supply

chain problems, record inflation, high fuel prices, illegal

border crossings, jittery employment reports, and a stock

market that bounces up and down like a toddler on a

trampoline, just to name just a few areas where things

could be better. Recession fears are the subject of fre-

quent news stories. Then, just for kicks, fresh off a mid-

term election where Republicans’performance fell far

below expectations, Donald Trump has announced he will

once again seek the U.S. presidency in 2024. This is, of

course, while several scandals still churn, such as his fail-

ure to relinquish classified documents upon leaving

office, his previous tax returns, his role in January 6th Cap-

itol insurrection, and other such fun. Elon Musk has pur-

chased Twitter and driven out or fired many of the staff

that contributed to its reputation for a left-leaning bias,

opening an avenue for freer speech on social media. He

has been criticized by the mainstream media for doing so

(see, for example, McHangama, 2022). And, to connect

the dots, Trump has used Musk’s revelations of certain

scandalous Twitter documents to suggest that the Consti-

tution should be abandoned and government set aside

because the media apparatus was interfering in the previ-

ous presidential election (Samuels, 2022). I guess it would

be fair to say things got a little heated over the past five

Received: 9 December 2022

DOI: 10.1111/puar.13591

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