I have noticed something lately that I do not care for.
More and more people on the political right have taken to calling Michelle Obama a man. Sometimes it is said as a joke. Sometimes it is said with the smug satisfaction of someone who believes he has discovered a clever insult. Sometimes it is posted as if it were a badge of tribal loyalty.
I find it classless.
That may not be the fashionable thing to say in certain circles, but it is the honest thing to say.
There are many fair criticisms a person may make of the Obamas. They were public figures at the highest level of American life. Their politics, policies, speeches, influence, and their place in American culture are all proper subjects for disagreement. A citizen has every right to criticize those things plainly.
But there is a difference between criticism and degradation.
A serious man should know the difference.
I think often of John McCain during the 2008 campaign, when a woman at one of his town halls tried to turn Barack Obama into something foreign and frightening. McCain could have let the moment pass. He could have enjoyed the applause. He could have allowed suspicion and ugliness to work in his favor.
Instead, he took the microphone back.
He corrected her. He defended his opponent as a gentleman. He made clear that his disagreements with Obama were real, but that those disagreements did not require him to degrade Obama’s humanity.
That was not weakness. That was command of oneself.
Political life doesn't require us to abandon manners. It doesn't require us to mock a woman’s appearance, repeat ugly gossip, or take pleasure in humiliating another human being. If anything, political life requires more restraint, not less, because public anger has a way of making people forget what kind of person they are becoming.
The right often speaks, correctly, about tradition, family, order, decency, and respect. Those words should mean something. They should bind us even when we are speaking about people we oppose. Otherwise, they are not principles. They are merely slogans.
I do not say this because I admire Michelle Obama’s politics. I do not. I say it because decency is not something we owe only to people on our side.
There is a kind of insult that weakens the person making it more than the person receiving it. It reveals a lack of discipline. It lowers the conversation. It teaches younger people that cruelty is strength, that vulgarity is courage, and that politics is nothing more than permission to be ugly in public.
That isn't strength.
A man can be firm without being coarse. He can be partisan without being indecent. He can disagree sharply without pretending that every opponent must be mocked at the lowest possible level.
The conservative instinct, at its best, is not just opposition to the left. It's the defense of things worth preserving: family, faith, memory, manners, institutions, standards, and self-command. If we can't preserve those things in our own speech, then we should be careful about claiming to defend them elsewhere.
There are enough real arguments to make. There are enough serious issues to discuss. There are enough honest disagreements in American life without reaching for cheap personal ridicule.
Some will say this is softness. I disagree.
It is easy to be crude. It is easy to repeat the joke. It is easy to join the pile-on and call it courage. What is harder is to remain decent when the people around you have decided that decency is optional.
I am not interested in defending every public figure from every insult. Public life is rough, and those who enter it know that. But I am interested in the kind of people we become when we forget restraint.
A decent society is not built only by winning arguments. It is built by men and women who know where the line is, and who have enough command of themselves not to cross it for applause.
Criticize the politics. Criticize the ideas. Criticize the record.
But leave the cheap degradation alone.
It is beneath us, or at least it ought to be.