When discussing matters of shared political concern, civility thereby becomes the expression of regard for the other. That is why it is both more and less than mere politeness, with which it is often confused: more because it extends well beyond the niceties of interpersonal behaviour, but less because it is not rule-governed or explicit. Civility is, on this account, something like the political air we must all breathe to negotiate our differences and, maybe, serve the cause of justice.

It is an optimistic picture. Worse, it is one that is justified using arguments that are themselves optimistic — namely that people will smoothly discern a personal interest in being co-operative. Hence the standard objections to the political virtue of civility, from the claim that civility stifles dissent or obscures power relations to the brisker claim that civil talk (in common with all talk) changes nothing. None of these objections is ever far from sight. In 2007, when the collection of intellectual anarchists known as the Invisible Committee circulated their manifesto, The Coming Insurrection, they said this about civility and politics: “All the incivilities of the streets should become methodical and systematic, converging in a diffuse, effective guerrilla war that restores us to our ungovernability, our primordial unruliness...Rage and politics should never have been separated. Without the first, the second is lost in discourse; without the second the first exhausts itself in howls.”

You have to admit that’s a nice piece of dialectical reasoning: Rudeness now! The only trouble is that, though passion may sometimes fuel good change, rage is a distinct modality of human conduct. Rage and politics really should be separated, or there will be no such thing as discourse, just shouting. Even anarchists demonstrate this; otherwise, they wouldn’t bother penning manifestos that make studied factual claims and offer rational arguments. But the argument for civility based on the presuppositions of discourse is valid only if we follow those presuppositions. And clearly many people don’t. So what can we say to them?

Here’s a suggestion, borrowed from game theory. What is incivility but a species of collective action problem? A collective action problem is generated whenever a situation’s rational opportunities at the individual level generate, at the systemic level, outcomes that are bad for everybody. Consider the familiar example of status-seeking via acquisition of a luxury sport utility vehicle. As consumers compete for this particular clump of positional goods — the feelings of safety that come from a ride bigger than the other guy’s, plus the bmw or Mercedes logo over the grille — they have to shoulder mounting personal costs. The competition then turns into a “race to the bottom,” in which every move to advance my position (larger car, fancier logo) creates a new incentive for you to invest more in pursuit of the same combination of size and status. Because these goods function by position, there is no theoretical upper limit to the ratcheted spending of our competition. Ultimately, the mounting opportunity costs mean we all end up poorer, even as the ends of “safety” are obliterated by the fleet of urban tanks surging through the city streets.

How and when the exercise of rational self-interest generates system-wide defeats has been the subject of much investigation and analysis. Some scholars have suggested, for example, that individual rationality, amped by greed and cleverness, led to the collective self-defeat we know as the economic meltdown of 2008 — though this analysis says little about the uneven distribution of the costs of that meltdown, whereby the greediest somehow ended up losing the least. But relatively little attention has been given to discursive versions of collective action problems, perhaps because we naively assume that transparency will govern political exchanges; we think we know what the other person’s interests and actions are. This assumption is false. Discourse, no less than consumption, has positional and hence competitive aspects. Indeed, winning the argument — or, rather, being seen to win it — is the essence of many discursive exchanges, especially political ones. If politics is reduced to elections or debates, it goes from being a shared undertaking of articulating ends and means and becomes a game of status and one-upmanship.

Traditionally, the philosophical defence of political discourse over divine-right authority claims and bare might-is-right power grabs has been that some arguments are better than others, and so they carry the day justifiably, not just factually. Which may be true in some idealized sense, though there are certainly people who doubt even the idealized claim. The trouble is that there are still lots of ways the worse argument can win factually, and incivility is one of these. So I have a clear incentive to resort to it, especially if my argument is weak, in order to boost my position. You jackass.

Now, however, you have an incentive of your own. In fact, merely repeating the incivility would just generate a minor stalemate, and maybe force us back to a rational assessment of the arguments. So you actually have an incentive to raise the rudeness stakes. Where do you get off calling me a jackass, you fucking moron?

And so on. The result is that the goal we sought, carrying the discursive day by force of reason, has been obliterated by the very pursuit of that goal via positional advantage. But now everybody loses, and nobody can win, because the well is poisoned; it no longer contains the fresh, justificatory water that drew us here in the first place.

So much for what Jürgen Habermas called “the unforced force of the better argument,” that fanciful lodestar of rational discourse. In actual discursive markets, bad currency tends to drive out good. Birthers and Tea Partyers can thus dominate the public debate in the United States by saturating it with misinformation, the discursive equivalent of shoddy but cheap merchandise; corporations, meanwhile, can increase their power through effectively limitless donations to election war chests (thanks in part to the Supreme Court’s 5–4 decision in January to strike down electoral spending restrictions for private organizations).

Further accelerating the decline, on both sides of the border, the practice of deindividuation — adopting an online nickname, for example, or hiding behind a political action committee — has become widespread, snapping the bonds of personal responsibility for what people say. It is a small irony of the digital world that John Rawls’s famous “veil of ignorance,” behind which he imagined anonymous citizens rationally choosing fair principles of justice, has in the real world translated largely into nameless flaming. So it goes.

The argument implicit here is the oppositely charged companion to the traditional one of moral sentiment. Instead of, or in addition to, saying that civility is a good thing for a pluralistic society, respecting difference and all that, we can say just why incivility is a bad one: it self-defeats, working against everyone’s individual interests, including the individual who made the first non-co-operative move. Being rude might look like a good tactic, but sooner or later it is revealed as a loser’s move. The argument is imperfect, to be sure: game theory research has shown that optimal results in competitive games are sometimes best achieved with a combination of co-operation and defection, making your moves unpredictable. But even that just highlights the underlying danger of treating political discourse as if it were a zero-sum game in the first place.

You might be thinking, and poised to type, that surely nobody sane considers anonymous discussion boards or wack job attack campaigns genuine forums of democratic debate. True, but it is nevertheless instructive to watch how our fellow citizens talk to each other over the issues of the day. And consider the more serious case of political attack ads. Though widely decried by citizens, polls demonstrate that they are still sometimes effective. That gives all parties a strong motive to use them. Once the last resort of dying election campaigns, such ads are now the norm even for the party in power, launched pre-emptively in place of the former convention of messages that outlined competing platforms. Remember platforms? Where parties would set out what they believed in, rather than attacking the competing guy as a doofus, a cynic, an opportunist? Those were the days.