Last Friday White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders tried to eat dinner at the Red Hen, a small restaurant in Virginia. But after a consultation with her staff, Stephanie Wilkinson, the establishment’s co-owner, requested that Sanders leave. She did, and then appeared, to some, to violate ethics standards when she used her official social media channels to publicize the incident. But forget protocol, which this administration has flouted on countless occasions. Let’s discuss manners.
A debate exploded over the weekend, with Republicans and even some Democrats determined to make the case that Sanders is a civilian who doesn’t deserve to be booted from a restaurant. “Let the Trump Team Eat in Peace,” ran a headline in The Washington Post. “Politics on both sides so tribal it reaches dining, entertainment & sports,” Sen. Marco Rubio tweeted. Even David Axelrod, a Democratic commentator, chimed in, “amazed and appalled” at the number of people who’d “applauded” what he deemed an “expulsion.” He went on to declare it a “triumph” for Donald Trump’s America—that we had been divided into red and blue dinner plates.
The pundit class is up in arms because it believes Sanders is entitled to eat at a farm-to-table restaurant, off the clock. But that’s not true. It’s 2018, and we don’t live in the realm of the rational. We live in the realities of our current hell, for which Sanders serves as the administration’s public face. The lies that she’s helped perpetuate don’t have a 9-to-5 schedule. Even so, I know some will insist that if we chase Sanders out of public spaces, we cede critical ground. How can we claim that what we want is bipartisan action, if we can’t stand to sit at the same table?
But to share a meal with someone is, in a sense, to settle on a set of facts: This is a plate, this is a fork, this is a human. To be kind or even civil to Sanders wouldn’t be the rare show of bipartisanship. Bipartisanship lies in consensus laws, which Republicans have not attempted to pass for most of a decade. Bipartisanship would be a clean DREAM Act, but no such luck.
Some would have us believe that the preservation of our national ideals depends on whether or not the people who are determined to undermine them can pick at a cheese plate in a nice restaurant. I don’t think so. It doesn’t make progressives “better than them” to swallow our values so that people like Sanders and Stephen Miller can eat.
Don’t pretend Sarah Huckabee Sanders is a normal customer or this was a normal meal.
Wilkinson said in an interview with The Washington Post that she serves private customers with whom she disagrees all the time. What she didn’t want to do was wait on a public person whose boss counts on us to be nice while he dismantles our democratic institutions. The crusaders for “civil” discourse support our resistance, but not outside a certain line. Well, we’ve drawn it—not between parties or policies but between the humane and the depraved.
All of us have made a terrible barter. While Trump honors no norms, we’re expected to uphold them. He mocks civil liberties and shows contempt for a free press, and we’ve been convinced that the true test of this historical moment isn’t a measure of what we will do to support the most disenfranchised. It’s how well we’ll maintain our decorum. That Trump notches this win even as he refines his politics of dominance and narcissism is an added insult.
People like Axelrod and perhaps even Rubio will tell us that the Trump era will come to an end, and when it does, the depths to which we’ve all sunk will be hard to crawl out of. It will be harder still for the children who’ve been separated from their parents and for the women who’ve survived domestic violence only to be rebuffed, told that the harm done to them no longer meets our standards for asylum.
There will be those who invoke the homophobic bakeries that refuse to make cakes for LGBTQ couples and people who warn that the slope on which the Red Hen sits is the most slippery of all. Former secretary of education Arne Duncan, who served under Obama, seemed to recall Jim Crow when he tweeted that our nation has denied “people access to restaurants, to water fountains, and even bathrooms,” a record which he said is “too raw, too real” to perpetuate. I feel the same, that it is “too real.” But unlike Duncan, I know better than to use an example of such stark oppression to claim that oppressors deserve to break bread with us. Some eateries require a shirt and shoes. Perhaps most don’t realize that in the Trump era, a kitchen needs policies to keep out those who make the President’s lies more palatable.
The editorial board of The Washington Post maintains that the Red Hen’s decision is just the latest evidence that politics has “spilled into what used to be considered the private sphere” and that the bleed into such uncivil behavior serves no one. If we approve of what happened to Sanders, we could find ourselves kicked out of establishments whose owners don’t like what we stand for too. But not all positions are a matter of opinion. Some are about the nature of who we are, what is fine and what is intolerable.
Politics is not a game. No one scores “points” when Sarah Huckabee Sanders leaves a restaurant. No one believes we’ve won some prize because she had to find her meal elsewhere. But instances like this remind us is that politeness for its own sake has never led to justice. In its conclusion, the Post cautions that people “who believe that abortion is murder” could use the same tactics the Red Hen co-owner did this weekend. What if those activists decided that reproductive health care providers “should not be able to live…with their families”?
What if. I think I know.
Between 1993 and 2015, when three people were shot and killed at a Planned Parenthood health center in Colorado, at least 11 people have been murdered at abortion clinics. In the civil rights era, black Americans lost their lives to inch closer to freedom. Discrimination is fatal—not when the people who perpetuate it sit down to dinner but when “nice” people don’t interrupt.
Since the election, some of us have have wanted to know whether we’re in the middle of one of those times we read about in textbooks. And if we are, who will tell us? Week after week, we watch The Bachelorette and make appointments and shop for groceries. With all the terrible news, we wonder whether our routines should feel different.
But here’s what the fortunate never remember—moments likes this one do not announce themselves to us. No one comes to whisper in our ears: Now! Go! (And the people who are under the deepest and most immediate threat don’t get to choose whether or not to act.) Good people, nice people, civilized people have to start to make the hard choices. There is no simple calculus. There is just a government-backed machine that believes it can commit atrocities because Americans are too polite or numb to stop it, and some people who will seize whatever opportunities available to them muck up the works.
Don’t pretend Sarah Huckabee Sanders is a normal customer or this was a normal meal.
When people in the future want to know what we did, I don’t want to tell them that we cleared Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ dessert plate and thanked her for the tip. I want to tell say we threw sand in the wheels whenever we could. Confrontation isn’t violence, and we can’t draw little boxes around our politics as if to claim that it’s civil disobedience when it’s in the streets, but just plain rude when it happens at dinnertime.
Mattie Kahn is a senior editor at Glamour.
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