The Inhospitable Table: On Political Hatred and the Death of Civic Courtesy

There is a scene that recurs with troubling regularity in modern American life, and it played out again last week in my own state’s capital city. Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a mother out to lunch with two other mothers at a Little Rock restaurant called The Croissanterie, was asked—after sitting, eating, paying, and tipping—to leave the establishment. The restaurant later cited a ninety-minute seating policy, but their own statement makes clear that the real driver was that her presence made the staff feel “uncomfortable.” As her party complied and departed, a man standing near the staff—the restaurant says he was a customer, not an employee—sent them off with a crude hand gesture.

The Governor responded with admirable equanimity. “Arkansans are known for their warm hospitality,” she said, “and while that restaurant certainly doesn’t meet that standard, my administration will continue to focus on lifting Arkansans up, not tearing others down with discrimination and hate.” It was a gracious reply—far more gracious than the provocation warranted.

I want to say something about this episode that goes beyond the partisan point-scoring it will inevitably generate, because I think what happened in that dining room is a symptom of something genuinely dangerous in our public life, something that ought to trouble anyone who still believes in the possibility of ordered republican government.

This Is Not New, But It Is Getting Worse

Those of us who were paying attention in 2018 remember when this same woman—then serving as White House Press Secretary—was asked to leave the Red Hen in Lexington, Virginia. The owner objected to specific administration policies and to Sanders’s role in defending them. Sanders complied quietly and tweeted afterward: “I always do my best to treat people, including those I disagree with, respectfully and will continue to do so.” That same year, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was confronted in a restaurant in Louisville. Senator Ted Cruz and his wife were driven from a Washington restaurant by a crowd chanting in their faces. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen was similarly harassed at a Mexican restaurant near the White House. The message being sent, each time, was unmistakable: you are not welcome here. Not in this restaurant, not in this city, not among us.

What we are watching is the normalization of a kind of political excommunication by a class of people who have turned immaturity and petulance into a point of pride, and we should call it what it is.

The Language of “Safety” and “Discomfort”

The restaurant’s statement is worth reading carefully, because it is a crystalline example of the rhetorical moves that have made civil coexistence so difficult. The owners explain that they “recognized that any course of action carried consequences” and that “allowing her to stay risked being perceived as a lack of support for the community that makes up the majority of our team.” They go on to say they chose to “support our employees and guests who expressed they were uncomfortable.”

This is a carefully crafted statement cloaked in a veneer of civility while justifying behavior that is anything but. Perhaps the proper course of action for an employer is to insist that employees conduct themselves as adults rather than indulge their need to advertise membership in the club of the self-righteous. And even if we were, against all evidence and common sense, to assign to them the benefit of the doubt—to accept that they actually did wrestle with their decision, and that their statement betrays genuine uncertainty, as cowardly and asinine as such uncertainty may be—that does little to mitigate the situation.

Notice what their framing accomplishes: the mere presence of a political figure with whom the staff disagrees is characterized as something that must be managed, weighed against consequences, resolved in favor of the employees’ subjective emotional state. The Governor of Arkansas, eating a meal she had already paid for, was not a customer to be served but a problem to be removed.

The language of “discomfort” is doing enormous work in our public discourse today, and it is worth examining with some precision. Discomfort is not danger. It is not harassment. It is not even rudeness. It is the ordinary and inevitable experience of living in a pluralistic society alongside people with whom we disagree. A country that cannot tolerate discomfort cannot maintain the conditions necessary for self-governance.

The rhetoric of “discomfort” and “safety” has become, in certain quarters, a mechanism for claiming moral authority without incurring the cost of actual argument. It substitutes emotional assertion for reasoned disagreement and, in doing so, forecloses the very exchange that democratic life requires.

William F. Buckley Jr., whose civilized combativeness on “Firing Line” stands as perhaps the greatest model of substantive disagreement in the history of American broadcasting, spent decades debating men and women whose views he found not merely mistaken but morally wrong—and he did so with wit, rigor, and a fundamental respect for the humanity of his interlocutors. The idea that one’s political opponents are so threatening that their mere physical presence in a room is cause for alarm would have struck him as both intellectually incoherent and morally unserious.

Instead, we are witnessing on the left a growing fetishization of victimhood—the conviction that moral authority belongs to the oppressed, and that if oppression does not find you, you must manufacture it yourself.

Civility is not the sentimental preference of the weak; it is the load-bearing wall of republican government. Tear it down, and what you have left is not liberation but rubble.

The Asymmetry Nobody Wants to Name

Of course, this kind of treatment is disproportionately directed in one direction. The thought experiment writes itself. Imagine a Democratic governor, a progressive congresswoman, or a prominent liberal activist seated for lunch at a restaurant in Bentonville or Conway, Arkansas. Is it plausible that a conservative restaurant owner would approach the security detail and quietly request that the Democratic official leave because their politics made the kitchen staff uneasy? I do not think it is—not because conservatives are inherently better people, but because this particular brand of political intolerance has found its most organized, most socially sanctioned, and most self-congratulatory expression on the left.

If we are going to have a conversation about the collapse of civic norms, we have to be willing to name who is currently most responsible for that collapse, even if we do so while acknowledging that the capacity for this kind of behavior exists across the political spectrum and can manifest differently in different environments.

An Arkansan’s Perspective

I grew up in this state. I have practiced law here, and I have served in the military because I believe citizenship in a constitutional republic carries obligations. Arkansas is not a perfect place—no place is—but it has historically maintained a culture that prizes a certain kind of personal decency across political lines. We are a state where neighbors are neighbors regardless of how they vote, where the Baptist deacon and the union man can sit next to each other at the diner without incident, where hospitality is not a marketing slogan but a genuine expression of how we were raised.

That culture is not accidental. It was built over generations by people who understood that the bonds that hold a community together—neighborliness, courtesy, the willingness to share a table—are prior to and more fundamental than political agreement. Politics is how we as a community make collective decisions. It is not, or it ought not to be, the whole of our identity. When we allow it to become so, we have made an idol of it, and idols, as the prophets knew, are always destructive.

The dignity of every person made in the image of God—imago Dei—is a doctrine as old as Genesis and as universal as Christianity itself, claimed by every tradition from the Church Fathers to the Reformers. The Southern churches in which so many Arkansans were raised have drawn deeply from it, however imperfectly at times, and it has consistently called us to treat even our adversaries with basic human decency. The Church Fathers maintained the same insistence: the failure to see Christ in the stranger, in the opponent, in the one you would rather turn away, is a spiritual failure of the first order. St. John Chrysostom was not subtle on this point. You cannot claim to love God whom you have not seen while treating with contempt the human being standing in front of you.

This is not a call to political passivity or to the smothering of genuine disagreement. I disagree with the political left on a great many things, and I intend to continue arguing those disagreements vigorously in every appropriate forum. Robust debate is not incivility. Vigorous argument is not hatred. The National Review tradition at its best—Buckley, James Burnham, Whittaker Chambers, George Will—understood that the conservative temperament is, at its core, a disposition toward order, continuity, and the inherited wisdom of civilization.

What Tolerance Actually Requires

The word “tolerance” has suffered considerable abuse in recent decades. In its classical liberal sense, tolerance means the willingness to allow others to hold and express views with which you disagree, without coercing or punishing them for it. It does not mean approving of those views. It does not mean pretending that disagreement does not exist. It simply means that in a free society, people are permitted to think and speak and, yes, eat lunch without being ejected because someone nearby objects to their politics.

This is the tradition of Locke and Mill and, in the American context, Madison—who understood better than anyone that the genius of the republican experiment was precisely its capacity to contain and channel faction rather than to suppress it. Madison was under no illusion that such divisions could be eliminated. Federalist No. 10 is, among other things, a meditation on their permanent reality—groups whose interests are, in Madison’s phrase, “adversed to the rights of other citizens”—in a free society. His solution was not to demand that everyone agree, an impossibility among a free people, but to rely on representative government and the sheer diversity of an extended republic to prevent any single faction from dominating the rest.

Those institutions presuppose a citizenry capable of tolerating the presence of its political opponents. When that capacity erodes—when a restaurant cannot seat a governor and a business owner treats a customer’s political affiliation as grounds for expulsion—the underlying culture that Madison’s institutions depend upon is itself under threat.

The Temptation of Reciprocity

In such moments, the immediate temptation is to respond in kind. If the left will not seat our governor, why should we seat any of their own? If they will treat political disagreement as grounds for social exile, why should we not do the same? And in Arkansas, with its deep red hue, the ability to extract such vengeance is potentially profound.

Nonetheless, we should not, both because it would be wrong—the rejection of moral relativism being a defining characteristic of conservatism—and because it would accelerate a spiral that ends badly for everyone. There is a reason that the conservative tradition has consistently insisted on the importance of manners, customs, and the inherited social fabric: these things are fragile, and once lost, they are not easily recovered. Russell Kirk, in the first of his canons of conservative thought, placed what he variously called a “transcendent order” and an “enduring moral order” at the foundation of the conservative understanding of society. That order does not permit us to treat people as objects to be deployed in political warfare, even when our opponents are treating us that way.

The proper conservative response to incivility is not to match it but to model its opposite—and then, with equal firmness, to say clearly and publicly that what happened at The Croissanterie last week was a disgrace, and its proprietor and employees beclowned themselves.

A Word About Governor Sanders

I should say, as an Arkansan, that I am proud of the way she handled this. (In the interest of full disclosure: Governor Sanders and I attended the same university at the same time, though we only had passing encounters.) It would have been easy—and perhaps understandable—to react with outrage, to make a scene, to use the moment for maximal political advantage. She chose instead to comply quietly, to pay her bill, to tip the staff, and to respond afterward with a statement that expressed disappointment without cruelty. For a person of such great power to respond humbly to insults from the small and petty is a remarkable testament to the republican ideals to which this country should aspire. Whatever one’s views of her politics, that response reflects a quality of character that ought to be more widely distributed in public life—and a dignity that put her antagonists to shame.

What Ought To Be Done About Political Civility

This is not, at bottom, a legal question, though there are interesting legal questions lurking here about the rights of business owners, the application of public accommodation laws to political affiliation, and the consistency with which those laws are applied. It is a cultural question, and cultural problems do not yield to legislative solutions. You cannot pass a law that makes people civil to one another—you can only persuade, model, and insist.

What ought to be done, then, is this: conservatives ought to respond to this episode with clarity about what it represents, with firmness in stating that this treatment is unacceptable, and with the personal determination to behave differently ourselves. We ought to be the people who seat everyone at the table, who disagree loudly and earnestly in the proper forums while treating political opponents with basic human dignity everywhere else. We ought to be, in short, what the Croissanterie was not.

Arkansas is better than what happened in that dining room last Friday. I believe that. The tradition of Southern hospitality—which is, at its best, not merely a regional custom but a genuine expression of the Christian obligation to welcome the stranger—is worth defending and worth modeling. The response to bad manners is not worse manners. The response to the closed table is the open one.

The Governor was asked to leave a restaurant. She left graciously. The people of Arkansas should take note—not of her departure, but of her grace—and resolve to deserve better than the culture that produced that moment.