A journalist I knew hated it when I described people as “nice.” He would make a face to imply meh, anyone can be nice. It was, for him, an empty word. He wanted something more, he needed details that opened the person up, fleshy information that he could really stick his teeth into. “Nice” doesn’t allow that. It’s too general and, especially for an entrepreneurial journalist, too boring.
“I was just being nice” is today an unacceptable statement. It has to be qualified: “I was being nice to him because you never know when I’ll need his help.”
Our economy makes it easy to label nice people as idiots with no idea about what’s happening—they’re not “in the know.” When a cashier at a grocery store explains to their manager that they let a customer take home groceries even though they were short because they were “just being nice,” it’s not going to hold water. Being nice in of itself isn’t enough. Politics is tough and requires tough choices. Business is tough and requires tough decisions. Life is tough and requires tough decisions. Nice doesn’t cut it. In other words, being nice means not only that you’re a dull normie, but a chump, too.
Nice guys finish last
There’s nothing original about being nice to someone. Incidental nice people tend to congeal into a smooth blob in our memories. “That lady was nice.” “There was this nice guy who helped me.” But we don’t remember them as individuals—they’re extras.
Left liberals crave individuality, which means nice people are bores. They escape into niceness because they don’t have something “smart and interesting” to say. It’s a fallback for the unimaginative, it’s that person who flops an interview because they just don’t impress. The left liberal mentality links a one-of-a-kind character with an essential vivre de joie. It reflects the high ideological value set on individual difference as an end in itself within the liberal outlook as a whole.
The liberal left casts being nice as a life unfulfilled, preferring someone who “says it like it is,” even if it ruffles people’s feathers. People who stay “nice and quiet” and go with the flow are dullards. It signals complacency—and even complicity—with the enemy, putting them on the wrong side of the culture wars. Take the popular bumper sticker: “Well-behaved women rarely make history.” It’s a quote from writer Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. I haven’t read its original context, but, as a detached object, it is used to expresses a solidarity with feminist activists who have risked and continue to risk public shame or personal injury in service of their beliefs. It embodies a faith in the essential, inherent value of transgression and disobedience as leftward and egalitarian. Angela Nagle makes the case that this faith is false—that the transgressive, countercultural style of the politics of 1968 and onwards is in perfect synch with the logic of contemporary capitalism. Transgression, in other words, is an aesthetic form, a style, and has no indelible, inherent political content. The innovator-entrepreneurial subject, which spans the political and cultural identities today framed by liberalism, is already deeply suspicious of niceness, which they associate with an intent to trick and deceive in order to out-maneouvre or out-compete. Put into the context of Ulrich’s quote, the well-behaved woman is a nice woman. She is not only complacent with a state of oppressive patriarchy, but she is actually complicit in it. A confusion has emerged on the liberal left whereby overvaluing the never-take-no-for-an-answer attitude has become synonymous with refusing to be nice and, worse, as an immanent critique of nice behavior in general.
Kindness as reified niceness
Nice is not the same as kind. Being kind comes with effort. I don’t want to be nice to this person but I am going to be because it’s the right thing to do. Left liberals don’t mock being kind and often value it highly. The hippie, baby-boomer end might even raise it into a spiritual exercise of kindness with mandates like “practice kindness” and recommendations to spend more time alone or meditate. (Another bumper sticker, this time from the Dalai Lama: “My religion is simple. My religion is kindness.” In reality, Tibetan Buddhism demands a lot more than “just being kind” in its view of the world.) A hipster is more likely to be kind in small ways, maybe helping a stranger or leaving a bigger tip than usual for the single-origin cortado with oat milk. People who are genuinely cynical and snarky, like my journalist friend, will scoff at all these forms of kindness in general only to pull an unexpected display of kindness in some public setting online (rarely offline) where it will get noticed. Usually the kindness is validated by a larger cultural or political framework. In all these (admittedly cartoonish) scenarios, there’s an end-game driving the kindness offered. Maybe that’s unavoidable. It would explain why so many religions have spent so much energy elaborating a fantasy of self-less kindness.
But being nice isn’t like this. Niceness is really simple and, like people who hate it claim, it is pretty boring. It’s someone saying “hi” or smiling, holding the door. It’s not a command to be nice and happens automatically (is it learned?). It’s not something that can be serially listed, since the formal gestures and conditions will vary between cultures. But what is common across all of them is the fact that people need to interact and, hopefully, do so in a way that encourages pleasantness and a sense of belonging.
Nothing nice to say
The liberal right (conservatives of all degrees) may have once encouraged niceness as a sign of social cohesion and overt conformity to Protestant values, but that’s no longer the case. They, ironically, see being nice as submission to the “liberal cultural order” or some variant of what they call “cultural Marxism.” It’s expressed best when aging baby boomers post memes to show that the world isn’t a nice place and so cry-baby millennials are going to have to learn to toughen up, stop whining, and live in it whether they like it or not. Being nice is an emasculated position in this paranoid view, one subject to a conspiracy. The nice people are always the ones in an alien invasion movie who are brainwashed by the invaders. This suspicion, found in films and TV from the 1950s through to the 1990s, has always had “nice” stand in for normal, everyday people (the first to get roped into the alien plots until it touches the hero’s personal circle). Today the hegemonic order has shifted such that the political content of this form has changed—it’s no longer the smiling Christian nuclear family, but the politically correct liberal elite.
The Trump presidency is a culmination of the right’s shift away from being nice, including even its Christian fundamentalist wing. Trump’s personality-style politics expresses in a sort of spectacle orgasm a decade or more of pent-up resentments that his supporters feel entitled to feel and express. Most recently, following a controversy sparked by a tweet telling four U.S. Congresswomen of color to “go back to where they come from,” he said at a press conference that the four women should leave the USA if they don’t like it. On July 17, Trump held a rally in North Carolina, the first in his presidential campaign for 2020. He positioned the incident as an attack on him—the “attack” being that his comments were racist, that he is a racist— and this set the tone for his 2020 bid: victimization. This was his fuel and that fuel burned. The crowd chanted in reply to his continued condemnation of U.S. Representative Ilhan Omar, “Send her back! Send her back!” Omar is a U.S. citizen. She was born in Somalia, but her home is in the USA.
Trump’s political spectacles tend to deter the public’s mind from social realities. While he talks and tweets, the realities of racism that many people of color experience—like police violence, poverty, or exclusion from political power—continue, the root causes unaddressed. Omar, in a press conference given with the other three U.S. Representatives Trump targeted, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib, described his actions as distraction.
It seems unlikely that a wave of moral pressure will ever force Trump to admit that he is racist. In fact, it’s more likely to encourage his behavior ever further along. That’s because there is hedonistic quality to it. There’s a joy that his followers feel every time such an event happens—they feel the joy of the bully who is able to rile up the same kid again and again. But, simultaneously, the liberal left enjoy something, too, even if it’s only a sense of moral superiority. Take the censure that the House passed, condemning Trump’s actions as racist. It’s important to set the record straight, sure, but the practical value of the move was empty and purely symbolic.
The true measure of Trump and his supporters isn’t so much the content of his comments (which are calculated, xenophobic, and hateful) or their chants, but the pleasure that they experience when the comments are made. That feeling, and the mean perspective on the world that it feeds, is growing like a sore, and I can’t help but think that the casual rejection of boring-old, nice people is only an incidental, early casualty of something more tragic to come.