Niceness is about not making other people feel uncomfortable, manners is about behaving yourself and making sure other people know when you notice they are not behaving themselves.

Very different disciplines that only look the same when people all behave.

Niceness is a tool of privilege that sees being uncomfortable as a failure in someone else's action instead of a sign that one might have treated someone poorly, that is why it is so endemic in white people of a certain age.

You see it playing out now in how people are reacting to the attempted insurrection. Niceness means that certain older leaders are almost incapable of dealing with lawmaker involvement because it would make people with social power uncomfortable and that would not be nice.

(Yes this is also why older democratic leadership keeps desperately seeking bipartisanship, because they want to be nice, republican also ascribe to niceness they just don't see Dems as having equalvilant social status so they don't need to be nice)

Lawmakers who have manners (who are often younger or from groups whose relative lack of social power makes them not eligible for nice all the time) have a very different approach centered on protecting the institution and the people instead of feelings.

It is stark.

My representative has manners, but I am very sad to note that both of my Senators are nice. Which is something I knew about them but was hoping this situation might change.

Making people with comfortable feel uncomfortable when they break social norms, especially when they do so in a way that puts people without social power at risk is essential to being a well mannered human and it is a shame to see people I voted for fall short.