We Have a Crisis of Democracy, Not Manners
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/25/opinion/trump-sarah-huckabee-sanders-restaurant-civility.html
PLEASE READ THE WHOLE THING. It's worth it!
. . . millions and millions of Americans watch helplessly as the president cages children, dehumanizes immigrants, spurns other democracies, guts health care protections, uses his office to enrich himself and turns public life into a deranged phantasmagoria with his incontinent flood of lies. The civility police might point out that many conservatives hated Obama just as much, but that only demonstrates the limits of content-neutral analysis. The rights revulsion against a black president targeted by birther conspiracy theories is not the same as the lefts revulsion against a racist president who spread birther conspiracy theories.
Faced with the unceasing cruelty and degradation of the Trump presidency, liberals have not taken to marching around in public with assault weapons and threatening civil war. I know of no left-wing publication that has followed the example of the right-wing Federalist and run quasi-pornographic fantasies about murdering political enemies. (Close your eyes and imagine holding someones scalp in your hands, began a recent Federalist article.) Unlike Trump, no Democratic politician Im aware of has urged his or her followers to beat up opposing demonstrators.
Instead, some progressive celebrities have said some bad words, and some people have treated administration officials with the sort of public opprobrium due members of any other white nationalist organization. Liberals are using their cultural power against the right because its the only power they have left, and people have a desperate need to say, and to hear others say, that what is happening in this country is intolerable.
Sometimes, their strategies may be poorly conceived. But theres an abusive sort of victim-blaming in demanding that progressives single-handedly uphold civility, lest the right become even more uncivil in response. As long as our rulers wage war on cosmopolitan culture, they shouldnt feel entitled to its fruits. If they dont want to hear from the angry citizens theyre supposed to serve, let them eat at Trump Grill.