(via John Patrick Leary: Against Civility - Guernica / A Magazine of Art & Politics)
The liberal call for a return to “civility” is both wrong-headed and anti-democratic for at least three reasons. First, nobody really knows what it means—is it decorum? A political point of view, like bipartisanship? Old-fashioned etiquette? Secondly, it’s a fantasy—nostalgia for a lost era of quaint collegiality and friendly rivalry that has never really existed in a country whose sitting vice president once assassinated Alexander Hamilton for writing a critical letter about him. Cable news, for example, may change the volume and frequency of inter-party argument, but Congress was hardly a polite debating society before Fox entered the scene. And lastly, it never should have been.
Source: guernicamag.com
