Obviously a fair and true point that I certainly agree with.
Speaking to both your and @MaiqTheLiar and @gracchus’s points, I feel like things were less toxic in the 90’s, but I was a bit younger then (late teens early 20s). Even into the early '00s it felt like you could have reasonable discussions with folks from The Other Side™, disagree about them, but that it was more often a point of subjective points rather than objective facts.
These days, it feels like the “alternative facts” label / claim has resulted in open season for outright falsehoods that are easily disproven but it no longer matters. The insane amount of complete rubbish spewing from Trump and the dropping of all pretense that it’s “country over party” is really rather terrifying to me, and it SHOULD be to everyone else, too. At least they used to pretend that they believed the things they were saying and not just regurgitating what fearless leader says, no matter how insane… Has it seriously always been that way?
Perhaps you missed out on someone named Newt Gingrich, who basically got the ball rolling on the bad-faith debate-club nerd discourse that brought us to our current situation. And as noted above, yes, it’s always been that way. Prosperous times like the 1990s can paper things over for the privileged, but the idea of comity in American politics always ends up being a myth and/or collusion.
We had whitewashed discourse. Civility (literally the good conduct of the civitas, or city-state) is only as good as it is for the most vulnerable members of society. True civility is to treat the most vulnerable with human dignity, not pretend to nor to coddle the privileged.
I wasn’t too young to be politically engaged in the 90s but young enough that American issues weren’t really on my radar, so this is a genuine question, not a bad faith attack: were the public reactions to the demonstrations in response to the Rodney King incident any more civil then they are now?
An excellent question that I can’t speak to in any meaningful way at all, unfortunately. I was 14 when Rodney King happened, and I remember thinking “wow, wtf, that’s crazy” about what happened to him and the resulting riots, but I was too young and/or too wrapped up in general teenage foolishness to recall what it felt like at the time with regards to public response.
Does anyone that was more plugged in at that time remember and care to share?