Against the backdrop of deep savagery in the world — the Syrian genocide, the Islamic State’s mass executions, China’s concentration camps for Muslim Uighurs, the genocide of Myanmar’s Rohingya — complaints about homegrown incivility in the United States seem quaint, even silly. But they are not. The descent of much of the country’s political conversation into venom and hate is accelerating and disturbing.
When casual cruelty entered the lifeblood of the United States is impossible to say. Newspapers in late-18th-century America were brutal, partisan weapons, and by the time of the Civil War, even the great Abraham Lincoln was mocked as a "barbarian, Scythian, yahoo, or gorilla.