The 'civility debate' isn't about manners. It's an old-school power play.

[SunSeeker]

The so-called "civility debate" is the newest front in a wider conflict that has less to do with manners, or ensuring a polite discourse, than in protecting the powerful from being forced to engage with politics on someone else's terms.
...
At its heart is a unique form of cultural illiteracy and status anxiety. The ability to hand-pick when and in what context to face the consequences of your work is a privilege, deep-seated and treasured by those who possess it. Dinnertime interlopers who challenge this expectation are protesting more than a government official or policy -- they are fundamentally rejecting it.

Simply put, the most powerful among us -- elected officials, their benefactors and high-ranking staffers, allied consultants, and some heavyweight analysts -- have traditionally enjoyed a certain self-enforced privilege: the freedom to actively seek out and in most cases find a break from politics.
...
Lately, though, these usually unmarked boundaries are being defied more often -- and increasingly by people, unlike Dershowitz and his island frenemies, who are never invited into the conversation, even when their fate is the subject. Now, with cell phones to record the confrontations and a few easy channels to make them go viral, there is an easy way in.

https://www.cnn.com/2018/07/06/politics/no-escape-from-politics-civility-debate/index.html

[madaboutharry]

1. Republicans do not want to take responsibility for their actions.

Those working in the administration and republican lawmakers enable a disgraceful president and disgraceful policies yet believe there should be no consequences or accountability. Republicans have always played the game of holding others to standards of behavior that they themselves violate and ignore. Serial adulterers sought the impeachment of President Clinton and cried from the mountain top about family values, the biggest grifters at the expense of the taxpayers seek to deny aid to the poor, and now the enabling circle around the most uncouth and ill mannered president cry about being confronted and called out. Too bad.

[SunSeeker]

2. Exactly!

[DAngelo136]

3. I Think This Explains Things Succinctly

“Conservatism has opposed rational thought for thousands of years. What most people know nowadays as conservatism is basically a public relations campaign aimed at persuading them to lay down their capacity for rational thought.

Conservatism frequently attempts to destroy rational thought, for example, by using language in ways that stand just out of reach of rational debate or rebuttal.

Conservatism has used a wide variety of methods to destroy reason throughout history. Fortunately, many of these methods, such as the suppression of popular literacy, are incompatible with a modern economy. Once the common people started becoming educated, more sophisticated methods of domination were required. Thus the invention of public relations, which is a kind of rationalized irrationality. The great innovation of conservatism in recent decades has been the systematic reinvention of politics using the technology of public relations.”- From “What Is Conservatism And What Is Wrong With It”

[SunSeeker]

4. Yep. Conservatism is about selling a lie so people will vote against their interests. nt