The Civil War Has Already Started

From Glenn Reynolds in the USA Today:

Marriage counselors say that when a couple view one another with contempt, it's a top indicator that the relationship is likely to fail. 

Americans, who used to know how to disagree with one another without being mutually contemptuous, seem to be forgetting this. 

And the news media, which promote shrieking outrage in pursuit of ratings and page views, are making the problem worse. 

What would make things better? 

It would be nice if people felt social ties that transcend politics. Americans' lives used to involve a lot more intermediating institutions -- churches, fraternal organizations, neighborhoods --that crossed political lines. Those have shrunk and decayed, and in fact, for many people politics seems to have become a substitute for religion or fraternal organizations. 

If you find your identity in your politics, you're not going to identify with people who don't share them. 

The rules of bourgeois civility also helped keep things in check, but of course those rules have been shredded for years. We may come to miss them. 

America had one disastrous civil war, and those who fought it did a surprisingly good job of coming together afterward, realizing how awful it was to have a political divide that set brother against brother. 

Let us hope that we will not have to learn that lesson again in a similar fashion.