I was saying to a friend on Wednesday night that what was sustaining me in this time of trouble and woe was reading the works of my favorite uncivil Americans—Tom Paine, Mercy Otis Warren, Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, late-period Mark Twain, a touch of Mencken here and there. Thus, I was able to read this incredible pile of piffle in The New York Times with comparative equanimity, which is to say without lighting my laptop on fire.

Mr. Trump’s coarse discourse increasingly seems to inspire opponents to respond with vituperative words of their own. Whether it be Robert De Niro’s four-letter condemnation at the Tony Awards or a congressional intern who shouted the same word at Mr. Trump when he visited the Capitol this week, the president has generated so much anger among his foes that some are crossing boundaries that he himself shattered long ago. The politics of rage that animated Mr. Trump’s political rise now dominate the national conversation, as demonstrated repeatedly during the debate over his “zero tolerance” immigration policy that separated children from parents apprehended at the border.

Bear in mind—I think the NYT is still a great newspaper that still does great work. There is no better reporter working than Charlie Savage. It has the time and the resources and, by and large, it knows how to use them. Just this week, I’ve linked and commented on at least three stories from the paper that would have flown completely under the radar if the NYT hadn’t dug in on them. But its flaws are obvious and manifest, and they are illustrated clearly by this bit of analysis, which has been flambéed on the electric Twitter machine for nearly a full day. I mean, Jesus, baby jails? If you’re being civil, you’re not paying attention.

I blame Lincoln, actually. If he hadn’t delivered the greatest speech ever by an American president, his Second Inaugural Address, we might not be quite as addicted to premature “healing” as we are. But Lincoln had an excuse. The country was trying to reassemble itself after the incredibly sanguinary effort necessary to crush treason and eliminate chattel slavery.

In my time, I’ve seen “healing” used to excuse all manner of mischief: the Warren Commission; “Bring Us Together” as a slogan for Nixon, of all people; the Nixon pardon; the largely bipartisan effort to defang the Iran-Contra scandal; the elite discouragement of righteous outrage at the Florida hijack in 2000 or the chicanery in Ohio in 2004; the refusal of the Obama people to hold the officials of the previous administration responsible for malfeasance and nonfeasance in office, “Looking ahead, not back.”

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All of these were undertaken on the theory, I believe, that The American People are made of fragile glass, and that they must not be encouraged to anger over the misuse of their right to self-government, lest it upset the salons of D.C. or the quiet anesthesia of our finer think-tanks. It must not frighten the horses, or David Brooks, who is only half of one.

Can anybody truly say that these exercises in civility and healing made our politics better? Is America a better place because we let the torturers go unpunished? Can’t it be argued that torture coarsened American culture worse than Robert DeNiro’s bad words at the damn Tony Awards? Is it that hard to trace a cultural line from the cells of Abu Ghraib to the cages of Brownsville, and to conclude that the implicit absolution of the former led to support of the latter?

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Good lord, the country was born in incivility. There are monuments to, well, monumental incivility not 12 miles from this very keyboard. Sam Adams was extremely uncivil. The pamphlets of the time were positively slanderous, and they helped make a revolution that changed the entire world. Read the criticisms of the abolitionists in the years leading up to the Civil War. They would have fit in with those chin-strokers that the Times quoted in that piece on Thursday.

Gary Payne, who teaches sociology at Central Lakes College in Brainerd, Minn., said that he opposed the president, his policies and also the trading of crude insults on both sides. “People are looking for the simplest signals to go by,” Mr. Payne said as he stood outside the arena after trying unsuccessfully to attend the rally. “People pay more attention to demeanor than they do to policy.”

Fck off.

Perhaps, and I’m just spitballing here, we shouldn’t equate the words of the goddamn President* of the United States with the comments of television stars and aging actors. Maybe what the president* said from a podium in Duluth carries more weight behind it than what Peter Fonda said in Cannes? The Times piece poses an interesting question that it is far too timid to answer.

This approach traces back to the day Mr. Trump first announced his campaign for president in 2015, when he labeled many Mexican immigrants as “rapists,” a portrayal that drew furious protests.

Mr. Trump recalled that controversy just this week and doubled down on it. “Remember I made that speech and I was badly criticized? ‘Oh, it’s so terrible, what he said,’ ” he said with derision during a speech to the National Federation of Independent Business on Tuesday. “Turned out I was 100 percent right. That’s why I got elected.” Indeed, the lesson that Mr. Trump took from his nastier-than-thou campaign was that the more outrageous he was, the more incendiary his rhetoric, the more attention he drew and the more votes he received. Any expectation that he would put the harsh language aside to become more of a moral leader as president has proved illusory.

Maybe the country is full of enough racists, xenophobes, nativists, and angry idiots that it elected a dangerous buffoon to lead it, and maybe that’s a more important subject than whether or not somebody said a mean thing to Ivanka Trump. Maybe calling the Trump voters what they are, based on what they’ve done to the rest of us, is more important to the survival of the Republic than what three jamokes in a diner think of brown people who are coming to murder them in their beds.

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Jesus, Duluth is 1676 miles from the southern border at Brownsville and, anyway, immigration has been good for Duluth’s local economy. So why did people there on Wednesday night applaud wildly this brand of truthless slander?

"The Democrats want open borders. Let everybody come in. Let everybody pour in, we don't care, let them come in from the Middle East, let them come in from all over the place. We don't care. We're not going to let it happen. Today I signed an executive order. We are going to keep families together, but the border is going to be just as tough as it's been. Democrats don't care about the impact of uncontrolled migration on your communities. Democrats put illegal immigrants before they put American citizens. What the hell is going on?"

I guarantee you it wasn’t because Kathy Griffin made a video.

I wish our politics were less wild, less driven by fear and hate and greed. But, alas, they are, and only one side leveraged fear and hate and greed so successfully through the years as to put a gibbering racist in the White House. Forgive me if I put civility on the back shelf for a while and, instead, take as my navigating star the words of William Lloyd Garrison, writing in the first issue of The Liberator.

I am aware that many object to the severity of my language ; but is there not cause for severity? I will be as harsh as truth , and as uncompromising as justice . On this subject, I do not wish to think, or to speak, or write, with moderation. No! no! Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen; — but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present . I am in earnest — I will not equivocate — I will not excuse — I will not retreat a single inch — AND I WILL BE HEARD .

That will do for now.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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