Maggie's Farm

A year or two back, an old Usenet pal posted the following in response to a liberal whining about the "incivility" of conservatives and libertarians; I think it's a pretty good summation:

The reason you do it is because you're intellectually intolerant.

In fact, that absolute unshakable conviction of moral truth applies
far more to leftists. Leftists just *know*, for example, that people
have a "right" to free health care and forgiveness of their student
loans, and they simply don't want to hear - refuse to hear - arguments
to the contrary.

This gets back, as this debate so often does, to a well-known bromide that oversimplifies the difference between conservatives and liberals, but nonetheless contains an element of truth and goes a long way toward
explaining the inherently uncivil behavior of leftists in civic discourse:

Conservatives think liberals are stupid; liberals think
conservatives are evil.

The implications of that are huge. Conservatives may think liberals are stupid, but as long as the liberals aren't brain damaged, they may be amenable to instruction. Thus, conservatives generally don't naturally start off being uncivil, as doing so would make the listener unreceptive
to the lesson. Conservatives tend to see civility as a virtue.

But liberals, with their reflexive belief that conservatives are evil, start with incivility, and given their assumption, why wouldn't they?

Liberals see incivility as a virtue when dealing with those whom they sophomorically see as incorrigibly evil.