They Started It

Did some Congressmen behave badly? Perhaps. But as with kicking Members off committees, the Democrats set the precedent. Being horrified when a Congressman screams “liar” during Obama’s presidency was reasonable. But today the Democrats do nothing but lie and insult Republicans. Every chance they get.
David Strom "Nancy Pelosi fans complain Republicans have no decorum"

Mr. Strom doesn't define what he means by "precedent," and so there's no way to understand why Representative Joe Wilson's (R-South Carolina) outburst wasn't one, yet Nancy Pelosi (D-California) tearing up her copy of then-President Trump's speech was. Other than, of course, simple partisanship, which is unable to ever see one's own side as having done anything wrong. After all, Mr. Strom conveniently leaves out the fact that by the time then-Speaker Pelosi tore up her copy of President Trump's speech, the two of them had been feuding for months. and one of President Trump's common go-tos was (and is) hurling insults at his political opponents; the practice had started during the primaries for the 2016 election. It's one of the reasons why so many people were slow to take him seriously. Picking the specific cherry of Speaker Pelosi's action seems to be very short sighted.

But I'm not a Republican partisan, and thus I'm not in David Strom's, or Hot Air's, target audience. Accordingly, any critique from me is simply proof that I'm not a right-thinking American. Eventually, however, I suspect that the political parties will start to wholeheartedly own their behavior, and people like Representative Taylor-Green will run on their willingness to display open and unprovoked disrespect to the people that they understand their target constituents dislike, distrust or fear. It would certainly be more honest than the disingenuous blame game that goes on right now, where neither side has any rational incentive to simply lay their cards on the table.

This is, I suspect, because the American public as a whole understand incivility to be appropriate when, and only when, there are grievances. And so each side goes looking them (not that they have to look very far) and plays them up in order to portray themselves as the put-upon victims of the evil Others on the far side of the proverbial aisle, who, due to their (often cherry-picked) bad acts, deserve to be mistreated. As long as the downward spiral is controlled, it will perpetuate itself, because both parties, and their followers, perceive it as being in their interests. And as long as segments of the public are willing to grant attention and/or money to people willing to tell them that they're the victims in all of this, there will be no shortage of voices proclaiming that selective memories are accurate reflections of the greater reality.