I wouldn’t say there was a Golden Age of political discourse but there was, for the majority of politician and civil servants, an unwritten code of ethics. Certainly your Roy Cohn and McCarthy types never bought into that but your Tip O’Neils etc did and differing opinions didn’t digress into hate filled quips. Certainly our current administration feeds a lack of decorum and our political arena has become a feeding frenzy of alt facts, misinformation and ignorance.
I take some solace in the David Brooks op-ed types who make an effort to extract themselves from the partisan swamp.
Our colleges, for better or worse, mirror the intolerance that is felt at a national level. The false equivalency is believing it’s the “fault” of liberals or SJW. Hypocracy cuts both ways; there is equal blame here.