In my experience that hasn’t “disappeared from political discourse today,” and I do a lot of political discoursing 
by asking the third question, you have answered your first.
The rest of #19 is bait.
Interesting, as all of #23 is unsubstantiated assertion.
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.
Funny you mention David Brooks, as he’s built a career around pining for imagined “good old days.” I think you do make a good point though that the political class itself is far more open about crass, invective-laden discourse than perhaps it once was, and that might be what @ucbalumnus was referring to (I was referring to general political discourse more broadly, not just that of politicians and their wonk pundits).
(I strongly recommend Chapo Trap House podcast to those who enjoy evisceration of pundits, haha)
An article from a paper with a bias, and answering questions with questions. The whole thread is bait.
@jym626 - which papers don’t have “bias”?
Oh please. The socialist worker?? And again responding with more questions.
I only made it through half the article because I thought it was unintelligible. It made it sound like students were being prevented from peacefully demonstrating against speakers they didn’t agree with, when the reality is a relatively small number of students (and non-student agitators) are willing to do anything from disrupting campus operations to using violence to prevent speakers they don’t like from speaking.
If school administrators are complicit in anything, it’s that they cave in too easily to the threats.
Below is a comment from the former Mayor of San Francisco, Willie Brown, on what’s going on with free speech across the Bay in Berkeley -
The battle over free speech in Berkeley has flipped the two sides in the old generation gap.
When the Free Speech Movement got rolling at UC Berkeley in the 1960s, the whole point was winning the right to speak out about civil rights, sex, the Vietnam War or anything else on your mind.
It was youth versus “the man.”
Now it’s youth demanding the shutdown, and the man expressing outrage at the death of free speech.
And the cops being sent in to protect it.
How’s that for a reversal?
And what are these kids upset about? Ann Coulter? Milo Yiannopoulos? David Horowitz? All second-string cable commentators at best.
The descendants of those who fought for free speech now say there shouldn’t be speech unless it fits their own political agenda. If it doesn’t, then it’s not free speech, it’s hate speech — and it must be stopped, even if it means violence and damage.
How the hell do you get away with that?
The Free Speech Movement was born in Berkeley, and now, it seems, it’s being buried in Berkeley.
Who are behind the free speech crisis are the hooded and masked hooligans dressed in black who arrive at the even armed with weapons and primed to destroy property and assault others–they and whoever encourages and funds them. Their violence is what colleges are trying to prevent. Maybe a larger area around the venue needs to be cordoned off in advance, like they do for an event the President or VP is attending, and then do a security check including asking for student IDs. This way we can at least learn if the anarchists are students or outside instigators, and work from there on preventing their return.
Ann Coulter’s on-again/off-again speech scheduled for tomorrow at UC Berkeley is off again. It was cancelled when the conservative groups sponsoring it withdrew their support over safety fears.
Basically, it looks like both left and right wing groups that intend to act violently will be attracted. Both should be really thought of as equivalent to criminal street gangs, but because they nominally act for some sort of politics, each will attract some political support that would normally not exist for ordinary criminal street gangs*, because many people on both the left and right seem to find it hard to reject even noxious extremists on the same side of the political spectrum.
*I.e. if the police arrest a bunch of them, everyone will cheer in the case of ordinary street gangs, but the police will likely face significant opposition if they try to arrest a bunch of violent political protesters.
@alh
Thanks for the link. Thoughtful treatment of the issue.