… is from pages 299-300 of my colleague Peter Boettke’s 2021 paper “Liberalism, Socialism, and Our Future,” as this essay appears as the Conclusion to Pete’s excellent 2021 book, The Struggle for a Better World:
Our own lack of civility in the United States as this time is because of the explicit rejection of liberalism and the adoption of nationalism on the one hand and socialism on the other, with the result that we have unleashed both ideological politics and machine politics, and have squeezed out the politics of responsibility and squashed civil society. Civility has lost its proper place as a restraining power in the public sphere of the United States. We must fix this issue for the sake of our future.