What do you think accounts for the rise in incivility?

[Bluenorthwest]

108. How civil of you! You don't know my life experience at all...

Stinky often self identifies as straight, male and married to Mrs Stinky. The straight community is his community, and that community used to put my community in jail. This is simple fact. I'm white, the white community used to enslave black people. Again, just fact. To deny that whites did what they did would be very wrong. To deny what other groups did to other minorities, also very wrong.
This dreamy past you claim was based on slave labor, then Jim Crow, the disenfranchisement of women, oppression of laboring minorities, Asians, Mexicans, you name it. The same thing is still true, some people have a dreamy present. Mitt and Ann live like fairy tale folk, do they not? And just like the dreamy lives of the past, they built that by taking from others.
Of course in all times, some live a gilded, protected existence which they keep separate from the rest of the world with gates and fences and finance. We have them today, just as we had them in the past. It was not 'better' back when racism and sexism ruled more strongly. It just wasn't. And...to claim that it was is to minimize the vile racism, sexism, homophobia and general ethnic bigotry of the past. 'Sure there were lynchings, but there were also debutants' is an interesting point of view, as long as you grasp that there are still debutants living the deb dream, right here and righ now, just as they used to. Only now, they have to pay the help.
Not sure what you think was more civil back in the 'good old days'. Feel free to offer specifics.