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An Essay: Incivility Not A Problem; A Crisis

BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON

People are not sure what to call it—excessive partisanship, bad behavior, negativism, gridlock, polarization, stridency, intolerance, ideological extremes.

It is collectively, incivility and it is, arguably, worse now than it has been in American history.

Something must be done about it.

Pundits such as the Washington Post’s George Will and the Washington Examiner’s  Michael Barone have argued otherwise.  Barone, for example, recently bemoaned the bemoaners of what he called ‘hyperpartisanship’ in American politics, suggesting that the problem is not as bad as it may seem and attempts to rectify it in the past have just made matters worse.

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