remember all the Fahrenheit 911 crap? Truther nut cases (talk about "blood libel").
Go back to the Cold War. There have been no shortages of less than civil conduct. We have McCarthy's rhetoric (crappy, but in point of fact VERY popular), then the opposition to McCarthy acting as if they had the high ground, even though they were in fact wrong (the were in fact Soviet agents all through the US government). They were also wrong in minimizing Communism (it was, after all, responsible for more murders than Nazism (even counting all the war dead from WW2 in the Nazi column). The famous "Have you no sense of decency, sir?" speech is always edited down to remove the fact that the same guy was talking about the risk of homosexuals in the military (and they intimated outside the hearings that Roy Cohn was gay).
So the 50s were pretty uncivil.
The 60s were filled with flag burning, actual violence and vandalism of a political nature.
The 40s... also uncivil.
We can do this for every decade, and likely people at the time thought it was the worst ever
