If we really want civility in politics, we have to insist on it

America is dying. That is, the idea of America is dying. In a nation whose political identity is based on free and open debate, one of the biggest things that divide us is the question of exactly who it is who ought to be silenced.

A college friend and fellow history major reminds me when I get too glum about the lack of civility in our nation that there have been moments in our history when there has been even less of it than now (despite the rhetoric of some of the zany right, an actual civil war with guns and stuff is still only a remote possibility, for example). But in an age in which it's hard to tell actual news from spin and more and more of us are simply accepting the narrative of whichever echo chamber we happen to prefer,  we can't even establish the facts. How can we debate the issues? When our view of people who are different than ourselves is more of a caricature than a portrait, how can we engage them?

Yes, it's true that if this article is accurate and the American people really want a return to civility in politics, Donald Trump will be voted out of office next November. But it's not as if the Democrats and the left aren't also implicated in the weaponization and deployment of misinformation. Donald Fredovich may be the all-time champion character assassin of American politics, but the folks in the other party are no pikers, either. In fact, I often tell my Democratic friends that in their own way they, too, are to blame for the Trump phenomenon. They cried "Wolf!" so loudly and so often when Reagan and the Bushes were in office that now that the wolf has actually arrived, nobody believes them anymore.

Every election is billed as "the most important of our generation." But this one really is. Mona Charon, a fellow Never Trumper, said the other day that she will be voting contrary to her ideological interests next November. I'll be voting the same way, and for the same reason. The 2020 election will transcend ideology. It will be a referendum on whether it's OK for a president to divide us on purpose, as a strategy, as well as whether it's OK to use his office to enrich himself, to lie with a frequency exponentially greater than any of his predecessors, to put the interests of Russia ahead of the interests of the United States, and to make America the laughingstock of the world.

Yes, I know. It's hard to be civil about Donald Trump because he really is just as bad as all that. That's probably one of his greatest strengths: no matter how accurately you describe the guy, people instinctively assume that you have to be exaggerating. That's how he gets away with bloody murder so easily and so often.

But no, the Democrats aren't innocent, either. Not by a long shot. But I don't think I'm overstating the case by saying that the re-election of Donald Trump might well be the death knell of civility in American politics, and perhaps of our future as a people capable of governing ourselves through the traditional method of free and open debate concerning the issues of the day. He's the first president in our history to explicitly build a brand out of setting one American against the other. I never thought I'd wax nostalgic for President Obama, who did a bit of that himself. But at least he had the grace to talk a good game when it came to bringing us together, and as the saying goes, hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue.

Especially if Joe Biden is the Democratic nominee, I expect him to be far more civil than Donald Fredovich. But if he's not, he shouldn't be allowed to get away with it either. Bottom line: if we want civility in politics, we're going to have to insist on it by punishing incivility.

We have to put our money where our mouth is.

It's hard to debate a cartoon- as the Republican candidates and Hillary Clinton found out in 2016. But when the cartoon is a caricature of your opponent who little resembles him or her, it's impossible.

Well, that's how I see next year's election. But whether you see it that way or not, if we want civility, we are going to have to insist on it. Unlikely friendships like those between George W. Bush and Michelle Obama, and between Mr. Bush and Bill Clinton, and between former President Jimmy Carter and the late former President Gerald Ford are proof that it can happen.

It's up to us to make it good politics.