It’s not just the Left that will ultimately drive the dynamic, though they are the preponderant offenders. Ultimately something else is at stake when the center can’t hold. Every dispute that crosses a certain line should fear the boundary where things no longer become a question of who’s right or wrong and the only question becomes “who’s side are you on?”

There’s the old saw about a democracy being two wolves and a sheep voting on lunch. To avoid that fate, you can’t simply do what 51% of the public wants, you have to do what 90% can live with. In a functional democratic polity the right thing to do may not be anyone’s preferred solution, but it has to be almost no one’s intolerable solution.

I mentioned before my notion that the great value of the civic (meaning voluntary, or “you should”) sphere is that it can provide a great buffer to addressing the difficult questions without forcing bitter confrontations – we can disagree about civic issues without needing to shoot one another. The government sphere (the mandatory one – “you must”) has no such flexibility, either you obey or you rebel, and rebels either overthrow the government or are hanged by it.

To put it in the terms Wretchard just used, the civic sphere asks questions about what’s right and wrong, but the government sphere just wants to know what side you’re on (loyal citizen or seditious criminal). The great triumph, and stupidity, of the Progressive Left has been to co-opt most of the civic sphere into the government sphere. We have to find a way to reverse that, or this kabuiki theatre of fabricated hate speech will eventually became the real thing.