re: #3 Obdicut

I grew up knowing a guy who’d been through the McCarthy period and the civil rights period, and he felt that the level of civility hadn’t really declined much from an overall perspective.

Absolutely. The visciousness of the attacks on FDR and Eleanor Roosevelt were the dress rehearsal for the attacks on OHB and the FLOTUS. (Those attacks are still going on—repel of the New Deal is the real goal of the Ryan Republicans. ) Before that you can find traces of obscene attacks on Lincoln and Jefferson