While you are explaining your view to me, if I interrupt and prevent you from finishing what you were saying, then it won't help much if I express your position clearly, vividly, and fairly. You wanted to express it yourself. Interruption is a paradigm of incivility because it sends the signal that I do not want to listen to you or at least that what you say is less valuable than what I say. Civility, thus, requires the virtue of patience while we wait for our audiences as they take time to speak their minds. It also requires forgiveness when others refuse to concede our best points. None of this is easy, but we have a choice. We can express civility by following or at least approaching the Rapoport Rules, by speaking and listening at the right times without interrupting, and by cultivating patience and forgiveness. Or we can practice incivility by interrupting, insulting, and abusing our opponents.
Your style is up to you. Instead of civilly asking why people adopt their positions, today we tend to assume that we already know their reasons. Of course, the reasons that we ascribe to them are rarely their real reasons, and they are rarely the best reasons for their views. Instead, we too often try to beat opponents by putting them in a bad light. Poor people accuse the wealthy of greed and demand higher taxes. Rich people accuse poor people of laziness and see taxes as theft by government or, worse, communism. Don't they see that the whole country needs extra tax revenue? Don't they see that I worked hard for my money? Don't they realize that higher taxes will hurt the entire economy, especially the poor? That will make cooperation difficult or impossible. Such caricatures are harmful. They are also inaccurate. Some wealthy people are greedy and selfish. Others are generous, hardworking, and fair to their employees and customers. Similarly, poor people are not generally lazy.
Some unemployed people who live on welfare would not accept a job if you offered them one. However, they are exceptions to the rule that most poverty results from bad circumstances with no options. There is truth on both sides. The same pattern recurs with the refugee crisis. While visiting Oxford, I heard supporters of allowing more refugees into the United Kingdom asking how their opponents could be so cruel. Didn't they realize how desperate the refugees were? Didn't they know how dangerous their home countries were? In such ways, they suggested that their opponents were ignorant and heartless. In return, opponents of allowing more refugees into the United Kingdom asked how others could be so naïve. Didn't they see how many refugees there were? Didn't they care about British citizens who could lose jobs if more refugees arrived? Didn't they care about security? Did they want to bring more terror attacks to British soil? Thus, they also suggested that their opponents were ignorant and heartless. Instead of trying to understand each other, both sides spread inaccurate caricatures of their opponents.
When opponents make such assumptions and toss around such misleading stereotypes, it becomes hard for them to understand each other properly. One particularly pernicious form of verbal abuse is fake psychiatric diagnosis. Of course, psychiatric diagnoses can be fine when done properly on the basis of evidence by trained psychiatrists in order to help patients with real mental illnesses. The problem is that political and cultural commentators today diagnose their opponents with no evidence or training, and their goal is not to help them but only to abuse them. The democrats are fully extreme. They are fully insane. They are nutcases, they are nuts. So what is the goal of such extreme language? One goal is to get laughs from his audience. It also signals his solidarity with Republicans and hatred for Democrats. What matters here is that it cuts off conversation. It might be useful for therapists to listen to them in order to find out which mental illness they have, and it might be calming to them for friends and relatives to listen to or talk with them. But that is not really having a conversation in the sense of an intentional exchange of information and reasons. When people are fully insane, we do not bother to tell them what is wrong with their views or give them reasons to change. We try to cure them instead of reasoning with or learning from them.
Other forms of verbal abuse impose similar costs. If I tell my friend that her position is wrong, she can ask me why it is wrong, and then we can still have a fruitful discussion in many cases. However, if I tell her that her position is ridiculous, that means that it deserves ridicule instead of reason. If she does not want to be ridiculed, why should she ask me why I think that her position is ridiculous? And if I call her a clown, that suggests that her view deserves laughter instead of serious consideration. It ruins a clown's jokes to take them seriously and ask what they really mean. Similarly, if I call my interlocutor an idiot, that means that she is too stupid to deserve any reason. But then why should she keep talking with me? I just told her that I am not going to listen to her.