Kanye West created a rant when he hijacked Taylor Swift's speech at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards.

Dave Schechter
CNN Senior National Editor

“We’ve forgotten our table manners.”

I heard that a couple of weeks ago, during a discussion that was supposed to focus on art but devolved into politics. The woman who made the comment was referring not to anything in particular, but everything in general - from this summer’s rancorous town hall meetings on health care to shouts from the floor when the President addressed Congress, from anger at center court of the U.S. Open tennis championships to a rant at the MTV Video Music Awards.

A couple of days later, I read a column by Elizabeth Bernstein in The Wall Street Journal. Bernstein was looking forward to a friend’s visit, until the friend said she was eager to discuss health care reform. “But now the ruckus is spilling over into our private lives. Alarmingly, people who know and even love one another are taking off the gloves and duking it out around dinner tables and water coolers, through phones calls and emails and even on the Web,” she wrote.

“Not so long ago, people tried to be polite in conversation. But that was when they actually listened to each other. These days, there's more shouting than informed discourse, as politicians, pundits and partisans attack each other on television and the Internet. . . The Internet is only making matters worse, as people feel emboldened to say things they would never dare utter to someone's face.”

The Los Angeles Times sought out Pepper Schwartz, a University of Washington sociologist. “Schwartz, a political liberal, believes that the flowering of rude behavior - call it the New Boorishness - took root in the late 1960s when students began challenging authority "for a very good reason: Authority was leading us into Vietnam."

Over time, she said, "we have shredded respect for every kind of institution, every kind of profession, and have indulged ourselves and our emotions at every level of society, from how kids treat their parents, how students treat their teachers and all the way up the line. So why wouldn't it ultimately get onto the tennis courts and presidential speeches?"

If we, the American people, have forgotten those “table manners,” it is not a recent development. It just seems that way. And it’s too easy to blame talk radio and cable television hosts for coarsening the public discourse. I’ll borrow from a commentator who himself borrowed from William Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” to admonish his audience when reporting on a controversy generating much public heat. “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves,” Edward R. Murrow said at the conclusion of his 1954 documentary demolition of Sen. Joseph McCarthy for the Wisconsin Republican’s often reckless accusations about Communists in the U.S. government.

A reference from the pulpit that led me to an oft-noted essay by historian Richard Hofstadter called “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”, which appeared in Harper’s magazine in 1964. Does any of this sound familiar today?

“American politics has often been an arena for angry minds,” Hofstadter began, but in the campaign of failed Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater he found a demonstration of “how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority.”

Still, Hofstadter did not attribute this to just one end of the spectrum, writing, “But behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wing. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind.”

Evidence of this “paranoid style” dated back more than a century, Hofstadter wrote, but in 1964 – even before the counter-culture movement took hold and a major escalation of the Vietnam War – Hofstadter observed something else.

“America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialistic and communistic schemers; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners as of old but major statesmen who are at the very centers of American power. Their predecessors had discovered conspiracies; the modern radical right finds conspiracy to be betrayal from on high.”

That was then. Today the “radical” left appears no less likely than the “radical” right to suspect the worst from on high.

Is there a solution? The Los Angeles Times noted an effort led by Mark DeMoss, a conservative evangelical Christian who owns a public relations firm in Atlanta, to get people to take a “civility pledge.” The three-line oath: I will be civil in my public discourse and behavior. I will be respectful of others whether or not I agree with them. I will stand against incivility when I see it.”

Sounds simple enough. Maybe we should give it a try.