There is nothing telling, interesting, or indicative about two men acting out at a couple of awkwardly staged performances. The way millions of people react to them, on the other hand, matters very much. […] If you’re like me, you’ll see this reaction as a collective insistence on deference to authority, a pathetic inability to tolerate the meekest of incivilities. Either way, whatever it might mean when 270 representatives spend valuable time excoriating a single man for a two-word declarative statement, it probably doesn’t have much to do with the triumph of individualism over conformity.

—Kerry Howley on David Brooks on the decline of civility.