We still live with this 1960s legacy — controversy has acquired a “razor’s edge,” and “venom and vehemence” have become fashionable.
.. The law, the dean said, “verbalized aggression,” taming it through an adversarial system that requires each party to listen to the other’s argument.
.. Wilkinson is a splendid anachronism, a gentleman raised by a father who “came to Saturday breakfast in his coat and tie” and who believed that “manners fortified man against his nature.”
.. He locates the genesis of today’s politics of reciprocal resentments in “the contempt with which the young elites of the Sixties dismissed the contributions of America’s working classes.”