Liberal NYT columnist Joe Nocera recalls that the modern era of take-no-prisoners political intransigence started 24 years ago this Sunday, when the Senate nixed the nomination of Judge Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. Nocera:

His nomination battle is also a reminder that our poisoned politics is not just about Republicans behaving badly, as many Democrats and their liberal allies have convinced themselves. Democrats can be — and have been — every bit as obstructionist, mean-spirited and unfair.

I’ll take it one step further. The Bork fight, in some ways, was the beginning of the end of civil discourse in politics.

Nocera says that of course Bork was a conservative, but he was no extremist. Yet:

There was tremendous fear that if Bork were confirmed, he would swing the court to the conservatives and important liberal victories would be overturned — starting with Roe v. Wade.

But liberals couldn’t just come out and say that. “If this were carried out as an internal Senate debate,” Ann Lewis, the Democratic activist, would later acknowledge, “we would have deep and thoughtful discussions about the Constitution, and then we would lose.” So, instead, the Democrats sought to portray Bork as “a right-wing loony,” to use a phrase in a memo written by the Advocacy Institute, a liberal lobby group.

So Democrats destroyed the man, and in so doing, they destroyed the chance that any SCOTUS nominee in the future, liberal or conservative, would be willing to talk about his or her judicial philosophy with any depth or nuance. It was too risky. And beyond that, an era of Bad Feeling and extreme partisanship had begun. Nocera again:

Mostly, though, the point remains this: The next time a liberal asks why Republicans are so intransigent, you might suggest that the answer lies in the mirror.