Being labeled uncivil marks those outside dominant social consensus as threats.

Evidence

Civility is prompted and promoted among the agreeable, where there is broad social consensus about social arrangements and the shape and content of state arrangements – in short, where social conditions and political infrastructure are largely settled. But resistance, critique, subversion call forth not so much incivility and rudeness as oppositionalities and resistances defined as such, characterized as not belonging because outside the compact, rowdy because already unfitting and unfitted, so not worthy of belonging, stylistically at odds or in contention with the compact. The insistent unworthiness of the uncivil is a product really of a different conception of being and longing, different romantic utopias coupled with the threat – the terror – of subversion. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 246

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the moral-panic literature on how dominant groups mark outsiders as deviant threats, echoing Cohen and the reader’s existing panic reading.
• DEEPTHINKING: The insight that ‘incivility’ is not rude behavior but a status imposed on those whose very existence contests the social compact — dense, generative, hard to one-line.