The Virginia shooting fallout was predictably partisan. Can this ever be fixed?

Some see in the gulf between Democrats and Republicans a parallel to discourse prior to the civil war, while others hope Americans will tire of the anger

It would be hard to imagine an institution more out of tune with the prevailing tone of modern American politics than the annual congressional baseball game. The Republican and Democratic teams play each other to win, but they do so in a spirit of friendship across the aisle that is all but nonexistent on Capitol Hill these days.

Even the running score between them entering the week of the contest was thoroughly bipartisan: 79 encounters since 1909, 39 wins each (plus one draw).

So the Republicans’ practice ground in Alexandria, Virginia, on the day before this year’s engagement made for an especially jarring choice of target when a lone gunman opened fire at 7.09am on Wednesday, critically injuring the House majority whip Steve Scalise and wounding three others. It was as if one of the last oases of civility in American public life had been torn by an outburst of violent hatred.

Partisan violence, at that. When details emerged of the shooter, himself killed in the exchange of fire, it turned out that James T Hodgkinson was a self-styled “democratic socialist” with a track record of assailing Donald Trump on social media. One of his Facebook entries called Trump a traitor and said: “It’s Time to Destroy Trump & Co.”

As news sank in of the attack, and of the Bernie Sanders-supporting leanings of the shooter – he had a Sanders photo slapped across his Facebook page and had reportedly volunteered for the senator’s presidential campaign in Iowa in 2016 – the nation collectively gasped. How would the country and its hyperpartisan leadership, not least the troller-in-chief, react to this heinous act of apparent political loathing?

For a split second, the unexpected happened. When Trump addressed the nation from the White House, he was measured, inclusive, resorting to none of the usual snarky references to “fake news” or “Crooked Hillary”. “We may have our differences”, he said, but “we can all agree that we are strongest when we are unified”.

But that rare moment of comity was all too fleeting. Within hours of the shooting, the wider hostility had renewed with a vengeance.

Conservatives saw an advantage to silence criticism. Republicans lined up to accuse Democrats of having fanned the flames of discord, seemingly oblivious to the fact that by doing so they were themselves fanning the flames of discord. “The rhetoric has been outrageous,” said Chris Collins, Republican from New York, chiding Democrats to “tone it down”.

“America has been divided, and the violence is appearing in the streets, and it’s coming from the left,” said Steve King, the Iowa Republican who has often sparked controversy for making incendiary comments about immigrants and once suggested that “radical Islamists” would see Barack Obama as a saviour.

Some of the most vivid language was aired on Fox News by the president’s counselor Kellyanne Conway, who said that personal rhetorical attacks on members of the Trump administration were bound to lead to further gun rampages. “If I were shot and killed tomorrow, half of Twitter would explode in applause and excitement,” she said.

Such a spiral of partisan name-calling in the week that saw a charity baseball game disrupted by gun violence has left observers of America’s political cacophony aghast. How did it get to be this bad, many are asking – and now that we’re in this mess, how can we get out of it?

Cecilia Muñoz is both an observer and a former sufferer of the phenomenon. She’s now at the New America thinktank, where she’s trying to find ways to transcend partisanship through common solutions to public problems – but until January she was director of Obama’s domestic policy council, where she often experienced the debilitating effects of partisan hostility.

She recalls how difficult it was for colleagues to find Republicans willing to attend state dinners, so toxic was the mood towards her boss. “Declining an invitation to a formal event honoring the leader of an allied country – that was an indication of how out of control the partisanship had gotten,” she said.

But she has no doubt that it’s far worse today. “The discourse has coarsened tremendously over the last decade, even more so this last year. You see it on the left as well as the right.”

Muñoz’s reflection that coarseness of rhetoric is not limited to either side presents the left with a challenge too: how to respond to the knowledge of the Alexandria shooter’s “democratic socialist” politics and the ensuing calls from conservatives to “tone it down”. Bernie Sanders himself was quick to respond, saying that he was “sickened by this despicable act” and that “violence of any kind is unacceptable”.

His supporters told the Guardian that they resented being tarred with the same brush as a deranged gunman. “The actions of one emotionally and mentally unstable individual cannot stop an entire movement,” said Hannah Zimmerman, who serves on the national coordinating committee of the Young Democratic Socialists of America.

She said that within every sub-group of Americans you will find individuals with problems, but that doesn’t make them representative. The shooter didn’t speak “for the millions of people who supported and voted for Bernie Sanders”, she said.

Moumita Ahmed, the founder of Millennials for Revolution who campaigned across the country for Sanders during the 2016 primaries, said that young progressives should not be cowed into changing their message. “The left doesn’t have to stay quiet because the left is talking about actual individuals who are suffering. We’re not doing it by attacking people. We do it by saying the Republican party is hurting the people, and that’s the truth. Do they want us to stop telling the truth?”

Historians point to parallels between the current malaise and the period leading to the civil war. Joanne Freeman, a Yale historian who has a book out next year looking at political violence in Congress, sees the same shakiness of government and splintering of party loyalties, combined with the destabilising effect of new technology – the telegraph in the 1850s, social media today.

Even this week’s calls to tone down the rhetoric have echoes. “That’s precisely what people said in 1858 and ’59 in Congress. They thought they had been pushing people to go beyond where they would naturally go.”

Freeman is not suggesting the US is on the road to civil war, but she does think the similarities are sharp enough to focus minds. “I don’t have the answers to what will pull us out of this, but it needs to start by taking us into a place of dialogue where we can listen without screaming.”

The week of the Alexandria shooting also took the debate around partisan rhetoric out of Congress and into the realm of the arts.

Bank of America and the airline Delta withdrew sponsorship from a production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in New York’s Central Park because of its portrayal of a Trump-like dictator’s assassination. Hours after the Alexandria shooting, the president’s son Donald Jr saw fit to draw a direct line between what he decried as “glorifying the assassination of our president” by New York elites and Wednesday’s gun rampage.

Companies, it seems, are paralysed – fearful of becoming a target for Trump’s anger, and caught in the middle between activist consumers on left and right who might just as easily punish them for placing adverts during a Fox News show as for supporting an anti-Trump portrayal on stage.

Among the 400 or so people lining up for tickets for the play in Central Park on Friday morning, some from as early as 4am, those aware of the controversywere scornful. Their views reflected the work of a New York design firm which redrew the Julius Caesar poster so that it read: “Cowards.”

Rose, a 61-year-old social worker from Manhattan who did not give her last name, said that she saw liberals as generally behaving so politely that conservatives had to scramble to find examples of them being made the victims. “It’s a play,” she said, disgusted.

Some in the line looked back fondly to the presidency of Republican George W Bush. Despised at the time by liberals, he had at least demonstrated “a certain level of decorum”.

“Decorum is gone,” John Hernandez, a 52-year-old realtor, lamented.

Frank Rich has a singularly pertinent vantage point from which to view the controversy, having been the longstanding theatre critic of the New York Times and now a political columnist for New York magazine. He dismissed as “preposterous” Donald Jr’s correlation between a Shakespeare play performed in front of a tiny audience and acts of political violence.

Rich said the Shakespeare argument was simply another return to the conservative culture wars of the 1980s – a product, he said, of conservatives’ “own cultural insecurity” at that fact that artists are almost uniformly liberal. “They feel left out. Part of it is jealousy that they’re not part of the culture.”

But Rich was also skeptical that things were so much worse today than in the past. At the time that Americans were being sent in droves to be killed in Vietnam, a popular touring theater production was the 1967 play MacBird!, a version of Macbeth that “literally suggested that Lyndon B Johnson assassinated Kennedy – and it was a hit”.

So where does this leave everyone at the end of an exceptional week? Republican congressman Steve Scalise remains in critical condition in hospital, where he awaits further operations on a shattered hip. The congressional baseball game went ahead as planned at Nationals Park in Washington on Thursday night; the Democrats won 11-2, though nobody was gloating.

And the wider public: how are they faring amid all the noise? Muñoz, the former Obama domestic policy chief, believes that if change is to come, it must start with the people.

“My hope is that the American people are becoming exhausted by this,” she said. “It’s exhausting for people to be stuck in their corners, outraged all the time.”