The idea of civility, a mere whiff of an intellectual fart, is in fact more important to them than actual human lives.

This at the end of the day is what I mean when I insult a centrist by calling them a liberal.

It is an utterly hollow worldview built out of all the easy nice things that divides people by providing a corrupted, deeply incomplete vision of a better future and then collapsing it into cynicism, at which point the liberal throws up their hands and becomes a good little conservative (though they still might call describe themselves as on the left for decades).