Civility as Status Quo Bias?

An argument against civility and free speech more generally (which even prominent advocates of civility concede) is that civility and free speech have “status quo bias” and therefore “privileges” certain “powerful” positions. I see no evidence this is the case. The most important, revolutionary changes in American history have come from free, open, civil discourse. MLK effected radical change in race laws and relations by engaging in constructive, open, civil speech (Letter from Birmingham Jail is a model). Gay marriage is now universal because of the civil, persuasive arguments made by Andrew Sullivan, Jonathan Rauch, and others. And even though abolitionism had its uncivil radicals (e.g., Garrison), overall, its most powerful exponents, such as Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, convinced the country to abolish slavery by reasoned persuasion. As with science, radical changes come about through a stable, unchanging framework. The framework of democratic openness and civility are necessary for whatever radical political changes we want to pursue, just as the framework of hypothesizing and testing is the framework for the radical innovations scientists discover. Democratic openness is, using information theorist Claude Shannon’s metaphor, the “low entropy carrier” for a “high entropy signal.” We must conserve that to appropriately change everything else. Throwing out the framework as itself “biased” and a “tool of the privileged” is what Hitler, Stalin, and Mao did. I don’t see any historical examples where constructive change followed the jettisoning of the democratic framework. Those who want to get rid of the carrier (civil discourse) in the name of “change” actually destroy the system that is a necessary precondition for the constructive change they seek.