The framing of corporate vaccine mandates is from the same vein - both the implication that it's at the same level of coercion as de jure government action, and also the normalization of what would normally be a fringe viewpoint as a mainstream political rallying cry (a direct result of tribal propaganda). If you want to talk about needless escalation, sane leadership would have unequivocally told everyone they should get vaccinated, and then the number of people defecting would have been small enough to just cope with.

Furthermore addressing your original appeal for "open, peaceful, extended discussion", this doesn't particularly work when the red tribe is still fully cheering on their spite-candidate looting and burning our country's institutions to "own the libs". From what I've seen there are many Democrats still asking "how can we compromise" (even if half are tone deaf about the reasons), while the red tribe continues to reject any criticism of what they're told is "winning".