TODAY'S LOGIC LESSON.

Deflection is as deflection does, and sooner or later it's going to end up going wrong.

Donald Trump is not the only politician who revels in violent political rhetoric, who excuses or invites political violence. Some people, such as [his lawyer, Michael] van der Veen, think that this exonerates Trump, but in fact it is a reason to convict him. After years of politicians playing with fire, one of them finally sparked an inferno. This is the moment for senators—for all of us—to begin re-establishing the basic norms of politics necessary to sustain our Constitution.

It's more than one of them, notes George Mason's Adam J. White, and it's not changing many minds.

In terms of both violent political rhetoric and actual political violence, politicians and pundits in recent years have raised temperatures and lowered standards. And so today we see members of Congress and other politicians, over and over again, either using violent rhetoric recklessly or excusing (and thus encouraging) actual violence—from excusing the violent episodes during the summer 2020 protests to encouraging their followers to accost officeholders in public or in their homes.

In such rhetoric, our political leaders cast struck matches on the ground. Most of the time nothing has happened. Other times, the flames that erupted—from lives lost or property destroyed in protests to assassination attempts on members of Congress—were sufficiently distant in time and place from the incendiary rhetoric to give politicians plausible deniability. But on January 6, the connection became virtually impossible to ignore: President Trump and his supporters, after months of reinforcing the big lie of a “stolen” election, gathered a mob in Washington, sent it to the Capitol, and then let all hell break loose.

We are lucky that more violence has not erupted around our politics in recent years—though it is hard to ascribe “luck” to the fact that we’ve only seen the Capitol ransacked, city neighborhoods burned, and congressmen shot. Still, for all the struck matches that have been strewn about, it could have been worse.

Bourgeois manners. If they didn't exist, we'd have to invent them.