Even a thick-skulled scholar can sometimes learn something new.

I wrote in 2016 that “A political movement can be based on shared virtues, shared interests, or shared passions.  The Founders of our republic hoped for the first, expected the second, and feared the third.  They desired the citizens to elect persons of virtue.  They tried to pit competing interests against each other so that none could overwhelm the common good.  As to passion, their best hope was to keep it from bursting the dams, and if it broke forth nonetheless, at least to delay decision until it dissipated:  For passion, once released, is a torrent that scorns boundary and restraint.”

I was concerned about Mr. Trump, I said, because rather than trying to direct the flood, he rode it like someone surfing a tidal wave, “slipping and skidding across the sloping water, now this way, now that, at each moment contradicting what he had said just a moment before.”  And I blamed his allies, saying it would be a wonder if they didn’t drown in the torrent.

There is a lot not to like about the former president, and I will have more to say about that next week.  Today I want to discuss only the rise in the political temperature.  Since I still think passion is deadly dangerous in politics, what in my thinking about it has changed?

The first change has been recognition that although Mr. Trump catches most of the blame for making politics hotter, most of the vitriol during the last eight years has come from the other side.  Why does he catch more blame?  That’s an interesting question.  A reason I didn’t sufficiently appreciate in 2016 is that his opponents lie with utter abandon about what he has actually says.  For example, they claim he said there were “very fine people” among the neo-Nazis at an explosive demonstration in Charlottesville, though they know he said “I'm not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally.”  The same smearers endlessly reiterate the many-times-discredited claim that he threatened civil war if he wasn’t elected, though in context he was obviously speaking of a “bloodbath” of automotive jobs, not loss of lives.

Another reason is that Mr. Trump’s tweets and name calling make it easier than it might otherwise have been to believe the more outlandish claims about him.  Some of his raillery is merely hilarious, like his nickname “Evita” for Alexandra Ocasio Cortez.  On the other hand, calling Gavin Newsom “Governor Newscum,” is over the top.  Yet despite his excesses, it's difficult to see how any of Mr. Trump’s satirical remarks are remotely comparable to the despicable things he himself is called, or to the numerous demands by his opponents that he be “eliminated.”  Shades of Tony Soprano!  More than one entertainer has won laughs and approval by displaying what is supposed to look like his bloody severed head.  After the first assassination attempt, a Democratic congressional aide expressed the wish that the shooter would “get some target practice so you don’t screw up next time.  Oops, I didn’t say that.”  The aide prefaced the remark, as such people always do, with the words “I don’t condone violence, but.”  Sure, you don’t.

Compounding these two reasons is strategic misdirection.  When some people at a rally whom Mr. Trump encouraged to demonstrate peacefully got out of hand, breaking and entering the capitol building, this was called an insurrection.  It was a brief riot, to be sure.  But if you want to use the word “insurrection,” you should apply it to the thousands of thugs all over the country just a few short months earlier who occupied downtown areas for weeks, terrorizing innocents, looting businesses, and setting fire to police stations, all with the enthusiastic praise of the entire woke establishment.  Apparently Mr. Trump’s opponents want even more of this sort of thing, but only provided that their own partisans do it.  Responding to his policies, Nancy Pelosi said “I just don't even know why there aren't uprisings all over the country.”  Not to worry, Mrs. Pelosi deplores violence too.  Of course she does.

The second change in my thinking has been recognition that although passion in politics is dangerous, trying to pen it up without an outlet is dangerous too.  For years, the slow simmer of the people to whom Mr. Trump appeals has been coming to a boil.

They resent being called “phobes” of one sort or another because they want their children to be safe and not taught to celebrate sexual deviance, they are tired of being called “racists” because they want criminals to be detained and the borders to be policed, and they are weary of being called “deplorables” because they don’t want their government to become ever bigger, more arbitrary, and more intrusive.  They are insulted that the government tries to bribe them by taking their money and promising to give some of it back, frightened that the law is sicced on parents who speak peacefully at school board meetings, and furious because they think they have been lied to – and not just by the other side.

For years, the strategy of most Republican leaders toward all this grievance has been to bottle it up.  To this day, politicians of an older stripe, like Mitch McConnell, who seems to be a decent man, don’t seem to grasp why people are angry at all.  The old joke about the Republican leadership was that it advocated “the same, but less.”  Despite the real differences between the parties, many of today’s voters wonder only about the “but less.”

Although I have always sympathized with the frustration of these voters, what I didn’t fully appreciate in 2016 was what happens if such frustration is given no outlet.  Mr. Trump seems to them to provide one.  His supporters may think his mouth is too big, but they don’t mind a big mouth if it gives them a voice.  He says in public what they think in private.

It’s all well and good to warn about explosions of passion, as I did and still do, but the longer resentment is bottled up, the more explosive it may be when it does burst forth.  Better a little electoral passion now, when it aspires to reform, than later, when it really could become insurrectionist.

The Left has already crossed that Rubicon.