There were two things all conservatives could rally around in 2016. The first was that if they won, even if it was Donald Trump doing the winning, they could pick a Supreme Court justice. Mission accomplished: They got Neil Gorsuch, who will make sure the nation's truck drivers stay in line. The second was pissing off liberals. #MAGA types and Marco Rubio's New American Centurions could all agree that political correctness is destroying this country, and the best way to combat it was to offend as many snowflakes as possible on Twitter.

Of course, as Bill Maher pointed out last night, this has become the governing philosophy of conservatism in the age of Trump. Now that traditional Republican principles like free trade were cast aside as part of the Will to Power, the God-given American right to be a dick has become the one to rally around.

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As Maher put it, there is no rational justification for lead bullets, which poison eagles—bald and otherwise—that scavenge hunted carcasses. There is no constituency for spreading pesticides that cause brain damage in children. And you would think there's no lobby for Big Asbestos, but you'd be wrong. After all, this is America, and the head of our national environmental protection agency "remains unconvinced" that carcinogenic asbestos—which ambulance-chasing TV lawyers have been advertising about for at least a decade—is dangerous. This Congress kicked off by using the Congressional Review Act to allow mountaintop mining companies to dump waste in rivers.

As Maher put it well, this isn't really what anyone wants:

Were voters in 2016 asking that we poison eagles? Does it get anyone a job? Does it save money? Does it do anything conservatism is supposed to be about? No. It's just about some warped idea that the way to show strength is to be a dick. And that, in a nutshell, is what Republicanism has become.

But while you might ask whether something is good policy or if anyone wants it, that's largely irrelevant. In a nation where spite has become the most powerful political emotion, liberal tears have become the elixir of the gods. That reached its lowest point when Chuck Schumer broke down while discussing President Trump's first travel ban, which was later struck down as unconstitutional. Schumer dared sympathize with people who were in many cases fleeing the kind of death and destruction which apparently just led us to launch cruise missiles at a Syrian government airfield. The response from the right, including the president, was to ridicule him.

The question is, how long can a democratic republic run on anger and bitterness? How long can we live under government-by-trolling?

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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