Let's say you were suddenly whisked back to the sixth grade, and you found yourself face-to-face with a bully threatening to kill your Tamagotchi. Now let's say you countered that surely his actions would exhibit a break from norms and that he would feel hypocritical because he'd probably once been victimized by someone. You would, in all likelihood, get your ass beat.

Anyone who went to an average middle school understands how this plays out. Which is why it's all the more bewildering that leftists, centrists, and guardians of the genteel status quo seem to think this approach will work with Trump after it failed to work with the Republican Party for at least a generation.

This has not, and will never, work. The president-elect's team is a hammer, and every problem, including you, is shaped like a nail. They have no sympathy.

Like a lot of bad ideas, this all started with a misunderstanding. It is an article of faith among the left that people vote against their own self-interests and tolerate political chicanery because they don't understand economics or history or good governance or what popular conservative demagogues said once six years ago.

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(It's not an entirely mistaken belief; there really are people out there who vote against their interests because no one helped to illustrate the stakes, and plenty more who stay home in the absence of any encouragement. That's why campaigns and activists knock on doors.)

This misreading also fuels the bottomless liberal faith in the power of political comedy. The Daily Show and its descendants run on hypocrisy: Take one appalling statement from some malicious clown today, then run file video of that same clown saying the opposite under the previous administration. Now, morally, said person in power has no choice but dissolve in a puddle of self-ownage.

The president-elect's team is a hammer, and every problem, including you, is shaped like a nail.

No one should be surprised that this kind of comedy took off. With eight years of George W. Bush followed by eight years of spectacularly cynical Republican obstructionism, you could circle the globe three times over with one-liners alone. Moreover, the prospect of massively successful viral clips that explain events to casual voters is practically irresistible.

The only problem is that it doesn't work. A pathological liar who acts as the setup for at least a dozen punchlines merely by standing still just got elected president in spite of audio/video evidence of him bragging about committing a sexual offense. Even when comedy speaks truth to power, it usually does so in another room with a locked door between itself and its target.

Playing gotcha! with hypocritical conservative statements about the Constitution, Russia, Middle East, or personal liberties, is like treating measles by putting Clearasil on the rash. It doesn't work because it fundamentally misunderstands the message and appeal of conservatism, which is punishment. There again is the hammer, pounding anything that perverts a phantom American utopia—you know, the good old days when every boy under 18 had a haircut you could set your watch to.

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Democrats seemed to spend half of their time with a Democratic president and congressional majority dicking around trying to figure out which move would upset people least. Trump hasn't even been sworn in yet, and already the GOP has announced a forthcoming repeal of Obamacare and the defunding Planned Parenthood. They attempted to gut the Office of Congressional Ethics, and they will spend the next two weeks tongue-bathing a roster of cabinet members so ludicrous and ethically compromised that it's like opening a housesitting website and finding every employee profile is just another picture of The Hamburglar. They do not heed polite norms, because polite norms are things that chickenshits obey.

Against this, the left and social media has arrayed a democratization of the zinger-gig economy—"Uber, but for pointing out the politically contradictory!"—balanced with the performative how dare you, sir of the electorate and even louder lamentations about America, heartbreak, and loss. Apart from being almost wholly ineffectual on its own terms, all it does is vindicate the conservative message.

Every malignant troll—95 percent of the time, it's a he—who changed his Twitter username to Deplorable Fuckface to "piss off the libs" feeds off impotent moral outrage and public despair. He and his leaders are people who feel so disempowered by (or eager to exploit) women's equality and the perception of minorities as full human beings that they brought on the reign of a world-historical virulent boob just because they hate the same changing cultural signifiers.

Logging onto social media to announce that you feel terrified and heartsick just vindicates these people.

Logging onto social media to announce that you feel terrified and heartsick just vindicates these people. Your fearful tingling sensation tells them that it's working. Friends on your side of the ideological fence see the hopelessness and feel a pang of empathy. But any attempt at broader entreaty to the people inspiring this feeling is founded on a mistake.

You cannot shame the shameless; you can't appeal to an inborn trait someone doesn't have.

"When they go low, we go high" is something you can say when someone's agreed to sit at the table with you, but Trump and the people who revel in his omnidirectional crass abusiveness and opportunism don't have to go anywhere to hit low. Their resentment and bullying will always find the lowest elevation. When they go low, let them—like the bully who eventually trips one day on the playground, it makes it easier for everyone in the rest of the class to see how small his size, how few his number, how low his road, and how everyone, together, can defeat him.

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