In the aftermath of their victory, the winners are markedly unmagnanimous. They brand those who voted the other way as a liberal elite, patronizing, self-interested, out of touch with real life. The liberal elite are characterized as bad losers, as though the vote were a football match. When they protest against or complain about the result and its consequences, they are immediately belittled and shouted down. In the weeks before the vote, the eventual victors’ own handling of language resembled a small child’s handling of an explosive device: They appeared to have no idea of its dangers or power. They used phrases like “We want our country back” and “Take back control” that were open to any and every interpretation. Now they complain that they have been misrepresented as racist, xenophobic, ignorant. They are keen to end the argument, to quit the field of language where only the headachy prospect of detailed analysis remains, to take their dubious verbal victory and run for the hills. They have a blunt phrase they use in the hope of its being the last word, and it is characteristically rude: “You lost. Get over it.”

The liberal elite, meanwhile, have evolved a theory: It is their belief that many of the people who voted to leave the European Union now regret their decision. There is no more tenuous comfort than that which rests on the possibility of another’s remorse. In psychoanalysis, events are reconstructed in the knowledge of their outcome: The therapeutic properties of narrative lie in its capacity to ascribe meaning to sufferings that at the time seemed to have no purpose. The liberal elite are in shock; they fall upon the notion of the victors’ regret as a palliative for their mental distress, but because the referendum result is irreversible, this narrative must adopt the form of tragedy.

Unlike the victors, the losers are loquacious. They render the logic of their suffering with exactitude and skill, waxing to new expressive heights. The deluge of fine writing that follows the referendum contrasts strangely with the reticence that preceded it. The liberal elite are defending their reality, but too late. Some urge a show of tolerance and understanding; others talk about the various stages of grief; others still call for courage in standing up for the values of liberalism. These are fine performances, but it is unclear whom they are for. I have often noticed how people begin to narrate out loud when in the presence of mute creatures, a dog, say, or a baby: Who is the silent witness to this verbal outpouring?

Meanwhile, in the Essex town of Harlow, a Polish man is murdered in the street by a gang of white youths who apparently heard him speaking his native language.

How can we ascertain the moral status of rudeness? Children are the members of our society most often accused of being rude; they are also the most innocent. We teach children that it is rude to be honest, to say, “This tastes disgusting” or “That lady is fat.” We also teach them that it is rude to disrespect our authority. We give them orders: We say, “Sit still” or “Go to your room.” At a certain point, I got into the habit, when addressing my children, of asking myself whether I would speak in the same way to an adult and discovered that in nearly every case the answer was no. At that time, I understood rudeness to be essentially a matter of verbal transgression: It could be defined within the morality of language, without needing to prove itself in a concrete act. A concrete act makes language irrelevant. Once words have been superseded by actions, the time for talking has passed. Rudeness, then, needs to serve as a barrier to action. It is what separates thought from deed; it is the moment when wrongdoing can be identified, in time to stop the wrong from having to occur. Does it follow, then, that a bigoted remark — however ugly to hear — is an important public interface between idea and action? Is rudeness a fundamental aspect of civilization’s immunity, a kind of antibody that is mobilized by the contagious presence of evil?

In the United States, Hillary Clinton calls half the supporters of Donald Trump “a basket of deplorables.” At first the remark impressed me. I approved of Clinton for her courage and honesty, while reflecting on her curious choice of words. “Basket of deplorables” almost sounded like a phrase from Dr. Seuss: It would be typical of him to put deplorables in a basket, for the moral amusement of his young readers. A sack or a box of deplorables wouldn’t be the same thing at all, and a swamp of deplorables is too Dante-esque; but a basket is just the kind of zany, cheerful container that makes light of the deplorables while still putting them in their place. It quickly became clear, however, that as a public utterance, the phrase was malfunctioning. The basket began to speak, to distinguish itself: Inside it were a number of offended individuals. Clinton had made the mistake of being rude. The “basket of deplorables” wasn’t Dr. Seuss after all. It was the snobbish language of the liberal elite, caught committing the elemental moral crime of negating individual human value. Yet Clinton’s adversary regularly committed this crime with impunity. Were Clinton’s and Trump’s two different kinds of rudeness?

In Britain, a man tweets that someone should “Jo Cox” Anna Soubry. The amorality of the English tongue: In the run-up to the referendum, Jo Cox, a member of Parliament, was shot and stabbed to death by a far-right nationalist; to “Jo Cox” someone is to murder a female member of Parliament who advocates remaining in the European Union. The man who posts the tweet is arrested. The police, it seems, are trying to get on top of our verbal problems. It has now become commonplace for proponents of liberal values to receive death threats. The death threat, I suppose, is the extreme of rudeness: It is the place where word finally has to be taken as deed, where civilization’s immunity reaches the point of breakdown. “I could kill you,” my mother often used to say to me, and I didn’t know whether to believe her or not. It is true that I frequently fell foul of her and others through my habit of outspokenness. The sharpness of my phrases maddened her. I was quite capable of the basket-of-deplorables mistake, the confusion of cleverness with insult, the belief in language as an ultimate good, the serving of which was its own reward. No one could mind what you said if you said it with sufficient skill, could they? Later I came to believe that the good of language lay entirely in its relationship to truth. Language was a system through which right and wrong — truth and untruth — could be infallibly identified. Honesty, so long as it was absolute, was a means for individuals to understand all good and evil.