There is nothing new, the ghost of Lyndon B. Johnson would point out, about politicians dropping profanities. But it used to be that cursing was mostly confined to the private spaces of politicians’ lives—that expletives made their escape into the public sphere as the result of investigative reporting, posthumous biographies, or some kind of mistake. The public knows about Richard Nixon’s propensity for profanities in large part because of the Watergate investigation, which led to the release of the tapes he had recorded in the Oval Office. Andrew Jackson’s habit of cursing was revealed through much more prosaic means: The president, the story goes, kept a pet parrot, which picked up the obscenities of its owner. At the president’s funeral, one startled attendee reported, the bird “got excited and commenced swearing so loud and long as to disturb the people and had to be carried from the house.”

The bird was a primordial version of a hot mic. It made public the stuff that was meant to be private. It anticipated, in its way, the gaffes that would come in the next century: Vice President Joe Biden, during the signing of the Affordable Care Act in 2010, caught summarizing the accomplishment, into the ear of President Barack Obama, as “a big fucking deal.” John Major, then the British prime minister, caught describing three of his cabinet members as “a shower of bastards.” Then–presidential candidate George W. Bush, during a Labor Day rally in 2000, caught referring to a New York Times reporter as a “major-league asshole.”

It wasn’t that long ago that distance and detachment were considered assets in leaders—such that, for example, a front-runner on the campaign trail could see his chances for election effectively evaporated by a single, unhinged scream. The machinery surrounding politicians worked to protect that distance. (When reporters wrote about John Nance Garner’s famous dismissal of the vice presidency as “not worth a pitcher of warm piss,” they replaced the final word with spit—preserving some decorum, maybe, but compromising everything else.)

The current collection of political profanities, however, as seen on TV and on Twitter, suggests something more than the collision of the private and the public. The profanities deployed by the candidates vying for the Democratic presidential nomination suggest performance. They suggest strategy at work. They are logical extensions of Beto live-streaming his dental visit, or of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez doing the same while she makes mac and cheese. They suggest access, and intimacy. An f-bomb dropped from a dais suggests the toppling of the barriers that once separated the politician from the populace—the private leader from the public one.

But it does something else as well. Used to refer to mass shootings and the White House’s enabling of white supremacy, profanity shows the extent to which anger operates as currency in today’s political context. It acknowledges how many of this age’s tragedies have been enabled by leaders who have cared too little, and given too few damns. It insists that, if you are alive and awake in the America of the present moment, the only reasonable response is rage. As Heather Heyer put it before she was killed by a white supremacist in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017: If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.