Brooks lauds Senator Booker for the kind of campaign he is running. Noting a poll that finds that 42 percent of people in each party regard the other side as “downright evil,” he says that Booker is making a bet that he can win by appealing to our better angels. Brooks writes,

I write this to you from Nebraska City, Neb., just over the Iowa line. I just had lunch with 15 locals, many probably Trump supporters and some probably not. But it didn’t come up. The idea that any of these good people are “downright evil” because of some political affiliation is ridiculous and a sign of how deranged our discourse has become.

Okay, but are any of them “complicit in evil“? That’s what Booker called supporters of Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court, well before Christine Blasey Ford was in the news.