I don’t want to wring my hands about this attitude’s corrosive effect on our politics, because it seems to me that once conservatism surrendered to Donald Trump, arguments about corrosion became a bit irrelevant. Rubio shouldn’t be in politics if he can’t handle vehement attacks, and the president that the Florida senator endorsed is as consistently ad hominem as the young school shooting survivors with rather less excuse.

But there are things that you can risk or lose when you fight the way Rubio’s critics seem to want to fight. For instance, one reason that the Dreamer amnesty was an executive decision that Donald Trump could simply reverse, landing us in our current immigration stalemate, was that the Obama White House deliberately chose to make it one, pre-empting an effort by, yes, Marco Rubio to craft bipartisan legislation. That was a good example of smash-mouth liberalism, albeit substantive in that case rather than just rhetorical and driven by fear of Rubio rather than the current spirit of contempt: Don’t let a Republican politician make nice with Latino voters, don’t let Republicans disguise their anti-immigrant views with modest bipartisan maneuvers, create a clear contrast so that voters will reward you even if doing so requires pushing certain constitutional limits on your power.

And it didn’t work out particularly well. Indeed if anything Obama’s executive action contributed to Trump’s victory by helping to radicalize conservative voters, and now several years later the Dreamer cohort is back in limbo because the executive move lacked bipartisan support and legislative form. Maybe in the longer run the whole debate will help smash the G.O.P. as liberals believe it deserves to be smashed — but not just yet.

Or another example, this one in the Trump era itself: During the debate over the Republican tax bill it was, again, Marco Rubio who made an extended effort to move the bill in a more middle-class-friendly direction by adding and then enlarging a child tax credit. The push was opposed by many of his Republican colleagues, but for a time Rubio thought that he could get an amendment in with Senate Democrat support. But in the end, presumably on the grounds that modestly improving a Republican bill makes it harder to attack it later, only nine Senate Democrats voted for the Rubio proposal, and it went down to an easy defeat.

Again, maybe this was an example of tough liberals brilliantly playing hardball: Don’t let Rubio have any kind of victory for his slightly more popular flavor of Republicanism, so that he and his party will be easier to crush in 2018 and beyond. But in the interim it meant that Senate Democrats gave up a chance to move real world public policy in a direction many of them support, in order to pursue an as-yet-hypothetical larger victory that may not, like the Hillary Clinton presidency before it, actually materialize.

It’s too soon to say whether this dynamic will repeat itself with the post-Parkland gun control debate. Again, the activists’ anti-Rubio zeal might actually help the progress of legislation, by holding him to his newfound promises. Or there might be no point in making a deal unless he’s willing to accept something closer to the full list of activist demands. Or no bargain of any sort might be possible so long as Republicans hold the Senate, or even so long as they hold seats in states like Florida — in which case the hate for the senator is just a necessary path to his eventual retirement.