For those seeking consolation in a crazy time, two views about Donald Trump have emerged, which intersect even as they oppose. The first is that, if you ignore the tweets and the talking, what you’re seeing in Trump is a completely conventional Republican—which is good! The second is that, if you ignore the tweets and the talking, what you are seeing is a completely conventional Republican—which is bad! Whichever way you look at the situation, from right or left, Trump sits not on one edge of American history but more or less at the center point of things as they are. In this new model, if you ignore the Twitter and the talk, what you are getting is what any other Republican would give you: the small feints at genuine populism, not to mention the old-fashioned isolationist suspicion of “foreign entanglements,” have long ago been lost in a conventional tide of tax cuts and sword-shaking—and you either like it or you don’t. If you’re a Republican, you say that he gives you judges and tax cuts and military parades, so don’t get distracted by all the mad and demagogic ugliness that the liberals pretend to care about. If you’re a Democrat, you think that he’s giving Republicans judges and tax cuts and military parades, so don’t get distracted by all the demagogic and anti-democratic ugliness that conservatives have stopped pretending to care about. The man is his party.

One sees this attempt to separate Trump from his habitual language and manners in highbrow places as well as in the tabloids: not long ago, the historian Niall Ferguson announced, in the Boston Globe, that, if you simply forget all the things Trump says, he actually has done much good and little bad, and has a record for prudent conduct superior to that of J.F.K. On the Lawfare blog, Jack Goldsmith, of Harvard Law, argues that Trump’s provocations are intended more to cause panic than to presage actual acts, partly because Trump enjoys panicking people and partly because panic creates the atmosphere of chaos in which Trump flourishes. Though Goldsmith allows that a certain amount of panic is probably healthy—“The provocation at stage one might be a trial balloon that gets shot down every time by the panicked reaction. Absent the reaction, Trump might follow through”—he feels, on the whole, that we should recognize the recurrent cycle and not fall into the widening abyss of hysteria that it creates.

The underplaying of the seriousness of Trump’s talk and tweets, emanating from both the left and the right, is a variant of what I’ve previously called the Ralph Kramden view of the Trump Presidency: he’s just a blowhard from the outer boroughs, who keeps making threats without any real intention or ability to follow through on them. “You’re goin’ to the moon, Alice,” he is still tweeting, in effect, while America once again just stands there. The new phase has Trump passing from a resemblance to Ralph Kramden to a closely related figure, the Rodney Dangerfield character in “Caddyshack.” Though loud, uncouth, and insulting to all, the thinking goes, he’s doing little more than upsetting the house rules and norms that were put in place long ago for a stuffier age. Everyone should ignore the provocations and concentrate on the policy. If you’re a liberal, you should worry more about incremental damage to the environment than about an imagined threat of constitutional disorder. If you’re a conservative, you should grin at your winnings, even as you grimace at the offensiveness, and keep playing.

The trouble is that the damage done by Trump’s words is damage enough. In a contestatory democracy—where the core notion, however debased by overuse and however degraded by money and power, is that political differences are settled by debate—words have, of necessity, a quality not so much sacred as practical. They’re the currency of open societies, which rest on the primary foundation of having exchanged weapons for ideas. There’s a reason that the great crises of this democracy have been met by an efflorescence of language, a reason that we turn to Hamilton and Franklin and Lincoln and King not just for wisdom about crises past but for a vocabulary for crises present. Words are what governments with a liberal public face have to live by. We know tyrannies by their temples; we know democracies through their tongues.

Trump’s words don’t debate or even discredit. They degrade and delegitimize. They’re insults so crude that it’s difficult to believe that anyone could find them persuasive, but that are clearly intended to appeal to a part of what is called the “base”—an unintentional, if somewhat Shakespearean, pun. One miserable truth of humanity is that cruel impulses are easy to awaken in large numbers of people, if they’re told by those in power that those impulses are now acceptable, and the form that such permission takes is invariably a reawakening of the language of demonology.

The core, truly revolutionary idea in liberal democracy is not simply that of freedom, or even liberty. Everyone’s for freedom—ancient people were always talking about freedom from a tyrant or from an oppressor nation—and liberty takes endless faces in different places. (The Roman Empire believed in liberty, for imperial Romans.) What’s revolutionary is the opposite idea, that you have to restrain your own freedom of self-expression in order to recognize the liberty of someone else. The genuinely radical view, new to liberal democracy, is that, someday, the opposition is going to be in power, and those people will have the same right to be there as you do, even if you think that they’re wrong about everything that matters. That the oscillation of power is inevitable and ultimately healthy is, by the normal standards of earthbound communities—or even non-earthly ones, watch “Game of Thrones”—outrageous. We’re supposed to hold power close. (It was this same outrageous belief that President Barack Obama was clearly trying to act on in the run-up to Trump’s ascendancy, with admirable patience and what now may seem like undue idealism.)

Trump, in maintaining that the opposition is not merely wrong but criminal, not mistaken but illegitimate, undermines not a norm or a manner or some stuffy curlicue of liberalism’s house rules; he assaults its essence. We are shocked by Trump’s language not because we’re prim but because we understand intuitively, instinctively, that the language is itself an assault on the rule of law, not merely a prologue or preface to it. It’s not a puff of air. It has real consequences. James Comey registered this shock just the other morning on NPR: “President Trump, I don’t follow him on Twitter, but I get to see his tweets tweeted, I don’t know how many, but some tweets this past couple of days that I should be in jail. The President of the United States just said that a private citizen should be jailed. And I think the reaction of most of us was, ‘Meh, that’s another one of those things.’ This is not normal. This is not O.K. There’s a danger that we will become numb to it, and we will stop noticing the threats to our norms.” To which one might add only that it isn’t norms but premises that are being undermined. Every time Trump calls his critics or political opponents “crooks” or “slime balls,” it poisons the possibility for open debate.