Donald Trump’s stunts, designed to shock and command attention, have revealed the hypocrisies of the political class and the Republican establishment. Photograph by Scott Olson / Getty

Those of us who accept the common-sense idea that everyone having guns is a good way to insure that a lot of people die from gunshots were first in despair at, and then darkly amused by, the success of a recent petition demanding “open carry” at this summer’s Republican National Convention, in Cleveland. The petition, which gained more than fifty thousand signatures, turned out to be something of a Dada joke: an attempt, on the part of a gun-control enthusiast, to force gun fetishists to confront the logic, or illogic, of their own position. If guns bring order, why not bring them to a Cleveland delegate floor fight?

But then the people at the Quicken Loans Arena, where the Convention will be held, announced, rather alarmed, that their rule against heavily armed spectators was fixed. The Secret Service, which is, of course, in charge of protecting the candidates, also stated firmly that no one exercising a patriot’s right to take guns wherever a patriot likes would be allowed to get anywhere near the Convention floor.

What was funny and ultimately telling was the minor uproar the petition set off in respectable conservative circles. The same gun-rights absolutists who talk about the importance of Americans having all the weapons they want in order to protect themselves against as-yet-unknown threats (the self-defense position) or to threaten tyrannical mayors and governors and park rangers (the Second-Amendment-is-the-pro-sedition-amendment position) suddenly got religion when it came to armed delegates in a convention hall in Cleveland. They know their own base well enough to know how that would end up, apparently. Schools, playgrounds, colleges—fine to have heavily armed patriots there. In a convention of conservative true believers, probably a bad idea.

In a curious way, this little Dada stunt was revealing in exactly the way that the Dada stunts Donald Trump pulls off day after day are: designed to shock and compel attention, they end, as such stunts should, by throwing light on the hypocrisies of the establishment in power. What Trump oddly does is X-ray the Republican id, pure and raw, without the quavers that they have learned to execute in order to get down the street without being stopped. Being a Republican candidate is like being a professional wrestler. You’re supposed to be maximally crazy, but you’re supposed to pretend to pay attention to the referee who is, sort of, there to enforce fair play. You’re supposed to hit your opponent over the head with a chair, but you’re supposed to pretend to hide the chair you are about to hit him with from the view of the referee. Trump is willing to be maximally crazy, when it comes to the more extreme positions of the G.O.P., but he can’t remember, or perhaps never learned, the minimally sane-sounding speech acts that the referees want you first to attach to the craziness.

The actual position of the Republican Party since the Bush Administration, for example, has been to violate Reagan-era treaties, reject the Geneva Conventions, and torture people—but you’re not supposed to say you favor torturing people. You’re supposed to say that you are opposed to torture, but what you’re in favor of isn’t really torture and anyway you would only do it when you had to and anyway they tortured us first. (Terrorism equals torture, so they started it.) To actually state the position plainly—that you would order soldiers to commit war crimes and fire them if they didn’t—is like showing the referee the chair and then hitting someone with it. It’s the same act but the wrong decorum. And so being in favor of open carry and the Second Amendment guarantee to unlimited private gun-flaunting is fine—but actually encouraging people to bring guns to Cleveland? Not so much.

It’s the same with abortion and big government. The actual position of the Republican platform, where abortion equals murder, would demand the creation of a government bureaucracy, a full-time pregnancy police, with cops who spend all of their hours tracking pregnant women to those now-illegal clinics and district attorneys who specialize in prosecuting doctors and can, of course, only do so by intimidating women to get them to testify—you cannot have a law making something a serious crime and not have the police pursue it. But to state this plainly is to make the actual consequences of the position clear. All but the most extreme know that the choice is and always will be between limited, legal abortion and unsafe, illegal abortion. They just want to make it as difficult and intrusive for women to exercise their rights as they can. So when Trump said that there should be consequences for women who have illegal abortions, no one acted more outraged than the people who had been arguing for decades that those women were complicit in murder. (Trump quickly changed his position to whatever his new position is, trying to guess, more or less randomly, where the referee wants him to hide the chair.)

What’s useful about these little Dada exercises is that they end by doing the great and distinctly conservative work of revealing the actual beliefs of the people who are taking part in politics. The core conservative belief and insight—what Edmund Burke actually thought—is that the space between laws and men, between official acts and actual practice, between what we say we want and what we are capable of doing, is always large, often immense. Large-scale utopian projects always fail, because they underestimate the complexity of life and the necessity of accommodation. Small is beautiful because life is complicated. Even more-modest reformist projects often fail, on this logic, because of the same space between pieties and practices: we want everyone to have good health care but not to pay taxes for it.

And so, in a curious way, the fake open-carry petition reveals the false logic, the self-defeating pieties, and the obvious hypocrisies of bourgeois society. We now know that the actual position of even right-wingers may be passionately for the radically reinterpreted Second Amendment—but no one actually believes recreating the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, with John Kasich as Doc Holliday, is a good idea. We know that even the most passionate believers in forced birth don’t actually believe that abortion is really like murder, and have no real desire to treat it as such; they just want to do all they can to make abortion once again difficult, dangerous, and heavily stigmatized. They are for torture, but they are ashamed of it, too, and would rather it were done far away and in secret. When the Joker appears, so to speak, putting Gotham on the spot, all of this becomes plain. You just have to wonder who will have the last laugh.