There was something genuinely astonishing in the spectacle of Republican representatives trying to reduce the FBI to the status of a fifth column, as McCarthy had tried to do to the Army. Strzok had sent a text message to assure his colleague Lisa Page, with whom he was having an extramarital affair, that Trump would not win the election—“No. No he won’t. We’ll stop it.” Ted Poe, another Texan—another representative, that is, of the law and order capital of America—turned to Strzok and said, “You’re going to act on your bias. You’re going to ‘stop’ President Trump. How do we know that’s not rampant through the FBI?” Strzok rejoined, “A judge asks jurors, ‘Are you able to set aside your personal opinions and render a judgment based on the facts?’ and I and the men and women of the FBI every day take our personal beliefs and set them aside in vigorous pursuit of the truth wherever it lies.”

As a child of the ’60s, I feel extremely strange placing the FBI on the pedestal of decency. J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI blackmailed civil-rights leaders and threatened presidents; Richard Nixon used the FBI to investigate his enemies. Yet Peter Strzok stands for an FBI that, whatever its faults, serves the nation rather than a political master. G-men have become the Henry Fondas, the Jimmy Stewarts, of the present day—the true believers in an archaic code. In his congressional testimony last year, former FBI Director James Comey also provided a ritualized enactment of decency in the face of Republican attacks. I was foolish enough to write at the time that Comey’s testimony might serve to remind Americans of the value of neutral institutions and principles. No such luck: Comey’s plea for impartiality came to be seen on the right as proof of partiality (though he also didn’t help his case by embarking on a self-aggrandizing publicity tour).

Gohmert will pay no price for indecency. Yet it would be absurd to say that shame is dead. The parade of villains of the #MeToo movement illustrates the ongoing power of shame in contemporary culture. Harvey Weinstein and Charlie Rose suffered a reputational catastrophe equal to that of McCarthy. Of course Weinstein was such a hero of cultural progressives that he was able to spend decades mistreating women before he was finally brought down by relentless investigative journalism. What ultimately doomed these liberal icons was perhaps not their gross indecency, but their violation of the right of women in the workplace to be free of harassment, a core principle of contemporary liberal politics.

Perhaps the reason why Bill O’Reilly, or Fox News as an institution, paid a far more modest price for their transgressions—the former Fox News executive Bill Shine is now Donald Trump’s communications director—is that the mistreatment of women in the workplace does not occupy the same place in the corpus of conservative values. The alternative explanation is that the collective sense of what constitutes decent behavior outweighs ideological affinity on the left, but not on the right. Elected Democrats lined up to denounce President Bill Clinton’s private behavior during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, though none deemed it worthy of impeachment. Donald Trump’s vastly more outrageous behavior has provoked far less opprobrium from his own party. Republicans aren’t less decent than Democrats; rather, they have come to see political struggle in such apocalyptic terms that no merely personal form of shameful behavior can compete with the political stakes. Thus Christian conservatives hold their tongue rather than jeopardize their chances of getting a Supreme Court justice who will overturn Roe v. Wade. The party of personal morality thus becomes the party of indifference to personal morality.