The idea that asshole could be a proxy for the fraying fabric of public life first struck me in 2005, just before things got really squirrelly. I was writing about the language of politics and listening to a lot of right-wing talk on radio and TV and I kept noticing how everything seemed to be aimed at depicting liberals as, well, assholes. Not that anyone ever actually says assholes on the air on the programs, bleeped or not.* But that isn't the point; it's rather that asshole seems to encapsulate the animus the shows are both stoking and stroking. It's a word we reserve for members of our own tribe: the boss who takes credit for your work, the neighbors who get on your case for putting out your garbage the night before, or maybe a well-known politician or celebrity. It isn't a word you'd use of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. It signals indignation, with an undercurrent of contempt, an emotion you can only feel towards those you feel both superior to and familiar with. And that feeling in turn legitimates a certain energizing response — combative, derisory, with more than a splash of asshole itself — that's compelling enough to keep listeners tuned in, which is after all the aim of the exercise. Or if the listeners are of an opposing political viewpoint, as many of them are, they can enjoy a rush of head-clearing rage at the hosts' assholistic harangues. Assholes are people who allow us to be assholes back at them. They turn us into anti-assholes, a word I think of as being less like antitoxin than antimatter — stuff just like matter but of an opposite charge, which reacts with matter violently.

Not that conservatives always had to manufacture such pretexts. You can't live in San Francisco and teach at Berkeley, as I do, without being impressed by the myriad forms of assholism that bourgeois liberals nourish: the pretension and superiority, the preciosity, the way laudable commitments to social justice sit cheek by jowl with intrusive paternalism. (Berkeley has always been a place where people believe that consenting adults should be allowed to do whatever they please in the privacy of their bedroom so long as they don't try to smoke afterwards.) The truth is that the dynamic I'm interested in here — the play of asshole and anti-asshole — is fed by the abundant strains of assholism that run through every corner of American life. What struck me in 2005 was the way the play of asshole and anti-asshole was bubbling up into the public sphere, like a sadistic form of performance art or a snarky sitcom.

This didn't come out of nowhere. Fifty years ago, the historian and traditionalist conservative Peter Viereck, recalling the humanism of Burke and Adams, wrote that modern conservatism was diffusing a mood of emotional freeze, making people "ashamed of generous social impulses." And in modern times, the right has always been susceptible to making an exhibition of its hardheartedness, just as the left has had a regrettable penchant for self-congratulatory pietism. But lately the tone of those displays has become more intense and operatic, as witness the striking series of outbursts during the debates among Republican presidential hopefuls in 2011–2012. A debate audience applauded when Brian Williams began a question to Governor Rick Perry by noting that Texas has conducted a record 234 executions during his term as governor, then booed Perry himself when he defended a Texas program providing in-state college tuition to the children of undocumented immigrants. (In his defense, Perry said, "If you say that we should not educate children who have come into our state . . . by no fault of their own, I don't think you have a heart" — a remark that so angered right-wing voters that Perry was placed in the situation, surely unprecedented in American politics, of having to apologize for using the "inappropriate" word heart.) In another debate, the audience booed a gay soldier serving in Iraq who asked in a clip what Rick Santorum would do about "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." A debate audience cheered Herman Cain's assertion that "if you don't have a job and you're not rich, blame yourself." And at a CNN–Tea Party debate, Wolf Blitzer asked Ron Paul what should happen to a person who lacks health insurance and falls into a coma. "Are you saying that society should just let him die?" Blitzer asked, at which point several people yelled, "Yeah!" and others cheered. By early 2012, a South Carolina debate audience was moved to boo Paul when he said that other countries didn't like being bombed any more than we would, adding, "I would say that maybe we ought to consider a Golden Rule in foreign policy." The audience's reservations about Paul's proposal may have been soundly rooted in Realpolitik, but even so it was a theologically awkward moment. If you took those effusions at face value, they seemed to confirm the continued relevance of Viereck's observation that among a slice of modern conservatives, it's cool to be cruel.