Most people are not by their nature cruel and contemptuous.

We can all be cruel in the moment, of course; we can all from time to time indulge the serpent inside of us. The intoxicant of power makes slipping into that mode easier for some people—some bosses, some high public officials, some media personalities. You know the type. They get a little, or a lot, of power and they become high and mighty, abusive and scornful. We’ve all known people like this, and maybe on our bad days, we’ve been them.

Remorse is the internal check on these impulses—‘‘the knife of remorse,” as J.R.R. Tolkein put it. We feel bad after we have been cruel. We want to take back our wounding, contemptuous words, and if we can summon our strength of character, we apologize.

This isn’t deep metaphysics. This is just ordinary, decent life. It’s the way most people live; it’s the way most of us were raised. Christians believe this is the way we are actually made by a loving God: free to choose our actions, good or bad, and endowed with a conscience to deepen our understanding of His grace and grow closer to Him.

But you don’t need a belief in any deity to feel the pull and recognize the practical necessity of decency in a free society. The impulse toward common courtesy is the grease in the gears of public life. We treat each other well so that we can get things done.

For two centuries and more, the world has recognized the power of these principles and practices in American life.

“In the United States, hardly anybody talks about the beauty of virtue,” Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in the 1830s in Democracy in America. “But they maintain that virtue is useful, and prove it every day.”

That’s who we were, and, I believe, who we still are, deep down.

But something weird, something really bad, is happening in our country. Under the transfixing influence of the extraordinarily low character of Donald Trump, more and more of our fellow citizens are performing cruelty and contemptuousness.

You see this every time Attorney General Pam Bondi testifies before Congress. It’s breathtaking—the rictus of disdain, the sneering smile, the crazed stream of shouted non sequiturs. She’s not speaking, she’s stabbing. She’s ripping through the veil of any decent human communication to tear and wound and crush the psyche and soul of anyone who dares to question her. Does it work? Normal people, even many Trump supporters, must look at her and ask, “Is she for real? Is that a shtick?”

And you see it now in Megyn Kelly, the podcaster who has demonstrated through a long media career a remarkable pliability of both her political positions and her on-screen persona. Watch again (if you can stomach it) Kelly’s furious eruption about—of all things, for Chrissake—Bad Bunny’s halftime performance at the Super Bowl.

How much of that was real? How much of that was performance?

This is the thing: In authoritarian politics, cruelty and contemptuousness are not the hallmark of the Leader alone. They radiate downward. It is a very old story: The court teaches the courtiers how to behave. What we are seeing in Bondi and Kelly, in so many MAGA leaders, and of course on social media, is competition for favor.

Authoritarianism does not create monsters, at least not right away; it first creates incentives. And people adapt themselves to those incentives—in order to advance in their careers; or to experience the thrill of belonging to a movement that licenses the darker impulses in us; or simply to survive. This is what we are seeing now, in so many ways and in so many places, in Donald Trump’s America.

The Eastern European poets of the 20th Century understood this dynamic. They lived it. They resisted it. We must take their work up again; they are our mentors now.

Here is a poem by Zbigniew Herbert, one of the great Polish poets of the 20th Century. In this poem, Herbert wonders what it is that made some Poles, like him, resist the Soviet-style tyranny that took over his country, while others performed the necessary cruelties. His answer is that of a poet: It was taste. The tyranny was simply too ugly and brutal.

For Professor Izydora Dambska

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedIt didn't require great character at allour refusal disagreement and resistancewe had a shred of necessary couragebut fundamentally it was a matter of tasteYes tastein which there are fibers of soul the cartilage of conscience

Who knows if we had been better and more attractively temptedsent rose-skinned women thin as a waferor fantastic creatures from the paintings of Hieronymus Boschbut what kind of hell was there at this timea wet pit the murderers' alley the barrackcalled a palace of justicea home-brewed Mephisto in a Lenin jacketsent Aurora's grandchildren out into the fieldboys with potato facesvery ugly girls with red hands

Verily their rhetoric was made of cheap sacking(Marcus Tullius kept turning in his grave)chains of tautologies a couple of concepts like flailsthe dialectics of slaughterers no distinctions in reasoningsyntax deprived of the beauty of the subjunctive

So aesthetics can be helpful in lifeone should not neglect the study of beauty

Before we declare our consent we must carefully examinethe shape of the architecture the rhythm of the drums and pipesofficial colours the despicable ritual of funerals

Our eyes and ears refused obediencethe princes of our senses proudly chose exile

It did not require great character at allwe had a shred of necessary couragebut fundamentally it was a matter of tasteYes tastethat commands us to get out to make a wry face draw out a sneereven if for this the precious capital of the body the headmust fall

—Terry