“Many self-identified left-of-center types will only accept criticism from people who they see as being on their team,” he has noted, “but they define their team as those who don’t engage in criticism. No one who criticizes can be a member of the group, and no one who’s not a member of the group will be listened to.”

Ultimately, our litigious struggle for power is not about who wins the right to make policy. It’s about joining a team to protect ourselves from losing our sense of identity. So long as we’re on a team, let policy do its worst. Rather than looking firstly on our ideological clients as guilty parties we get paid to protect, we look on ourselves as fundamentally guilty—guilty of our own insignificance, of our own interchangeability, of our trivial irrelevance before the monumental indifference of the universe.

Without the grace of God to ameliorate this horrible truth, we fall back on the favor of the team. Not even team mercy is absolution enough, for with mercy comes judgment as well as forgiveness, and this is more than our fragile constructed self can withstand.

The mercilessness of our public performance as pseudo-lawyers comes from our weakness. Not only do we feel we need teams to survive. We have good reason to feel that way.