The point isn’t that Comey made no errors in handling the Clinton investigation. It’s that no law enforcement official tasked with such an investigation could have passed through the political vortex of a highly polarized presidential election in the age of 24/7 digital news without appearing to play favorites, without looking like a political actor in the guise of an impartial judge. The political stakes are simply too high, the ability to detect, amplify, and publicize microscopic (and perhaps imaginary) signs of bias too easy.

The damage to our civic life is real. The more seemingly impartial public figures are accused of covert bias, the more citizens begin to suspect that everything is political, that no one ever rises above partisan passions. And the more citizens begin to doubt the possibility of rising above partisan passions, the less they try to do so themselves — or to expect any better from public officials. Everyone has a political agenda. No one is fair-minded or concerned with the impartial truth.

When everything is political, nothing is held in common, admired, and understood in the same terms by all. And a nation in which nothing is held in common, admired, and understood in the same terms by all is less a community than an aggregate of warring factions jostling for advantage, striving for a total victory in which those on the other side of the battle are permanently vanquished.