And even if Joe Biden suddenly remembers that he is president and decides to start acting like it, it is in many ways too late — it would be obvious that he is acting only out of political calculation, which is the only way he ever has acted or ever will. Where the president should be direct and full-throated, Biden has been, at best, indirect and pusillanimous. His press secretary and MSNBC pundit (we mean the press secretary who is becoming an MSNBC pundit, not the MSNBC pundit who is becoming his press secretary) said the administration “hoped” the protests would be nonviolent. They have not been. Now what?

The personalization of politics — and of political protest — in our time is a lamentable development, whether it is bullying Supreme Court justices at their homes or terrorizing Tucker Carlson’s family at his. A society in which there is no private life, no separation between the public and private spheres, is a totalitarian society — and it is a society in which civic peace is ultimately impossible. Screaming in front of the Supreme Court building is rambunctious democracy, but screaming at a Supreme Court justice from the sidewalk in front of her house is unhinged fanaticism.