One of the bigly reasons for Donald Trump’s success was surely his refusal to apologise when provoking outrage; although many of things he’s said in the past are genuinely grotesque, the use of shaming for badthink has been so overused that they’ve lost their power. As a friend at the time observed, Trump is like antibiotic-resistant super-virus totally immune to this form of shaming.

And even if Trump’s a horrendous human being, that still makes him appear strong, and preferable, to a politician who cowers and apologises when the self-appointed guardians of morality demand their cancellation. It’s long been apparent that people demanding public apologies aren’t actually interested in forgiveness or whether what the person says is actually true (the Larry Summer’s argument about maths was perfectly valid, and at least debatable); they want submission. This is one area where I’d say that modern social justice politics has diverged from Christianity, which has forgiveness and redemption at its core. It’s a much more modern (or perhaps ancient) worldview, about crushing your enemies into the dust.

The public, however, tend to still quite reasonably assume that if someone apologises then they must have done wrong, and should be punished.

Unfortunately, without a sense of forgiveness or a generous definition of what’s open to debate, public discourse is bound to coarsen; people on the Right are going to cotton on to the Trump strategy, and the line between what is a valid debating point, like Larry Summer’s argument about maths, and what is just rude, unkind and abusive, will get lost.