In 2018, at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, comedian Michelle Wolf delivered a monologue which was pretty direct, and certainly not polite. The most controversial comments were directed at Trump’s then Press Secretary, now Governor of Arkansas, Sarah Huckabee Sanders. And the one that really provoked reaction, was when she said:

I actually really like Sarah. I think she’s very resourceful. But she burns facts and then she uses that ash to create a perfect smokey eye. Like maybe she’s born with it, maybe it’s lies. It’s probably lies.

Of course, Trump and his acolytes howled like stuck pigs. They seemed to forget that Michelle Wolf’s style of humour was well known, and that she had been hired to speak at the event. Hypocritically, they also conveniently forgot that the comments were mild comparable to what Trump has said about Megan Kelly, E. Jean Carroll, Ted Cruz’s wife, Serge Kovaleski (that disabled reporter), immigrants, Muslims, veterans…you name it. But many people who would identify as liberal, such as the White House Correspondents’ Association (who hired Michelle Wolf in the first place), and Maggie Haberman, White House Correspondent of the New York Times, who received an award at the dinner, condemned the monologue.

In the same year, Sarah Huckabee Sanders (yes, to be fair, she was having a rough time of it) was asked to leave the Red Hen restaurant in Lexington. The co-owner later cited Sanders' role in what they called the "inhumane and unethical" Trump administration in which Sanders had "publicly defended the president's cruelest policies."

Again, of course, the ranting of the Trump camp showed that they expected to be treated with a level of courtesy much higher than that they show to others (not to mention the fact that they also defended bakers who refused to bake a cake for a gay couple. And, yet again, many liberals joined in the chorus. Arne Duncan, Obama’s former Education Secretary, tweeted:

No matter how much we dislike or disagree with someone, we should not deny them the chance to have a meal. The history in our country of denying people access to restaurants, to water fountains and even bathrooms is too raw, too real. We can’t keep dividing.

Frankly, this was pathetic. Whether or not one agrees with Sanders’ treatment, comparing it to the practice of denying people access to restaurants and other public facilities simply because of the colour of their skin, and not their opinions or their actions, was laughable.

I could quote countless other examples of this phenomenon, which underlines a weakness of the liberal left. Trump has been successful in harnessing the fear and anger of a large part of the American population. 

This anger and hatred towards their opponents is a common factor among all the hard right movements around the world. After Brexit, and the conviction of Thomas Mair for the murder of MP Jo Cox, I set up a fake twitter account to draw out support for "bringing our boy home" - as in "let Thomas Mair out of prison and hail him as a hero."

And the response of so many people is “we can’t sink to their level”. Or "we can't fuel divisions".

These scruples are precisely why the hard right is on the rise. It’s because decent people aren’t angry enough. We are taking a knife to a gunfight.