When critics cried to the mountaintops that President Trump’s election posed an authoritarian threat to American democracy, we were calmer. Our system is planted thick with checks and balances, including institutions the primary roles of which include holding the president accountable. For that reason, we were confident that Trump, whatever his real or imagined flaws and intentions, wasn’t going to push us toward tyranny.

Whether acting on these overblown fears of tyranny or in response to Trump’s vulgarity and sloppiness, or simply in response to a president whose beliefs they oppose, too many people in our crucial institutions have abandoned norms and constraints. They have decided that they are part of the #Resistance, amorphous and self-aggrandized critics whose purposes are sufficiently vague both not to exclude many cranks and extremists and to attract some decent people.