“A mob set on violence” has attracted more scrutiny in two weeks than most phrases do over generations. It is a cliché (though sometimes true) to say that violence is what a mob does, as an end in itself. But is that because a mob does not (or cannot) know what it wants? A lynch mob certainly knows what it wants. Supporters of Donald Trump came to the Capitol on January 6th wanting something, and the things many of them brought suggested it was violence. At a minimum, most wanted a line to be crossed, but it’s hard to know how many knew that once whatever line had been crossed, they became insurrectionists.

The rage itself wasn’t haphazard; it was only the rioters’ scattered attention (many seemed more concerned with livestreaming themselves in the Rotunda than stringing up Mike Pence) and lack of any deployment plan or tactical training that prevented more of the intended targets and their protectors from getting hurt or killed. Their impromptu defense was that it was all adult fun, some kind of Dad’s-Day-Off cosplay adventure where both sides ought to know the rules (or at least the safe word). I suppose they expected the public to envision a stadium of drunk football fans with painted torsos, men already engaged in playing out Braveheart fantasies of battling competing clans with hammers and axes.

Sad is a condition few people want to be in. Sadness on a massive scale is tragedy, according to the Greeks, who also gave us pathos. When our pity is accompanied by empathy or a desire to aid the sufferer, this is compassion. Sometimes, however, we pity the situation caused by a reprehensible action. What makes us sad is the lack of shame or contrition on the part of the perpetrator. This more or less is contempt—what Donald Trump elicits without breaking a sweat.

During his first presidential campaign, Trump obsessively used the Twitter refrain “Sad!” for anyone he wanted you to believe had gone down (Jeb!) and was therefore highly kickable. It’s interesting that Trump applied the exclamatory Sad! so frequently when he never seems to feel sad about any person or situation. When his 71-year-old brother died after an undisclosed illness on August 15, Trump released a statement: “It is with heavy heart I share that my wonderful brother, Robert, peacefully passed away tonight. He was not just my brother, he was my best friend. He will be greatly missed, but we will meet again. His memory will live on in my heart forever. Robert, I love you. Rest in peace.”

Most of us have a long history of seeing seatback videos or printed illustrations of what to do if the plane you are traveling in experiences a sudden drop in cabin pressure. Usually it’s a mother logically securing her own breathing device before affixing a dangling oxygen mask onto the child beside her. Before March, I doubt anyone watched those videos with anger, thinking “No airline is gonna make me put on a mask!”

As the life-giving conduit of oxygen, masks have long represented protection amid catastrophe. Infantrymen in World War I lived in mortal dread of the shout for “Gas!” Gas masks became the symbolic escape hatch of battlefield carnage well beyond the next world war. Scuba divers and snorkelers, astronauts in Ad Astra—they all seem to “get” the importance of masks. And of course the masks that protect people from contamination on both sides of a medical procedure. From the perspective of science, it’s complete logic, this effort to prevent possible death. It’s hard to imagine politicization.

In a speech at Notre Dame Law School last October, Bill Barr, the U.S. Attorney General, made clear that his conservative Catholicism and definition of democracy were one and the same. Like Republican fundamentalists since the Reagan era, Barr decried “moral relativism” as the cause of every social ill, insisting that the Constitution’s framers believed that “free government was only suitable and sustainable for a religious people.”

Leaving aside the question of what Barr means by “free government,” his thinking leaves aside a lot of people in this country. In 2019, Gallup polling found that 21% of Americans had no religion. That’s one in five people whom Barr considers incompatible with free government. I’m sure many in Barr’s audience were hardline conservative Catholics, and I’m sure that the “religious people” he thinks the framers had in mind were not Jews, Muslims, and Hindus.